It is important in this line of work to declare your biases upfront, and in that spirit I should admit to new readers – who have perhaps not read much of what I have written about the man – that I find one of the two principal participants in this week’s upcoming meeting between the Irish Taoiseach and the American President utterly detestable.
That’s right: I can’t abide Micheál Martin.
The reasons for that in summary are as follows: Mr. Martin has been an elected parliamentarian in Ireland since 1989. He was first elected when I was five years old; I am now forty-one. In that thirty-six year career, he has served in multiple governments, and had more opportunities than most people to serve the country. He had been elected only three years when the National Children’s Hospital was first proposed, and it has still not been finished. He has one signature legislative accomplishment to his name – that as Minister for Health in 2003 he banned cigarette smoking in pubs. On the flipside, he has been at the cabinet table for disaster after disaster, from the 2008 financial crash to the fiasco of voting machines to the present housing crisis.
He is a man of precisely zero conviction, entirely unrecognisable today from the politician he was in 1989 because he has spent an entire career waiting to see where public opinion might go, so that he could follow it. He has been both pro-life and pro-choice, both pro-green and pro-growth, both pro-Fine Gael and deathly opposed to Fine Gael. The man stands for nothing, except one thing: The idea that Micheál Martin should be Taoiseach.
That single conviction has been his north star for three decades. And he has finally achieved it, not through being brilliant, or incisive, or displaying much by the way of leadership mettle. He has achieved it by cultivating a brand as a decent guy. And by all accounts he is personally decent, unless you happen to get in his way. But look at every problem the country currently faces, and its roots can be traced to a period when Micheál Martin was at cabinet. No other Irish politician can say that.
And so I understand the instinct you now see in a lot of places online ahead of the big meeting this week, which can be summarised in a sentence: “I hope Trump shows him up”.
There’s almost a relish at the idea in some sections of the population. This, too, is understandable: The Irish Government operates under an umbrella of media protection. Friendly chats on the Late Late Show; a state media more interested in questioning opponents of the Government than the Government itself; an avalanche of state funding to establishment parties that advantages them hugely in elections; a phalanx of supportive taxpayer funded NGOs; and the bizarre legitimacy our electoral system grants to a man who could still only muster the support of fewer than a quarter of the voters.
In Ireland, he is protected at all times. In Washington, you can sense some people hoping, he might finally be exposed. Stripped of the protection of the Irish media, he might finally be made answer some uncomfortable questions about immigration, or wokeness, or why Enoch Burke is in jail, or why so many sex offenders are not. Those Irish people driven demented by the Government’s bizarre obsession with Gaza might equally hope for a public reaping of the consequences, and so on. There are lots of us – me included – who might derive some pleasure from the smug self-satisfaction of establishment Ireland getting exposed on the global stage.
We should rise above it, though, because that would be, ultimately, disastrous.
A month or so ago, the Canadian Conservatives were on course for an enormous victory in this year’s Canadian General Election. Justin Trudeau was immensely unpopular. Then, Donald Trump started calling him “Governor Trudeau” and launching enormous criticisms of Canada.
Today, Trudeau is popular again and his party might actually win the election. Every observer connects this to the ongoing US diplomatic war with Canada, and the rally around the flag effect.
Human beings are tribal. They rally around the flag, and they rally around the leader. An opinion poll of Irish voters before the US election showed that 16% of us would have voted for Mr. Trump, while over 70% would have voted for Vice President Harris.
It is a mistake, I think, to imagine that a public conflagration with Mr. Trump would be meaningfully harmful to Micheál Martin. If anything, I fear it would have the opposite effect: To reinforce the Irish establishment’s view that they really matter, and that their “resistance” is having an effect. The line afterwards would not be “it was a mistake to spend so much time on (for example) Gaza”. The line would be “see, the Americans have been shamed into anger by our outspoken approach”.
It would not chasten Dublin, but embolden it.
The best outcome this week, if you are somebody who wants to see change in Ireland, is a quiet and uneventful meeting where the Taoiseach hands over his bowl of shamrocks, smiles for the camera, says a few things he transparently doesn’t mean, and comes home again in triumph. That would not be the most emotionally satisfying outcome, but it would transparently be the best one.
Further, if you care about things like neutrality and the like, the idea of this country in open rhetorical conflict with the United States is a poor one. The public loss of the US administration’s friendship would immeasurably strengthen the hands of those in Dublin who want to say “closer integration with Europe is now essential – we sink or swim together”.
I have written for years that Ireland is a small country that ultimately does not matter on the global stage. It is foolish for this country to pick fights with powers not directly relevant to it.
If there is a blow up, it will be Mr. Martin’s fault, just like many of the other problems in the country. But for the sake of all of us, we should hope that said blow-up does not happen.