Well, that couldn’t have gone much better, could it?
There was the usual grumbling from the American President about trade, which is his favourite topic, but aside from that Micheál Martin got through yesterday’s tete-a-tetes with the two most powerful figures in the US Government relatively unscathed. This will be a relief to some and a disappointment to others.
We will begin by noting that Mr. Martin made one wise decision: Refusing point blank to take the frankly insane advice of his left-wing domestic opponents and make some big song and dance in the Oval Office about Ivana Bacik’s three priorities for the big meeting: Gaza, Ukraine, and Climate Targets. A try-hard question from an Irish reporter about Gaza was batted away by Trump, who simply noted that the journalist in question was obviously not from Israel. Aside from that, he didn’t take the bait and give the reporter in question the global moment in the spotlight that may have been dreamed of while that question was being fantasized over the night before.
The Irish housing situation was also raised, and, just as the left missed their big moment on Gaza, so did the Irish right find that holding their breath for some immigration smackdown from Trump was a fruitless exercise. Ireland has a housing problem, the President said, “because Ireland is doing so well it can’t build houses fast enough”.
That is certainly a point of view, you have to give him that much.
The reality was that yesterday’s event was always going to be win/win for Mr. Martin. The news environment in Ireland has been painfully slow in recent weeks, meaning that a bored media were incentivised to build yesterday’s meeting up into a kind of “Showdown at the OK Corral” moment where Mr. Martin would either do the country proud by standing firm in the face of Trumpist aggression, or do the country proud by provoking some benign Orange smiles. It was always either going to be “diplomatic triumph for Micheál Martin” or “Dignified Taoiseach holds his own in Oval Office showdown”. Those were the only two options that the Irish media were ever going to go with.
In the end, it was option A. On RTE, a gushing Sharon NiBheolain was almost overcome with talk of the Taoiseach’s “deft diplomacy” in talking about Ireland’s desire for peace and a two-state solution in the Middle East. If you couldn’t see that one coming, then you probably deserve everything you get from RTE.
On the other, smaller flank of Irish politics, one of the more frustrating things about recent weeks has been the number of otherwise perfectly sensible people who had gotten it into their heads that something else entirely might happen.
For the 18 or so hours before the meeting, you couldn’t go onto an Irish social media site without observing some self-styled opponent of the Irish “regime” making grand predictions that Trump would all but march into the Oval Office, take Enoch Burke out of the pockets of his suit, and having plonked Mr. Burke on the table in the middle of the room, proceeded to ask Mr. Martin all about it.
But the bottom line is this: We don’t matter very much, at all. There is a reason why 18 months of frantic Irish diplomacy on Gaza has had zero impact of any kind on any other country’s approach to the Israel-Hamas war raging in that territory. There is a reason why Mr. Trump is arguably misinformed on the Irish housing crisis. There is a reason why JD Vance, having excoriated European leaders just a few weeks ago in Munich, was sweetness and light and wearing Shamrock-inlaid socks yesterday.
That reason is that Mr. Martin, far from being on a vital diplomatic mission from Ireland to the United States, was actually there to associate the US administration of the day with the gaudier St. Patrick’s Day revelry that will happen across the United States this coming weekend, replete with fighting leprechauns and implausibly-coloured pints of Guinness.
“The Irish are great fighters”, announced President Trump, who also bathed praise on Conor McGregor. One might have thought that Mr. Martin was there to represent not the Island of Ireland, but the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team, with its angry leprechaun mascot.
One the substantive stuff, it is obviously true that Ireland had interests at stake from yesterday’s meeting: This country, like others in Europe, does not want a trade war with the United States. It was notable then that the meeting took place on the very same day that the EU announced reciprocal and retaliatory tariffs against the USA over Trump’s initial tariffs on EU steel and aluminum.
On that note, I’m afraid, the visit was a qualified failure: There is zero evidence that anything Mr. Martin said or did moved the needle on that. Mr. Trump did graciously allow that he had no desire to denude Ireland of all its American companies, but the reality is that his tariff approach will target the EU as a whole, of which Ireland is a constituent part. He won’t frame a trade war with Ireland as a trade war with Ireland, but as one with the feckless Europeans writ large.
And so the whole show ends for another year. On Sunday, Alison O’Connor will announce in the Sunday Times that it was the greatest diplomatic performance since Bill Clinton gave Gerry Adams a visa. In a week or two there’ll be a poll showing that 70% or so of Irish people think Meehawl did fierce well altogether, and then the whole festival of fretting about the big White House showdown will start again circa next December. Some of you will even be back to believing that next year will be the year that the Irish Government gets told what for in the White House.
Perhaps in the interim we can get back to talking about domestic issues, once our friends in the rest of the media have ceased their endless gushing about Mr. Martin’s canny and deft diplomatic performance in the Oval Office.