This week marked the St. Patrick’s Day diplomatic event that happens every year, where Irish politicians, including the Taoiseach, go off to Washington DC to shake hands, present a bowl of shamrocks, and have a good aul’ chinwag in the Oval Office.
It’s usually supposed to be a photo op that helps strengthen trade relations on our end, and helps the Americans appeal to tens of millions of Irish-American voters. In that way, it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement.
This was my first time in America full stop, let alone Washington DC, so I really didn’t know what to expect. You assume Washington DC is going to be some kind of degraded, Mad Max society, because that’s the impression you get from reading about America on social media. But on the contrary, in person, it was quiet, lovely, and everybody was polite. It’s actually much nicer than media would indicate from afar.
As one American man living locally pointed out to me, “You’re only going to film the sensational stuff like two crackheads fighting down an alley; a clip of a perfectly peaceful street of people just going about their business isn’t going to go viral.”
It’s almost like social media gives off a false impression to the world. But that’s neither here nor there.
One surreal and cool experience was that you’d regularly see units of American soldiers in full military uniforms going about their business. At one point myself and Gript’s cameraman went into a restaurant only to find an entire unit of the National Guard members in full camouflage with rifles slung over their shoulders eating lunch, occupying every single seat, and we had to find somewhere else to grab a bite.
We also ran into an off-duty Secret Service agent in uniform on his break, covered in more tactical gear than Robocop. He told me that his mother was from Galway and that he’d always wanted to visit Ireland, and was delighted to speak to a real Irish person. He eagerly shook our hands and asked us for a challenge coin to show her, which sadly, we didn’t have to give.
When it came to the White House itself, you assume it’s going to be unbelievably secure to the point where it’s scary, with armed guards on every corner. In reality, there wasn’t that much visible security at all, which surprised me.
Obviously, there was a lot going on that we couldn’t see, and I’m sure there were snipers everywhere out of view. But as far as what you could actually apprehend with your eyes, getting in felt like just a little bit more security than you would have at an airport. You go through a metal detector, get scanned with a wand, put your bag down for a sniffer dog, and that’s it. It was pretty relaxed, all things considered – looking around you mostly just saw civilian-looking people in suits offering to help with this or that.
The working theory we had in the press pool for why this might be is that, by the time you’re actually invited into the White House, they’ve already vetted you so heavily that they know you aren’t a threat. If they had any doubts about your bona fides, you wouldn’t even be invited in the first place, so they can get away with just doing a basic sweep.
As one of my colleagues joked, “I’d say they know more about us than we do.”
Walking into the Oval Office is a very odd feeling because it’s a room you’ve seen in every movie ever. We were sternly warned not to touch the Resolute Desk under any circumstances, and if we had to go behind it for some reason, to only do so with a Secret Service escort. They were very firm on that.
But you know you’ve been doing this job for too long when you don’t get starstruck even by somebody like Donald Trump, JD Vance, or Marco Rubio. I remember when I first became a journalist, at one of my very first press events, I was actually slightly starstruck by Darragh O’Brien, of all people – not because I’m some huge fan of his, but purely because I was thinking, “Janie Mack, I’m talking to the housing minister of Ireland, this is a highly influential person.”
Now I’m so over famous people from having interacted with so many of them that even seeing the President of the United States was a pretty calm experience, cool though it was.
Some people asked me if the Irish media was extremely hostile to Trump behind the scenes. Obviously they weren’t fans, as you could probably intuit, but there was a widespread agreement that whether you love him or hate him, he is clearly a historic President who will be in the history books. As one Irish journalist said, “He is the most consequential President in our lifetime, no doubt about it.”
The actual press interaction was an absolutely brutal scrum – you wouldn’t want to be an introvert with a quiet voice in that room. There are 21 Irish journalists and 21 American journalists who make the cut due to space constraints in the Oval Office – that’s 42 people in the room all trying to get a word in edgewise.
Naturally, this causes total chaos, and you just have to use brute force to shout your question out and hope it gets through by sheer force of will.
There was actually some grumbling from the Irish contingent about how the American press get access to the President all year round, and this is our one opportunity out of the year, so really we shouldn’t have to compete with them. But it’s not for me to set the rules.
The President himself picks and chooses who gets to ask a question, pointing at someone amid the chorus of people shouting, based on some totally unknown criteria inside the machinations of his own inscrutable mind – there was no discernible rhyme or reason as to why he called on the people he did, but he obviously has some standard he goes off.
Sadly I didn’t get called on this time – though I joked to another media member that next year I should wear a red baseball cap to maybe garner better results.
One experienced journalist told me she had done St. Patrick’s Day loads of times, and had only managed to get a question in twice because it is just so cutthroat. I was also told an anecdote that one year, all the American journalists came to the Irish journalists and said, “Let’s be civilized about this – we’ll ask a question, then you ask a question, and we can take turns.” The Irish journalists agreed, and then apparently the American journalists immediately threw the rules out the window and started shouting like maniacs.
As my colleague joked, “You can only pull that trick on the Paddies once.” But honestly, America wouldn’t be the superpower it is without a mindset geared towards ferocious competition, so I’d expect nothing less.
When questions did get through, the responses were sometimes brutal. One Irish woman asked a question and Trump didn’t hear it. After she repeated herself, he said something to the effect of, “Listen, you’re mumbling into your phone, I can’t hear you, next,” and ruthlessly moved on, which must have felt grim.
Another person asked about his Doonbeg golf course getting planning permission despite a protected snail species, and Trump dismissively said he didn’t know anything about it and had bigger things to worry about.
Towards the end, trying to cut through the noise, I tried calling on the Vice President, JD Vance. My reasoning was, every time Trump was finished speaking, all the journalists would shout out “Mr. President!” in unison. I figured saying “Mr. Vice President” might stand out and help to attract attention – though I later found out that was a faux pas; apparently when the President of the United States is in the room, you should specifically address him. So I guess that’s a lesson learned.
Throughout all of this, you could see Micheál Martin looking visibly uncomfortable at certain points. He was very clearly trying to thread the diplomatic needle and not sell out his European principles, while also not antagonising his host, which is perfectly wise and reasonable given the circumstances.
Trump spent much of the meeting teeing off on many of Martin’s sacred cows, like mass immigration, FDI, attacking European leadership like Keir Starmer, and speaking about the inefficacy of renewable energy like wind turbines (or “windmills,” as he called them).
Martin evidently didn’t agree with any of this, and while he gently tried to push back on some of it and convince the POTUS that Keir Starmer was sound and Ireland’s immigration policy isn’t a disaster, I’m not sure Trump was persuaded.
Of course Martin has to keep both Brussels and Washington happy, which is no easy feat for any Taoiseach. Ireland is kind of the go-between in the middle of the Atlantic, which creates its own challenge. You could almost see him grimacing on a couple of occasions as he braced for certain questions, acutely aware of the fact that he was constantly one wrong sentence away from a major diplomatic incident.
Ultimately, what strikes me most about the whole thing is the sheer diplomatic access Ireland has. I learned that apparently our embassy is literally right across the street from the White House, closer than any other country’s embassy – even closer than the Israeli one or the UK or anywhere else. That’s kind of amazing when you think about it.
For example, the last time the Swiss President was formally invited to the Oval Office was 2019. Yet Ireland, this little country on the corner of the Atlantic, gets invited every single year to have a face-to-face with the most powerful man in the world, arranged by our embassy across the street.
Mexico doesn’t have that relationship. Canada doesn’t have it. Even massive countries like Germany and France don’t have that kind of closeness. We really are in an unbelievably unique and privileged position, and the fact that some Opposition members would like to blow that up by telling the man off in his own gaff is nothing short of stunning.