Is Ireland out of Trump’s firing line?

The Taoiseach Micheal Martin’s White House encounter with Donald Trump was controversial even before it was announced. Before any invitation had been extended, Sinn Fein said they were going to boycott the event in a show of solidarity with the people of Ukraine and Gaza and as a sign of their commitment “to humanity.” The People Before Profit Party said Martin was endorsing America’s role in a genocide and Labour leader Ivana Bacik insisted the Taoiseach take the opportunity to publicly scold Trump on Ukraine, Gaza and his perceived failures to take action on climate change.

But Martin is a more experienced politician than that and knew there was only one real matter at hand: Ireland’s increasingly vulnerable economic reliance on American firms and Trump’s threats to impose swinging tariffs if these firms didn’t return to the US.

The morning started well with a breakfast with J.D. Vance. The vice president — who waxed lyrical about a previous holiday in Ireland, talked about his Irish friends and wore a pair of much mocked “shamrock socks” — allayed some Irish fears. He said, “one of the more robust areas for us to work on with our Irish friends in the years to come is going to be technology and particularly Artificial Intelligence.” That phrase “in years to come” will have been well received in Dublin.

But Martin’s subsequent meeting with Trump proved to be rather more unnerving. Of course, there was never going to be a “Zelensky moment,” as many of Martin’s Irish critics had hoped for. Instead, Trump paid a series of compliments to Martin and repeatedly expressed his admiration for Ireland, while also boasting about Doonbeg, his beloved golf course in county Clare.

In fact, Trump’s animosity towards the EU seems to stem from his initial involvement with Doonbeg, which he bought in 2014. Having sought permission to expand the complex, Trump said: “I got the approvals from Ireland so quickly. They were so professional… But I was told something that bothered me. They said, sir, you also have to get approved by the European Union… And then I hired somebody and he said the process will be from five to seven years… And then I found out that they weren’t playing games… That was my first experience with the European Union and I dropped the project… It was a very bad experience I had.”

Yet Trump’s velvet compliments failed to conceal an iron fist: “The Irish are smart, yes, smart people. You took our pharmaceutical companies and other companies… This beautiful island of five million people has got the entire US pharmaceutical industry in its grasp.”

He certainly has a point — the largest US pharmaceutical companies based in Ireland, such as Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Boston Scientific are large drivers of Ireland’s $60 billion a year export trade to the US. Ominously, Trump then added that he was determined “to take back our [country’s] wealth.”

When Trump referred to the EU’s successful legal action against Apple, which forced them to repay the Irish exchequer $11 billion in back taxes, Martin quickly interjected and pointed out that Ireland had fought in the courts alongside Apple. This prompted Trump to say: “I’m not blaming you. I’m blaming the European Union. The European Union has gone after our companies… We have a problem with the European Union. They don’t take our farm products. They don’t take our cars.”

From an Irish point of view, there will have been little consolation from his assertion that, “We don’t want to do anything to hurt Ireland. We do want fairness.”

If Trump had problems with the EU before the meeting, they will have been further exacerbated by the subsequent news that there would be more EU “countermeasure” tariffs of up to $28 billion on US products in retaliation against America’s 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum.

As the trade skirmish between America and the EU now threatens to explode into a full-blown trade war, Ireland finds itself stuck in the middle of a conflict it can’t influence, while also being the most widely exposed of all the countries involved.

Having managed to keep expectations to a minimum before the Oval Office meeting, Martin can quietly content himself on a job well done. In fact, the Irish press pack in Washington reported a wide sense of relief.

There was one notable gaff, when Martin appeared to laugh as Trump made a joke about Ireland’s housing crisis being the result of such a booming economy. But that relatively minor, and subsequently clarified flub aside, it was a successful diplomatic mission.

But as they sift through the details of what was said, and watch the EU escalate its tariff war with the US, Martin and his team may yet find that any sense of relief was, sadly, rather premature.