Photo by Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office
The scene was familiar: Donald Trump received his guest in the Oval Office, Kublai Khan style. The media gathered around, cameras flashing. The guest needed something from him, or depended on him in some way – they always do, it’s America. Trade, defence, whatever. Trump demanded something from them in return – the humiliation ritual. Volodymyr Zelensky was the first to suffer, and since then every leader dreads it.
On St Patrick’s Day, the Irish taoiseach Micheál Martin was in the hot seat. Few countries need more and have less to offer Trump than Ireland. Its economic prosperity is built on a careful balance between Britain as an export market and foreign direct investment from US multinationals (big pharma and tech, mainly) attracted by low corporation tax and EU access.
So when Trump pivoted to Britain, Martin was forced to walk the tightrope. The president lamented Keir Starmer’s insufficient zeal abroad, gesturing towards a bust of Winston Churchill as if to summon a more obedient past. Here, Martin could easily have said nothing – offered a neutral platitude, kept his head down, and waited for the moment to pass. Instead, he did something quietly striking. He stepped in and backed Starmer directly.
Ireland’s relationship with the UK is vital, Martin said, and Starmer has helped reset it. He reminded Trump that Ireland has “a different perspective” about Winston Churchill. Then he stuck his neck out for the man in No 10 today. Starmer is “an earnest, sound person”, he said, with whom Trump can work.
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It was not exactly “I am Spartacus”, but gently contradicting the president in the Oval Office takes a certain bravery.
Martin likely enjoys some protection from Trump’s wrath thanks to the continuing political usefulness of the Irish in America, but that bloc is diminishing. Irish Americans, once a key Democrat demographic, have, of late, shifted. Trump himself has been unusually candid about the transactional value of that support. Last March he declared it “Irish American Heritage Month”, adding: “They’re a great people. And they voted for me in heavy numbers, so I like them even more.” The joke lands because it is not entirely a joke.
Martin’s goal was modest: survive the encounter. Get through 30 minutes with no major slip-ups, no red flags to the bull, a quiet visa request here, a careful tariff mention there. Hand over the shamrock bowl – no Boeing 747, but symbolic enough – and head home with dignity intact, or at least not entirely stripped away.
If Martin’s careful approach represents Ireland as it actually is today, then a scene elsewhere in US politics showed a very different vision of Ireland. Asked about Irish unity, the New York mayor Zohran Mamdani demurred, instead offering a vision of Ireland closer to Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn than contemporary reality. The Irish built New York, he said; they dug the tunnels and raised the skyscrapers. It was a speech less about Ireland than about America, and about a vision of it as a pluralistic immigrant society bound by bonds of working-class solidarity. Pressed again later, Mamdani used the language of the Good Friday Agreement, and its principle of consent. Irish self-determination is for the Irish to decide, he said; a careful neutrality more typical of British Labour politicians than their American counterparts.
As recently as 2018, the then New York mayor Bill de Blasio described St Patrick’s Day as “Gerry Adams Day”. Earlier mayors navigated Irish America as a homogeneous voting block, one with clear demands and sensitivities tied to events back home. By contrast, in Mamdani’s St Patrick’s Day message, his third attempt at answering the Irish question, Ireland appears not as a nation with interests, but as a moral symbol. Mamdani draws a line from St Patrick in the fifth century to the present. The Irish, having suffered colonisation at the hands of Britain, have become those who “weep with those who weep”, with a special authority to speak on behalf of the colonised.
This helps explain the divergence between Martin’s Ireland and Mamdani’s. In the Oval Office, Ireland is a small, export-driven economy negotiating with a superpower, acutely aware of its self-interests and dependence on American money. In progressive American rhetoric, it is a historical allegory for more modern causes. The two Irelands coexist uneasily. One hands over a bowl of shamrocks and hopes not to provoke a tariff, while the other acts as a kind of moral conscience for the West.
St Patrick’s Day is where they meet. It is an event that flatters both sides: the US gets to celebrate a (white) immigrant success story, while Ireland gets a seat at the table. But underneath it all lies a more complicated reality. Irish unity no longer motivates the American left. It is, instead, a symbol. And, for one meeting each March, Ireland is also a small country sitting across from the most powerful country in the world, hoping that the invites keep coming.
[Further reading: Ireland gambles on Catherine Connolly]
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