Former taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said Micheál Martin is going to have a “tough job” when he visits Washington for St Patrick’s Day, adding that he will have to “walk a tightrope” when he meets the US president.
Mr Martin is set to meet US President Donald Trump in the White House on 17 March after formally accepting Donald Trump’s invitation last month.
The former Fine Gael leader said the trip to the Oval Office is not just a photo opportunity, but is also about “soft power” and is a “chance for Ireland to advance its interests and say something on the world stage”.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Brendan O’Connor show, Mr Varadkar said: “You know, he doesn’t want to say or do anything that might damage Ireland, and that’s his responsibility as Taoiseach.
“But I do think Irish people will want him to use the opportunity to say something.”
Other western leaders have been critical of the Trump administration and what is happening, he added.
Mr Varadkar said Mr Martin would have two opportunities to raise issues.
The first being in the Oval Office and one at the ‘Shamrock Ceremony’, an official ceremony which started in 1952, where the Taoiseach hands over a bowl of shamrocks to the US President.
Micheál Martin and Donald Trump in the White House on 12 March last year
The former taoiseach said the shamrock ceremony is “more scripted” and a “safer environment to make remarks”.
Mr Varadkar said he believes the European/Atlantic relationship has changed forever and that things will not go back to the way they were, even if a traditional Republican or liberal Democrat were to become US president in three years time.
“There will always be the risk and fear in the minds of Europeans that America will go back the other way again,” he said.
“That is why there is an inevitable need for the EU to build up its foreign policy capacity.”
Speaking about the upcoming visit to the US at a Cork Chamber event last month, Mr Martin said “our economic contacts are of enormous value to both of our countries and this has at its foundation an open dialogue”.
At last year’s meeting, the US president said it was a “great honour” to host the Taoiseach, adding he had “tremendous business relationships” with Ireland which would “only get stronger”.
US and Israel should accept Iran war refugees, says Varadkar
Mr Varadkar also said he believes that the US and Israel should accept any refugees who flee the war in Iran and the Middle East.
However, he added that he is not sure it would be practical for Europe to refuse to accept refugees under international law.
“The countries that started the war should accept them,” he said, adding that Israel and the US should pay for reconstruction damages.
He said it was hard to see how the war could end well.
“We’ve seen this movie before. We saw it in Iraq. We saw it in Syria, where those countries broke up on ethnic grounds. You had a civil war. You had, as a result of that increased terrorism overseas, you had significant migrant flows towards Europe,” he said.
Mr Varadkar described it as a “war without any clear reason” and also “without any clear objectives or war aims”, adding that it is unlikely that the regime in Iran will surrender.
He said his biggest fear is that there would be a total breakdown, similar to Syria.
He said that he had spoken to many Iranian grad students in the US during a recent trip.
“Iranians want to see the regime fall, but there is a total lack of trust in how much they can rely on the US to help them achieve the end of this Islamic regime,” he said.
“There is a real fear that they will just see a military coup or a new Ayatollah appointed who’s willing to bend the knee to America, but still rule Iran, just as it’s been ruled for the last last 40 or 50 years, and then that big fear in the back of people’s heads that Iran could could break up and follow the civil war – just as happened in Libya and Syria and Iraq.”
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