Why don’t we showcase Ireland properly on St Patrick’s Day, by bringing dignitaries here?

John Costello, former Fine Gael taoiseach, penned a memorandum after he became the first Irish head of government to visit the White House on St Patrick’s Day in 1956.  “It is impossible to visit America, certainly at the time of the Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations, and retain any sense that Ireland is a small unimportant island,” he wrote. “It is not.”  

The pride in his statement belies the inferiority complex of an adolescent nation, merely 30 years old at that time, still finding its feet on the world stage. The reluctance to let go of the narrative of a “small, unimportant island”.