{"id":158960,"date":"2026-02-01T08:27:17","date_gmt":"2026-02-01T08:27:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/158960\/"},"modified":"2026-02-01T08:27:17","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T08:27:17","slug":"is-sending-verona-murphy-off-to-los-angeles-really-in-the-national-interest-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/158960\/","title":{"rendered":"Is sending Verona Murphy off to Los Angeles really in the national interest? \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

As our public representatives put the finishing touches to their itineraries for the annual jamboree of self-debasement and hypocrisy that is the St Patrick\u2019s Day<\/a> exodus, they\u2019ll be hoping that US president Donald Trump<\/a> does what he does best, and hoovers up all the oxygen.<\/p>\n

So long as he ensures public attention is transfixed by the inevitable row over whether Taoiseach Miche\u00e1l Martin<\/a> should be travelling to the White House \u2013 a debate that has raged every year Trump has been president, even though the only answers on the table seem to be \u201cyes\u201d or \u201chell yes\u201d \u2013 then other questions might get overlooked. <\/p>\n

Or one question might anyway: do we really need to send every single member of our grossly inflated Government off to far-flung corners of the world? <\/p>\n

Whatever you might think about the morality or the embarrassment factor of it, there\u2019s an unassailable economic logic behind the Taoiseach\u2019s trip to Washington and Philadelphia, and Helen McEntee\u2019s Boston deployment. T\u00e1naiste Simon Harris will be handling the EU side of things in Paris and chumming it up with Keir Starmer in London. Sounds reasonable. Darragh O\u2019Brien is off to Brazil and Hildegarde Naughton is ticking off Chile and Argentina, weeks after the crucial Mercosur trade deal. Makes some sense; let\u2019s just hope no one remembers we voted against it<\/a>. Jack Chambers, Christopher O\u2019Sullivan and Neale Richmond are covering six countries in Africa under the \u201cemerging markets\u201d brief, while Richmond is also swinging by Jordan, a mere 10,000km from his primary destination of South Africa. Wait, what?<\/p>\n

The further you go down the long schedule of visits, the less it looks like a vital part of the Government\u2019s Action Plan on Market Diversification, and the more it starts to resemble a transition-year ski trip planned by a committee after one too many gl\u00fchweins. Verona Murphy will have a splendid time in Los Angeles, as will Martin Heydon in San Francisco, but do we really need to send them both \u2013 not to mention the other six who are US-bound? What part of Charlie McConalogue\u2019s brief as Minister of State at the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport with special responsibility for Sport and Postal Policy will he be pursuing in Thailand and Vietnam? Will anyone sleep better knowing that Michael Moynihan, Thomas Byrne and Michael Healy-Rae are rattling through 10 eastern European countries between them? <\/p>\n

Alan Dillon has one of the longest job titles in the current Government \u2013 Minister of State at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment with special responsibility for Small Businesses and Retail and Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications with special responsibility for Circular Economy. But it\u2019s not immediately clear what any of it has to do with Mexico and Guatemala. And there\u2019s no doubt a very good strategy behind dispatching Attorney General Rossa Fanning to India \u2013 just don\u2019t expect to hear the details.<\/p>\n

In all, 40 representatives of the State will \u201ccarry Ireland\u2019s message\u201d to more than 50 countries worldwide. And just like that TY ski trip, the purpose is a bit vague beyond \u201cit\u2019s costing a lot so it\u2019s bound to be good for them.\u201d <\/p>\n

The subtext is that this is about shoring up our fabled soft power. An internal Department of Foreign Affairs document<\/a>, recently seen by Irish Times reporter Jack Power, sheds some light on the official rationale: Ireland\u2019s history as a small, \u201chelpful\u201d, \u201cnon-threatening\u201d and \u201cnon-colonial\u201d State has opened doors, it claims, going on to praise \u201cthe interpersonal skill set of diplomats and officials\u201d. It adds that the department\u2019s ambassadors and officials should lean into \u201ccultural diplomacy\u201d. \u201cIn Singapore and the wider region, bands such as U2, The Corrs, The Cranberries, Westlife and Boyzone remain extremely popular,\u201d it notes. No doubt officials in Singapore will look on Frank Feighan as a very decent substitute for Bono.<\/p>\n

This year, though, the already-thin guff about how we \u201cpunch above our weight\u201d has been stretched to breaking point. Is Ireland \u2013 with its reputation, unfair or otherwise, as a tax haven, a defence freeloader, a hotbed of anti-Semitism and anti-American sentiment which is nonetheless happy to keep taking US dollars \u2013 still seen anywhere as the harmless chatty neighbour just popping in for the craic and the tea? Anywhere other than in Ireland, that is?<\/p>\n

Perhaps that\u2019s the point. The real audience for the St Patrick\u2019s Day mega-jolly isn\u2019t actually the foreign dignitaries we are assured will be wowed by being in the same room as someone whose niece was in school with one of the Corrs. There may be a genuine shred of hope that we can charm our way through the current global geopolitical minefield. (In the case of Trump, calling him \u201cDaddy\u201d does seem to work wonders.) Which leaves the question of who is supposed to be taken in by the epic scale of this year\u2019s display of Irish soft power. The answer, I fear, is us. <\/p>\n

The people of Monaco might not be blown away by the prospect of a visit from Marian Harkin, but \u2013 or so the thinking seems to go \u2013 her constituents in Sligo-Leitrim will be impressed. Likewise, the citizens of Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania might feel they could take or leave the presence of Michael Healy-Rae, but voters in Kerry will be reassured that all is right. And so on.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s time we let go of the fantasy of Ireland\u2019s soft power sending a warm glow around the world, like the gentle hug of a Ronan Keating song. Those days are long gone. Attitudes to Ireland have hardened. Patience with our hypocrisy on defence is running out. The clock is ticking for our economic model. <\/p>\n

Shipping the entire Government off to drink green beer and hum along to Zombie for St Patrick\u2019s Day might offer us brief assurance that all is well, but it\u2019s an expensive form of therapy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As our public representatives put the finishing touches to their itineraries for the annual jamboree of self-debasement and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":158961,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[536,77434,48,52,51,47,50,49,77435,77437,77436,435,77438],"class_list":{"0":"post-158960","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-donald-trump","9":"tag-jennifer-o-connell","10":"tag-la","11":"tag-la-headlines","12":"tag-la-news","13":"tag-los-angeles","14":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","15":"tag-los-angeles-news","16":"tag-micheal-martin","17":"tag-simon-harris","18":"tag-st-patricks-day","19":"tag-united-states","20":"tag-verona-murphy"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/158961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}