US president Donald Trump may have been Britain-baiting with his remarks about how he “would love to see” a united Ireland, but that doesn’t make it any less consequential.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin is right that some of the reaction was an overreaction. Trump has an interest in goading Britain, which didn’t support him in Iran. Andy Burnham’s government is already a target in a Maga culture war. But in politics, statements are facts. The US president could later have walked it back, but he didn’t; instead, he doubled down.
Martin deserves credit for having successfully navigated Trump again – avoiding disaster this weekend was a significant achievement. The US president enjoyed showboating on his golf course and showcasing himself to an audience back home. Of the winners from last week, Shane Lowry, Trump and Martin emerged at the top of the leaderboard. We can now toast their success with tariff-free Irish whiskey.
The American-Irish economic model, which yields outsize benefits here in corporation tax, is intact, and temporarily a little more secure. Defence, neutrality, Gaza and human rights may be important issues, but it is clear that our primary concern is securing even more money for us. That may be a shame, but it would be a bigger one not to notice the plank in our own eye because we are too busy looking at the specks in others.
Macklemore says he has been removed from tour with Ed Sheeran after Gaza comment
Schoolgirl seeks to raise awareness of sepsis after losing her hands and feet to infection
WRC awards €11,000 to worker sacked within days of warning bosses about manager’s ‘irregular’ practices
Social Democrats leader Holly Cairns will miss party’s think-in following medical advice
Our imperative interest is in maintaining a unique economic model reliant on American companies with substantial investments here but paying tax in Ireland on wider activities elsewhere. Supporting that requires deft diplomacy. It is certainly helped by the lobbying power of those companies in the United States. The backhanded compliment from Trump, when he laughingly described some of our best in business as “vicious bastards” shows that Ireland still carries weight in his worldview. We can bank that for now. Small countries largely play the hand they are dealt.
It is a long way since former US president Jimmy Carter’s groundbreaking statement in August 1977 calling for power sharing in Northern Ireland and promising economic assistance. That statement was a diplomatic breakthrough for Ireland, but was agreed to reluctantly by James Callaghan’s government in London. The context for it was the aftermath of the failed Sunningdale Agreement, the nadir of the Troubles, and the height of Tip O’Neill’s influence as Speaker on a Democratic president who needed help on Capitol Hill. It happened despite the US State Department, which logically took the view that Britain was more important. And it also happened despite the British themselves.
That was the first time Ireland impacted on the policy priorities of an American president. Disappointingly, it had an underwhelming impact at the time, but it set a precedent and created a template.
A decade later Margaret Thatcher said: “It was the pressure from the Americans that made me sign the [Anglo-Irish] agreement.” In the 1990s, Bill Clinton went the extra mile politically to give a visa to Gerry Adams.
Trump’s words can be somewhat discounted. He is a master of disruption and distraction, and his remarks last weekend may not lead to much in the short term. But if we play this determinedly and carefully, his remark may become an inflection point in American policy. Ireland has played a long game in the US for decades. Importantly, we have much more at stake now.
In a State more than 100 years old, more than half of its history was spent in the political and economic slipstream of Britain. In the 1970s, joining the EEC, overseeing economic growth and successfully internationalising Northern Ireland as an issue changed our geopolitical co-ordinates. Fifty years later, we are in the EU, but Britain is not. And it is no longer first among equals among American allies, the reality of which predates Trump’s global disruption. The US no longer looks at the world from a North Atlantic perspective. But in contrast, Ireland increasingly does. The consequences of a disruption of our economic model, which is significantly dependent on the United States, would proportionally be bigger now than those of the Economic War of the 1930s.
[ It’s easy to look tough on immigration. It’s much harder to build empathyOpens in new window ]
In relative terms, we enjoy unprecedented tactical advantages but have acquired an increasing strategic dependence on the US. Maintaining that as a mutual benefit is an imperative Irish interest.
The irony for the political parties protesting Trump’s visit here is that their economic policies would further increase dependence on the largesse of the American-Irish economic model. In relation to Sinn Féin, which collects significant amounts of American money at source from supporters in the US, its market in Irish America is in the main Trump-voting and Maga-supporting because that is where a majority of Irish-America is. There the party overlaps with the DUP, who ostentatiously cultivated their own Maga base as evangelical Christians. All roads led to the new Rome.
Burnham told a home truth, in ham-fisted terms, when he said a Border poll is off the table. He is correct that it is not on the table because the demographic numbers don’t add up and won’t soon. That is not to say that the eventuality should not be prepared for. It is as likely that English nationalism could be the disruptive driver of British disunion as Irish nationalism being the catalyst for Irish unity. The ultimate ally of unionism in Northern Ireland may be a new mutation of southern unionism here. Sly, silent and self-serving, they are the voters who won’t pay for unity and ultimately don’t care about it – even if they say in surveys that they do.
In American terms last weekend’s visit was a small event. For a small island with an outsize relationship with a bigger power, it mattered much more. In the greater scheme of things, like Carter’s statement in 1977, Donald Trump’s remark in 2026 will ricochet throughout history.
