Tánaiste Simon Harris has directly contradicted the US account of a call this week between himself and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state in US president Donald Trump’s administration.
Mr Harris, who is also Minister for Foreign Affairs, spoke to Mr Rubio by phone on Tuesday.
A readout of the call provided by US State Department officials afterwards said that the two men had “discussed the US priority to address the US-Ireland trade imbalance”.
This was a reference to the fact that the US buys more goods and services from the State than it sells to the Republic, also called a “trade deficit” – a key gripe of Mr Trump’s administration in its relations with several European countries.
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However, speaking in Britain on Thursday after a UK-Ireland political summit, the Tánaiste denied the State’s trade surplus with the US had been discussed at all.
“The trade imbalance wasn’t specifically referenced. I was on the call. I was on it for over 20 minutes. It was a very good conversation,” said Mr Harris.
The Tánaiste said he was the one to bring up trade in the call with Mr Rubio, but only in the context of the extensive trade links between the Republic and the US.
“I didn’t bring up the trade imbalance, I brought up the importance of the transatlantic relationship,” he said.
“[Mr Rubio] actually said to me: ‘I’m aware that Ireland is one of the top investors in the US.’
“I was able to say: ‘We’re actually number six.’ That was the extent of the discussion on trade.”
In a readout of the call supplied by the US State Department, officials said that they had “expressed eagerness to work together to address our shared interests. They discussed the US priority to address the US-Ireland trade imbalance and reaffirmed the importance of our partnership in addressing issues like Gaza, the conflict in Ukraine, and space co-operation”.
“They also discussed energy security and co-operation with US companies operating in Ireland, two areas of increasing interconnectedness between our two nations.”
There was no mention of the discussion on the trade imbalance in a statement supplied by Mr Harris’s office after the call.
Mr Harris’s statement said only: “We agreed on the mutually beneficial nature of the dynamic US-Ireland relationship today, which we look forward to celebrating across the United States during our St Patrick’s Day programmes. Ireland is the sixth largest investor in the United States, with the top 10 Irish companies alone in the US employing 115,000 people.”
Irish officials are nervous that Mr Rubio’s comments signal that president Donald Trump will seek to corner Taoiseach Micheál Martin on the Irish trade surplus with the US during his visit to Washington next week for the St Patrick’s Day engagements in the White House and on Capitol Hill.
Ireland exports about €50 billion more goods than it imports from the US every year, a number driven principally by pharmaceutical exports. The US president and many of the senior figures in his administration regard the existence of trade deficits as evidence that the US is being exploited by its partners – and have vowed to end the practice, partly through the imposition of tariffs.
Mr Trump has imposed tariffs on goods from Mexico, Canada and China, and has promised that tariffs on EU imports are also on the way.
