For Irish politicians, the annual trip to America to mark St. Patrick’s Day is usually about as low-risk and high-reward as anything in public life. The presentation of a bowl of shamrock had muted beginnings: In 1952 Irish ambassador John Hearne sent a gift to President Harry S. Truman, who was out of town at that time but sent a warm note of thanks. Four years later, John Costello became the first prime minister of Ireland to present the shamrock in person to President Dwight Eisenhower. It was Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald in the 1980s who began regularly making the trip to Washington in person.
This relationship has traditionally been win-win. Successive Irish heads of state have banged the drum for American investment in Ireland, while presidents have been able to parade their Irish ancestry and Blarney stone bonhomie in front of Irish American voters.
Gradually it has become a significant event for Northern Ireland’s leaders too. The prime minister of Northern Ireland, aristocratic Anglo-Irish Terence O’Neill, visited Washington in 1964, but until 1999 it was only Nationalist and Republican leaders who found a welcome. Since then, intermittently, first ministers and deputy first ministers have represented the devolved Northern Ireland executive.
This year, everything changed.
If you are willing to take at face value President Bill Clinton’s tenuous claims of Irish lineage, President Trump is the first chief executive since Eisenhower to have no familial links with the Emerald Isle, and inevitably does not have the instinctive attachment to Ireland and Irish America of some of his predecessors. Of the 45 men to have held the presidency, 23 had Irish roots — mostly Protestant Ulster-Scots. Joe Biden, although only five-eighths Irish, positively weaponized his identity, often quoting W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney. Two years ago, Biden dismissed a question from the BBC with the scornful response “BBC? I’m Irish.” (I described the effect of this identity on his presidency in 2023.)
But it has not simply been an issue of a new president who is cooler towards Ireland. In February, Northern Ireland’s Nationalist SDLP party, then the Republican Sinn Féin party, announced that it would boycott the Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations in Washington. The two parties, both of which support a united Ireland, made the decision in protest at the Trump administration’s stance on the war in Gaza, in which they have been sharply critical of Israel’s conduct.
Sinn Féin’s boycott meant the absence of the first minister of Northern Ireland, Michelle O’Neill, who said she was “taking a stand against an injustice which I see unravelling every day from the dangerous rhetoric from this new U.S. president.” It also ruled out the party’s president and leader of the opposition in the Irish Parliament, Mary Lou McDonald.
Trump sees little more than Ireland’s membership of the European Union, an organization he hates and claims was “formed to screw the United States.” He is imposing severe tariffs on EU imports and has already
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