Ireland’s leader survives visit with cranky old guy in White House

It could have gone worse, you’d have to say, for Irish Taoiseach (or prime minister) Micheál Martin, who made his ritual St. Patrick’s Day visit to the White House on Tuesday. But in this case, maybe not a whole lot worse.

In fairness, Martin was no more than a bit player in his joint press conference alongside Donald Trump in the Oval Office, a fate shared by many of the president’s past visitors and many more to come. Only a few of the questions flung at the two leaders by reporters had anything to do with Ireland or the recent complications in U.S.-Irish relations, which include the Iran war, Israel’s war in Gaza, Trump’s improvised tariff policies and his unrelenting hostility to the European Union. (The Republic of Ireland remains an EU member, unlike the larger island nation and former colonial superpower next door.)

An Irish reporter asked Trump about the proposed expansion of his golf resort in County Clare, which is currently on hold over the fate of a protected species of snail. He mimed falling asleep at the question and said he hadn’t heard about it. Toward the end of the event, Trump bristled at a question about Ireland’s recently-elected president, who has criticized the Iran war as a violation of international law. “He’s lucky I exist,” Trump growled. Irish President Catherine Connolly has a sense of humor; perhaps she enjoyed that moment.

Other than the usual tedious boilerplate about the long relationship and ancestral ties between the two countries and the supremely mixed legacy of Irish-American politicians, priests, cops and construction workers (OK, nobody said “mixed legacy”), that was it for Irish-centric topics. On the upside, there was no mention of mixed martial-arts champion Conor McGregor, whom the White House and various MAGA influencers tried to position as an Irish presidential candidate last year. On the downside, Martin never got a chance to celebrate “Hamnet” star Jessie Buckley, who just two nights earlier became the first Irish woman to win the best-actress Oscar. (I promise Trump doesn’t know who that is; contemporary culture confuses him.)

But, man, did a bunch of other stuff come up, and Martin had to sit there and take it, like an article of furniture that neither agrees nor disagrees with what is said in the room. He’s understood in Ireland as a canny political operator who led his boring center-right party, Fianna Fáil, back to power after a decade in the wilderness. If he isn’t especially charismatic or universally beloved, he also isn’t widely disliked, which in Irish political terms definitely counts as a win. He endured the same ritual last year, and came to Washington with a clear understanding of the task: Whatever you say, say nothing, as Seamus Heaney put it in a famous 1975 poem.

This is not a relationship of equals: Ireland may be more dependent on American capital than any other country in Europe, and perhaps the world. While Martin’s government faces a range of domestic problems, including a worsening housing crisis and a patchwork health care system, it also has loads of money and a huge budget surplus. Most of the $35 billion or so Ireland collected in corporate taxes last year came from American tech and pharmaceutical companies, including Microsoft, Apple and Eli Lilly.

It can’t have been easy to remain virtually silent while the increasingly disinhibited president of the most powerful nation in the world unleashed his 2026 greatest-hits package, free-associating through a series of delirious fantasies, outright falsehoods and boastful claims. This isn’t exactly news, but watching Trump perform live for 45 minutes is a distinctly strange experience: Contrary to many liberal assumptions, he appears fully oriented in time and space and shows no obvious signs of cognitive decline. He mostly seems angry and impatient, like a guy who can’t wait to get out of the room and go do something more fun, as well as troubled by intractable delusions that on some deeper level he knows don’t make sense.

Trump kept Martin and the press corps waiting for almost an hour while he launched an aggrieved Truth Social screed at the NATO non-allies who seem inexplicably reluctant to help him unclog the Strait of Hormuz: “Because of the fact that we have had such Military Success, we no longer ‘need,’ or desire, the NATO Countries’ assistance — WE NEVER DID!”

With the Irish taoiseach (TEE-shuk; it just means “leader”) next to him studying the carpet pattern and occasionally mumbling about something called “diplomacy,” Trump mostly wanted to expound on that theme: The war on Iran has been a glorious victory, and the world is insufficiently grateful. Iran had been “two weeks” away from building a nuclear weapon, he said, and would have used it within 24 hours, “probably against Europe.” (Ireland would have been OK, he assured the impassive Martin.) By contrast, his famous claim that “Barack Hussein Obama” (sigh) had sent multiple Boeing 757s “stuffed with cash” to Tehran after the Iran nuclear deal seemed almost normal. There’s actually a grain of truth behind that one, although it’s been stripped of context and inflated beyond recognition.

Trump then sidetracked himself into a litany of complaints about British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a particular target of his recent ire: “I like him, but I’m disappointed in him,” the president said, before gesturing at a bust on a shelf behind him: “Keir is not Winston Churchill.”

That put Martin in the hilariously awkward position (for literally any Irish person) of defending the U.K.’s current head of government, calling him an “earnest, sound leader” who had improved British-Irish relations, while tiptoeing away from the Churchill question. Irish people might have “a different perspective” on the legendary World War II prime minister, he delicately suggested, a historical reference that must have flown way over Trump’s head. (As a Cabinet minister during the 1919-1921 Irish War of Independence, Churchill sent the famously vicious paramilitaries known as the Black and Tans to Ireland.)

Oh, and the “windmills.” Those darn windmills! Trump cannot talk about anything related to Britain or Ireland, or Europe in general, without an obligatory monologue about the wind turbines that are “all over Scotland,” killing the birds and ruining the environment. “They don’t work” and “they’re all made in China,” he insisted, no doubt as part of the enormous Chinese climate hoax. (He didn’t say that part directly, but if you know, you know.)

Martin spoke up for real just once, rather quietly, after Trump moved from his complaints about energy to his bilious far-right talking points about immigration. He loved Europe so much, Trump said. Big fan. But it had become “a different place. Bad things have happened. You’d better do something about immigration and you’d better do something about energy, or you won’t have a Europe.”

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What “bad things,” do we suppose? Trump usually lets JD Vance and Stephen Miller roll out the unsubtle racism, and seemed mildly surprised when Martin opened his mouth for almost the first time. Immigration had been “very positive” for Ireland overall, Martin said, adding that “sometimes Europe gets characterized wrongly in terms of it being overrun or whatever.”

It wasn’t quite a ringing denunciation of all the Trumpian lies, fash-flavored mythology and wishful thinking of the previous hour, and it didn’t prevent Martin from getting scorched by political opponents across the pond. Holly Cairns, leader of the center-left Social Democrats, said he had “failed to represent the views of the Irish people, who are appalled at Trump’s lawless and belligerent presidency.” Richard Boyd Barrett of the socialist party People Before Profit called Martin’s performance “thoroughly embarrassing,” blasting his “pathetic failure … to challenge Donald Trump’s ravings and his justifications for a blatantly illegal and murderous war.”

Those responses are entirely defensible in moral terms. But perhaps the laconic statement from Marie Sherlock of the center-left Labour Party captured the spirit of this ugly encounter in a more realistic mode. Ireland’s elected leader, she said, “appeared to survive the meeting today.”

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