Terry Prone: Taoiseach exits Oval Office stage left, with a smile. Phew
Taoiseach Micheál Martin and US president Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Picture: MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
Getting out alive would have been a win for Micheál Martin. Getting out smiling and all in one piece was better than a win. Getting in a plug in the White House for a Fianna Fáil councillor from Clare was nearly as unexpected as having Rosie O’Donnell thrown at him.
He sat, hands splayed on his thighs, watching and listening as Donald Trump advanced the thesis of the day: Ireland was a great country. Ireland had effectively taken the US pharmaceutical industry and had been allowed to do it by one bad president after another.
The Taoiseach mildly pointed out that the pharmaceutical industry hadn’t done badly in Ireland. Great workforce. He looked almost happy when the president began giving out about how few American cars you find in Berlin. Not a big Irish problem, the car export issue.
Even what decidedly was his problem — the housing crisis in Ireland — managed to turn right ways around when the president suggested the lack of houses might be due to Ireland doing so well.
At a certain point, the Taoiseach knew he was winning. That was the point at which he did a classic Micheál Martin communication.
“Let me finish this,” he instructed the press corps, and it’s fair to assume that some of the Irish broadcasters present did a rueful smile: typical. The Taoiseach (unlike the American president) thinks and speaks in long sentences and hates being halted before he has applied his personal full stop.
In this instance, he owned the full stop and its timing, and from then on, he was egging to deal with whatever anybody wanted to put to him, including the Israeli situation. He was home and hosed and he knew it.
Not all credit to him, to be honest. From dawn, it was clear that the US administration was minded to be positive and good-humoured towards the Taoiseach, starting at the Naval Observatory, where the first challenge wasn’t to him at all, but to Mrs Martin.
She has a reputation for liking her privacy, does the Taoiseach’s wife, and may have been dismayed when she realised the TV cameras were on her side of the vehicle, not on his. But she came down out of that mile-high SUV like a trooper, did Mary Martin. Unhesitating. Then grabbed her handbag and walked around the back of the vehicle to meet her husband so the two could walk as one toward their host and hostess.
A snapper who missed the first handshake asked if they’d do another and the vice president smilingly said: “Sure. Do anything for the cameras.” They all laughed. Not a care in the world.
No evidence, as they walked into the vice president’s residence, that Micheál Martin was weighed down by advice, much of it unsought. But he was. He certainly was.
People with experience in diplomacy and people without such experience had spent the last week shoveling guidance in the direction of the Taoiseach. None of it showed as, booted, suited and buzzed on adrenalin, smiling in that slightly worried way he shares with golden retrievers, he walked into the hall, guided by Vance’s courteous hand at his back.
The Taoiseach even managed to be warmly accepting of JD Vance’s shamrock socks. In fairness, Vance’s introduction of his socks was a palpable gesture towards tension reduction and the laughs about the president being a fan of conservative dressing were easy and respectful. (The president decided to play along with sock thing, later.)
All the early photographs were good, from Ireland’s point of view. Open-handed gestures from JD Vance to the Taoiseach as he talked, matched when it became the Taoiseach’s turn. Close-ups of Micheál watching other guests, including RFK, closely and smilingly.
One mid-shot showing his right hand clutching Vance’s hand and circling the vice presidential wrist with his left as if the Taoiseach was taking his pulse. He did the same pulse-taking encirclement with the president just a few hours later.
All good, it must have felt, as the Taoiseach tucked into his berries and eggs benedict. But then, president Zelenskyy may have been just as optimistically inclined before he was dumped on from a great height, just one week back.
The Taoiseach could not have known whether the vice president was being genuinely warm towards him or was making him comfortable before media execution. You couldn’t be sure. Nobody could. The president and vice president overturn expectations. It’s what they do.
The rules of traditional diplomatic negotiation are predicated on an unspoken agreement between the negotiators. It goes like this: “I know what you’re at, and you know what I’m at, but let’s not go there.” Two problems, right there.
First, as the assault on Volodymyr Zelenskyy proved, Trump can’t be bothered with any of that subtle stuff. In his world, you don’t work up to a smack in the kisser. You start with one. It can be your opening gambit.
Second problem is that, in this country, for more than a week, every volunteer advisor and past expert has leaked, announced and shared at high volume the key things they believe our Taoiseach should wear and do, today, including that: He should point out the 175,000 jobs in American-owned companies in Ireland in total is a piddling number, set against the 250,000 jobs America is generating every year.
He should hammer home how much Ireland invests in American companies.
In particular, those two points have been touted as killer blows. Which ignores the fact that the essence of a killer blow is you don’t see it coming, whereas president Trump, courtesy of self-serving leaks from Ireland, will have known everything the Taoiseach might possibly say before he ever put his presidential hands around the bowl of shamrock. He was never going to be wrong-footed by the Taoiseach.
Back home, in a televised Big Debate, Micheál Martin marshals data and has only to reach behind him into the pile of weaponry to pick and throw the right bit of information to deliver a crushing point win over his opponent. It’s habitual. Trained into him by success, down the decades.
And completely irrelevant, at lunchtime today, in the Oval Office. Micheál Martin could not afford a crushing win. Or to prove the president wrong on any factual point.
So the Taoiseach (whose title was impeccably pronounced by JD Vance) listened to the US president praising the Irish planning process as applied to Doonbeg while suggesting that the EU had created seven years’ worth of delays to an extension there.
Sometimes silence is your best option, and on that one, the Taoiseach was judiciously silent.
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