Why don't we showcase Ireland properly on St Patrick's Day, by bringing dignitaries here?

The annual export of all our ministers around the world on St Patrick's Day misses the point, argues Simon Tierney

Taoiseach Micheál Martin and US president Donald Trump at the White House last year for the St Patrick's Day ceremony

John Costello, former Fine Gael taoiseach, penned a memorandum after he became the first Irish head of government to visit the White House on St Patrick’s Day in 1956.  “It is impossible to visit America, certainly at the time of the Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations, and retain any sense that Ireland is a small unimportant island,” he wrote. “It is not.”  

The pride in his statement belies the inferiority complex of an adolescent nation, merely 30 years old at that time, still finding its feet on the world stage. The reluctance to let go of the narrative of a “small, unimportant island”. 

We retain this immaturity when it comes to the diplomacy surrounding St Patrick’s Day 70 years later. Costello went to Washington to sell the idea of Ireland to the Americans after our wartime neutrality and refusal to join Nato. 

But we don’t need to market Ireland in the same way anymore. We are an established nation now with less to prove.

Rather than exporting our salespeople (ministers) across the globe, let’s import the clients (other heads of government) to Ireland.  This year, the Government will send 38 ministers and junior ministers to 50 countries around the world. Based on previous years, it’s likely to cost a few hundred thousand euro. Bear in mind many ministers have chosen to travel business class in the past. Talk about a jolly.

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern with President Bill Clinton at the White House during the shamrock presentation for St Patrick's Day in 1998. Picture: Eamonn Farrell/RollingNews.ie

When foreign affairs minister Helen McEntee announced this year’s programme of travel for St Patrick’s week, she defended the expense on the grounds it would “showcase Ireland on the global stage”. 

But the “stage” is here, in Ireland, not in the countries we’re sending our ministers to. St Patrick’s Day originates in Ireland, not on Fifth Avenue.

Yet we continue to export the drama abroad. Let’s bring it home.  What I’m proposing is simple. The Government would make a formal invitation to a different head of state each year, and we would host them in Ireland as a guest of the nation on St Patrick’s Day. 

Being our special guest during our national week of celebration would be considered a particular honour, with all the associated pomp and ceremony, drawing potentially large media interest from abroad.  

When former minister Eamon Ryan visited Brasilia on St Patrick’s Day in 2024, it barely registered among the Brazilian media. But if Inácio Lula da Silva, the current president of Brazil, and one of the world’s largest economies, was our guest of honour on March 17, it would be significant news in such a vitally important nation.  Is it not better to have a big fish in our small pond rather than sending lots of little fish into a gigantic ocean?  

We have fallen into this current tradition of sending government ministers abroad, not by design but through a series of events in the mid and late parts of the last century. 

John Hearne, the former Irish ambassador in Washington DC, started it all when he “popped over” to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on March 17 1952 with a bowl of shamrock for President Dwight D Eisenhower. It was an inauspicious beginning. Eisenhower wasn’t at home. 

It wasn’t until the Reagan years that the tradition became much more formalised, with the addition of the Speaker’s Luncheon and the trade delegations tagging along. The festivities have always been fluid and they should continue to evolve. Nothing is set in stone with these ministerial visits on St Patrick’s Day. 

In fact, the government waits with bated breath for a formal invitation each year from the White House before all systems are a go.  

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and US president Joe Biden during the shamrock ceremony at the White House in 2024. Picture: Niall Carson/PA Wire

In 2020, former Clare TD Joe Carey suggested the US president should be invited to Ireland on St Patrick’s Day in 2022 to mark the centenary of the State. One of the reasons Carey proposed this was because he felt it would boost tourism. 

This gets to the heart of the matter. An American president in Ireland on March 17 would receive much greater media attention in the US than the scraps we receive when the Taoiseach jets into DC.  

The Government always talks about how good the exposure is for Ireland with its foreign trips on St Patrick’s Day. But again, the trouble is that we are not actually showing off Ireland to the world at all. We’re just talking about it. 

Having Niall Horan, lovely lad as he seems, perform at the White House (March 17 2023) just doesn’t cut it. We need NBC and CBS news cameras on Irish soil, sending images back to American homes.  There is a lot to be said for the benefits of the networking opportunities for business and trade during the St Patrick’s festivities in the US and beyond. 

The annual Ireland Funds dinner also contributes enormously to charities back home. However, we can’t allow St Patrick’s Day to mutate into an annual shakedown, where the purpose of the thousands of airmiles flown by our ministers can be whittled down to investment figures and numbers on a graph. 

Instead, let’s fulfil our promise of being the Land of a Thousand Welcomes and bring the hospitality home.