How kind, Chief Leo!
Taoiseach offers gift of scholarships in Ireland for Native Americans
LEO Varadkar’s status as Ireland’s chief was to the fore during his meeting with the Choctaw tribe in Oklahoma yesterday. And the Taoiseach came bearing gifts – with a scholarship programme announced for Native Americans to study in Ireland.
In exchange, he got some sage advice about how to deal with Donald Trump when he meets the US President on Thursday for the St Patrick’s Day celebrations.
Choctaw chief Gary Batton, who has met Mr Trump, confirmed: ‘What you see on TV is what you get, so my advice would be to be very honest with the President, very up-front with him because I think that’s the same way he is going to be with you.’
In meeting the Choctaw people, Mr Varadkar said it was the first step in helping to renew Irish links with the Native American tribe who famously made a large relief donation to help the Irish people during the Famine.
Few taoisigh have met with Native American tribes over the years. One of the most notable meetings came in 1919 when Éamon De Valera was made honorary chief of a Chippewa tribe of Indians in Wisconsin. Dev even received the tribe’s feathered head-dress at a ceremony.
The scholarship programme announced yesterday will enable Choctaw students to study in Ireland from next autumn.
The Taoiseach said the scheme would further strengthen ties between Ireland and the Native American tribe who famously made a large donation to help Irish people during the Famine.
Speaking at the Choctaw reservation
Ceremony: Éamon De Valera in Oklahoma, he said the scholarship is ‘an opportunity for us to learn from you and your culture, and you from ours, in a sharing of knowledge that will enrich both our peoples’.
Asked if he had been given any advice from governors he met in Texas and Oklahoma, Greg Abbott and Mary Fallin, as to how to handle President Trump, Mr Varadkar said: ‘I have asked actually because most of them have met him on occasion.’
He added: ‘I am looking forward to that meeting.’
Meanwhile, there were a few tribal matters closer to home for Mr Varadkar, as he was questioned about there being no St Patrick’s Day invitations to the White House for Sinn Féin leaders Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill and DUP leader Arlene Foster. But Mr Varadkar’s political smoke signals were clear on the matter. He said: ‘I think that’s a matter for the White House.
‘It’s up to the White House to send out the invitations to whoever they see fit.
‘I think it’s a change, but in previous years the power-sharing executive was up and running... That changes the context.’
Asked whether he would raise with President Trump the plight of the Irish undocumented, which the Government has recently put at only 10,000 after previous claims of 50,000 being trapped without resident status in the US, Mr Varadkar said: ‘As with any meeting between two Heads of Government, there are always more things on the agenda than you can ever get to. But certainly the undocumented is one of those issues we have to address.’
‘A sharing of knowledge’
SO there you are, visiting the newish neighbours for the first time. They’ve invited you round because they’ve heard it’s a special day for you – maybe you’re marking a birthday, a wedding anniversary, a national conversion to Christianity, whatever – and they’ve only gone and thrown you a big party.
They’ve chosen the guest list carefully, even being thoughtful enough to leave out a couple of prominent neighbourhood women because they know you don’t get along.
In fact, there are lots of very prominent folk, from all over, who’d give anything for an invitation to your neighbours’ home, but will never set foot inside it. For you, though, they’ve made a seriously big effort. They’ve asked along all manner of important folk to help you celebrate. They’ve put a lot of thought into the food and drink and music and entertainment, they’ve gone so far as to decorate their whole house with your favourite colour just to make you feel more at home.
The thing is, you know they expect you to invite them back. And you really don’t want to but it’s going to be impossible to avoid. You are pretty famous for your own hospitality, after all, well known for offering a hundred thousand welcomes to total strangers at the drop of a hat. So if you fail to return the compliment and don’t extend that invitation to come and stay, it won’t just look like an oversight: it’ll look like a deliberate snub. It will be a calculated insult. And they’re quite influential people, these newish neighbours of yours. They’re also very touchy, and famously unpredictable. The problem is that nobody, back home, wants you to have them round.
So what do you do? Put on your game face, make the best of the inevitable and issue the most sincere and warm invitation you can muster? Or toss out a grudging, ‘You must call round some time’ offhand sort of a suggestion, and hope they get the hint. Or you can do what, I fear, our Taoiseach Leo Varadkar may be planning when he meets Donald Trump in the White House on Friday – shove a pot plant at them, thank them for a great evening, grab your coat and run.
Last year, then-Taoiseach Enda Kenny broke the ice when he invited the Trumps to make a return visit after their St Patrick’s Day meeting. But then, Enda was on his final lap as Taoiseach. And, being a good West of Ireland man, he was never going to leave a neighbour’s house without asking them round to his.
Best of all, though, he could invite the Trumps to visit in the certain knowledge that he wouldn’t be the one waiting by the red carpet at Shannon while Irish dancers twirled in gale-force sleet (some-newspaper thing poor Michael Noonan never did live down), and he wouldn’t be the one sandwiched between them for the photocall on the steps of Government Buildings. To use the neighbourhood analogy, it was a bit like giving the deeply unpopular neighbours your address, and insisting they absolutely must drop by anytime... when you know you’re moving house.
Nightmare
But Enda Kenny also surprised his critics here, and delighted Trump-haters around the world, with a hard-hitting speech reminding the president that ‘St Patrick was an immigrant’, leaving him looking uncommonly disconcerted and even mildly abashed. The clip of Enda blind-siding a rictus-grinning Trump with his soft brogue and his harsh words has been downloaded more than 30million times, and it compounds the dilemma he has left his successor.
Although Leo has dismissed some calls to boycott the shamrock ceremony and is on the record as saying that a Trump visit here wouldn’t necessarily be his ‘worst nightmare’, that’s still a far cry from expressing unconfined joy at the prospect of welcoming the POTUS and Melania. So he has quite a fine line to negotiate next Friday when he comes face to face with The Donald in the Oval Office.
As a young, gay, mixed-race leader, for a start, he simply cannot be more equivocal towards Trump than his older, heterosexual, Mass-going, conservative predecessor was in the same circumstances. He has already said he’ll tackle Trump on the death penalty, immigration, LGBT rights and equality issues.
But it won’t be enough to do so in the context of a private conversation, before walking out together for the obligatory shamrock presentation and photo call. He’ll have to make some hard-hitting observations, score some significant points and appease the majority of Irish voters who, according to a poll in this last year, detest Trump and fiercely oppose the idea of a State visit. In reality, the prospect of a visit by President Trump is probably more remote now than it was when Enda first issued the invitation last year. At the time, it was a real runner as an adjunct to a White House visit to the UK, which had seemed to be on the cards. But that was called off amid genuine fears of widespread public demonstrations, with the White House reportedly saying that the president would only visit Britain when he was sure of a warm welcome... by the squadrons of pigs, presumably, flying in formation over Buckingham Palace.
But just because your embarrassing neighbours are unlikely to accept your hospitality does not absolve you of the obligation to offer it. Leo Varadkar is simply going to have to repeat Enda’s invitation to Donald and Melania, or – at a time when Trump’s burgeoning trade war with Europe may well extend to include tariffs on Irish whiskey – risk a very damaging froideur. And he can’t ignore the fact that Trump is the first sitting American president with an active business interest in this country, the Trump Doonbeg luxury golf resort, which gives him all the more reason to expect an invite.
Meanwhile, the US economy is thriving, and no matter how many Russians or porn stars (or even Russian porn stars) crawl out of the woodwork, if Donald revives the Rust Belt’s steel industries and keeps the NRA on side, his core support won’t falter. Add in the bizarre wild card of his planned meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, which is so crazy that it might work, and the prospect of a second term in office, for a man whose original candidacy seemed like a bad reality TV stunt, is now a real possibility.
So here’s the diplomatic and political minefield which Leo has to tread on Friday. He has to address the president’s appalling record on race, equality, immigration, guns and human rights. But he also has to maintain this country’s uncommonly close bonds with the US.
They might, as he says, be bigger and stronger than any single presidency, but a quixotic and petulant president who’s been slighted could do untold harm over two terms in office. Leo has to propose a presidential visit – there is no way you can accept a neighbour’s hospitality without returning it – but he has to do so in a sufficiently watery manner to ensure that Trump won’t come.
The Taoiseach’s pet Strategic Communications Unit has come in for a lot of flak this past few weeks but, if it can come up with a communication that is strategic enough to pull off this balancing act, it will have earned its keep.