The Irish Prime Minister – the Taoiseach, as he is called there – showed up at the White House yesterday for the traditional St. Patrick’s Day visit. Above all, Ireland is not a power. Its leader, however, did not fail to provide a lesson in good manners to the President of the United States.
Over the years, meetings between the US President and the Taoiseach, I have covered several. Rarely does anything interesting come out of it. Everyone loves the Irish and, in the United States, with more than thirty million Americans tracing their roots to the island, even more.
This year, however, the Taoiseach’s visit proved more tense. Already, according to our Irish colleagues at BreakingNews.ie, more than 4,000 people had contacted his office, urging him not to travel to the United States this year.
This is because the Irish, in the latest conflict in the Middle East, have taken an increasingly vocal side in favor of the Palestinians. If the savage Hamas attack on October 7 continues to be denounced, Israeli reprisals, perceived as indiscriminate and disproportionately devastating and murderous, have several times thrown demonstrators into the streets of the country.
WITHOUT DETOUR
Leo Varadkar, the Taoiseach, has finally made the trip: there is a limit to snubbing an invitation to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with a president who repeats to anyone who will listen the pride of his Irish roots.
However, he had no intention of leaving his opinions and those of his compatriots in the lobby of the West Wing. Already, during the week, he had prepared the ground. Arriving in Boston on Monday, he made sure that his speech at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library did not go unnoticed.
Calling for an immediate ceasefire in Palestine – rarely do Americans describe the so-called “Palestinian territories” so clearly – Varadkar warned: “The cries of the innocent will haunt us forever if we remain silent.” And it is by relying on the bloody Irish history that he described what the prolongation of the conflict in the Gaza Strip risks producing: “These cries will generate more reprisals, which themselves will generate more violence and of revenge.”
A DOUBTABLE LEGITIMATE DEFENSE
On leaving the Oval Office, the Irish Prime Minister came to speak to us, the correspondents, for a few minutes. He opened with an admission of failure: “The president is very clear that the United States will continue to support Israel and help it defend itself. So, I don’t think that’s going to change.”
But admitting to not having succeeded in convincing your interlocutor and abandoning your convictions are two very different things. Leo Varadkar immediately continued: “I don’t think any of us like to see American weapons being used in the way they are. This is not self-defense.”
Obviously inconceivable for the Taoiseach to denounce the deaths of innocent people and continue, with the same enthusiasm, to provide the weapons which perpetuate the massacre. Joe Biden doesn’t want to admit it; However, according to Leo Varadkar, it is only a question of moral propriety.