Brian Feeney: Unionist gooseberries at St Patrick’s Day love-in are truly a lost tribe
WELL, it’s over, the ordeal in Washington that is.Micheál Martin survived. Better than that, he emerged unscathed. Opposition parties criticised him for not correcting Trump, who in his ignorance assumed the Irish president was a man, but Martin didn’t want to dwell on Catherine Connolly’s description of Trump’s war in Iran as “illegal”. The Social Democrat leader, Holly Cairns, said Martin sat “mute while Trump went on a tirade spreading disinformation to defend his illegal war” and gave the impression the Republic had no issue with Trump’s “flagrant breach of international law”. Look, as former Irish ambassador to the US Dan Mulhall said: “This is a TV reality show that Trump has created in the Oval Office and visiting heads of government are extras.”There was a 30-minute monologue complaining about Keir Starmer and Europe. Breaking into the monologue would have produced a slanging match.Martin actually managed three uninterrupted minutes, mostly defending Starmer and Europe, which he said was “a very good place to live”. Taoiseach Micheál Martin listens during a St Patrick's Day meeting with Donald Trump at the White House The day began with breakfast at the vice-president’s residence where JD Vance agreed with Martin on the “tremendous bonds” with Ireland.Vance said: “All of us in America – most of us at least – have somebody who has this deep connection to that island on the other side of the Atlantic. We love it, and we admire it, and we cherish the incredible friendships that we have and the great things that Ireland has done for the US.”There followed a day for the Irish and Irish-Americans. The White House went green. They even turned the water in the north fountain of the White House lawn green. Trump wore a pale green tie. What about the gooseberries at the love-in though, that crew of political nonentities, hangers-on and rubber-neckers – the unionists.Although they were the gooseberries, they studiously avoided green. What were they doing there? We know that Gordon Lyons was searching in vain for Ulster-Scots, Scotch-Irish, or Scot-Irish.He must have been so disappointed in JD Vance, on whom he’d wasted thousands last year producing a glossy booklet trying, on the basis of no evidence, to show that he was a hill-billy descendent of Ulster-Scots or Scotch-Irish or whatever. Vance turned out not to be of of unknown origin and Catholic, though he disagrees with the Pope on the Augustinian concept of ordo amoris.That waste of public money was what one poor civil servant described as a “top priority” for Lyons.Now, here was Vance drawing attention to his Donegal wool socks as less noticeable than his shamrock-patterned ones last year. Lyons’s activities are sometimes inexplicable. He kicked off his American junket with a speech at Georgia Southern University, which he claimed showed his desperate search for Ulster-Scots links was “bearing fruit”. Exactly how?Communities Minister Gordon Lyons promoted the "connections between Northern Ireland and the United States" during his visit to Washington this week (DfC Press Office) Georgia Southern has a campus at Savannah. Savannah has one of the largest St Patrick’s Day parades in the US after New York and Chicago.If you go to the parade committee’s website you find that Savannah’s “Irish Catholic community has, and continues, to celebrate the feast of St Patrick, Ireland’s patron saint since 1824”.Not right up Lyons’s street, especially that they paint the streets green. Nothing about Ulster-Scots. What did the unionists think they would achieve at the Friends of Ireland Luncheon?There Micheál Martin told the guests of the democratic values “eloquently expressed in the Declaration of Independence, signed by three men born on the island of Ireland and many others of Irish descent, and first printed by Irishman, John Dunlap”. He referred to 17 presidents of Irish descent or connection. Marco Rubio’s statement that day said: “Over 30 million Americans claim Irish heritage, and Ireland’s contributions to American independence, from Charles Thomson’s design of the great seal of the United States to the nine signers of the declaration of independence of Irish origin, are woven into our nation’s founding. Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona daoibh.”Total official silence on Lyons’s Ulster-Scots. Lyons must have been dismayed also that Rubio used no phrase from the English dialect called Ulster-Scots, on which ludicrous sums of public money are pointlessly squandered. Why would he? It’s unknown outside Ballymena or Newtownards. Lyons’s fraught attempts to divide out the north as an entity before the British invented it in 1921 is his equivalent of Hunting the Snark; An Agony in Eight Fits. For the unionists sitting through those functions was there no sense of embarrassment, no sense of self-awareness of the inherent contradiction in their position, or were they just prepared to masquerade as Irish? Truly a lost tribe.To cap it all the Deputy First Minister had to sit there and endure Trump proposing a united Ireland.Trump added: “I love mergers.” That was his main takeaway from the unionists’ attendance.
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