A cousin of mine in Ireland — whom I won’t identify, given the 50/50 chance they end up reading this — texted me recently to say that for the first time, they felt actively frightened of America and Americans. (“Pardon my generalization,” they added; I am regarded, in the words of a different cousin, as “almost Irish enough.”) Long-standing Irish jokes about being the 51st state or “just east of Boston” had lost their charm; the status of a small, damp and famously fractious island on the western edge of Europe, three-quarters of which have maintained an uneasy independence for the last century, suddenly seemed in doubt.
That’s the context — I mean, setting aside the much larger and even more frightening global context — in which Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin (i.e., the prime minister) paid his ritual St. Patrick’s visit to the White House this past week, offering Donald Trump the traditional bowl of sh — OK, fine, bowl of “shamrock.”
