COUNTY VIEW: Shamrock diplomacy and a whole new challenge

At least we know now who will be accepting the bowl of shamrock in the White House on St Patrick’s Day next. Just who gets to hand over the symbolic gift on our behalf we won’t know for another couple of weeks. But of one thing we can be sure – whoever he or she may be, the Irish dignitary will find the Oval Office a much colder house than it has been for many a long St Patrick’s Day.
Donald Trump has made no secret of the fact that a cornerstone of his policy will be to bring American jobs, investment and technology back home again. Front and centre of his MAGA ambitions is that the outsourcing of American jobs has to come to an end; that he has chosen to namecheck Ireland as a country that has, in his view, been gaming the system is enough to send shivers down the spine of US companies domiciled here.
What that will actually mean for the 1,000 American firms now located in Ireland, and which contribute a total of €40 billion to the Irish economy, remains to be seen. But it does mean that our shamrock diplomacy, which has served us so well over the years, will need to operate at a higher level than ever before.
The Trump ‘jobs for America’ policy is planned to operate on the carrot-and-stick principle. The carrot will consist of favourable tax incentives for those who choose to relocate back in the United States. The stick will see the imposition of a scale of tariffs, starting from a base of 20 percent, on all imports of goods into the US, including goods produced by American companies located outside the country.
The overall aim is to make it more attractive for US companies to produce their goods where they are largely consumed – back in those flyover towns where jobs have withered as employers upped sticks and moved abroad.
However, economic sanctions are but one aspect of the raft of changes that the president-elect has promised his voters, and for which he has been amply rewarded. His sweeping claim that he would deport 12 million illegal immigrants – another major plank in his appeal to middle America – might not, however, turn out to be as simple as rounding up, street by city street, residents of long standing and deporting them.
It’s a policy that would soon run into the brick wall of practical economics. Many industries that already rely heavily on migrant labour (stories abound of fruit crops rotting in the fields of Florida and California because of labour shortages) would be prone to inflation in the event of mass deportations. And economic reality is that, if you curtail migrant labour, then you must import goods from outside; but if you curtail imports by way of tariffs, then it follows that you must have migrant labour. It’s either/or; it cannot be both together.
The Trump return to office comes with a deep sense of foreboding across the world order. A man who has been labelled a fascist by both his own former chief of staff and the former head of the joint military chiefs of staff can hardly be considered a safe pair of hands in the highest office on the globe. Those who comfort themselves by pleading that many of the fears of his first term of office never came to pass, are forgetting that, this time round, he will have no constraints on his power, since re-election is not an issue.
And the world is a more dangerous place than it was eight years ago, not helped by the Trump boast that he will bring peace to Ukraine in a day, an assertion that will leave Mr Zelensky wondering how long it will be until the White House forces him into a capitulation with his enemy.
An interesting aside to Trump’s decisive victory was the extent to which the polling companies so misread the margin of victory. Maybe they should have taken notice of the gambling fraternity. In the weeks before the election, American professional punters had been piling money onto the Trump horse, accurately predicting a two-in-three chance of success for the braggart Republican.
A lesson here, perhaps, for our own general-election predictors?