What's your take on it all, Dan?

Well, first of all, just say that I'm a lifelong football supporter.

I travelled up and down the country with my father, watching Waterford play in the League of Ireland when I was a boy.

And I was in Stuttgart in 1988, and I played football 11-7 when I was 40, and I played 5-7 in my 50s.

So I'm just saying that I'm not some sort of retired, nerdy, retired diplomat.

I've got an interest in football that goes back a lifetime.

I think it's important to make that clear.

Would you call him a fool?

No, no, look, I just don't engage in sort of slagging off people.

I try to be an analyst, but I'm not a politician, so I don't have to, you know, look for votes and be elected, so I leave that to others.

No, look, I describe these remarks on RT television there on Saturday when I was part of the panel as extraordinary.

And extraordinary, what I meant by that was that This has never happened before.

I mean, one could assume that Joe Biden might have those views personally, but he never said them and probably never would say them.

Donald Trump is a very different type of politician.

So do you think this will blow over, as John Burroughs said?

How will Bretton see his stance?

I mean, I'm sure they were not happy at all with, you know, and I think there may be some element of him having a bit of a dig at Britain, not because of Ireland, but because of his unhappiness with Britain over the war with Iran.

So, no, I'm sure, I mean, we've already seen the sort of hair on fire in certain places about what he said.

But at the end of the day, I think it doesn't really change anything in Northern Ireland.

It doesn't bring a referendum any closer.

It doesn't bring Irish unity any closer.

But what it does mean is that there probably is a wellspring of support for Irish unity.

Does what happened in relation to the tariffs underline that?

On Ireland's national holiday, the Irish Prime Minister, the Taoiseach, has a meeting and a ceremony with the president.

Time-honored tradition, I'm gonna present the bowl of shamrock to president.

[crowd applauding]

Dan Mulhall is a former Irish ambassador to the US.

I don't know of any other country that has a guaranteed annual outing in Washington.

Some of my European colleagues kind of puzzled as to how Ireland had managed to pull this off.

Dan, you're very welcome.

Thank you very much.

Uh, thank you, John.

Um, [applause] Ɣ Chaigh leig, uh, Councillor Mulvey, um, Chief Superintendent Glackin, um, distinguished members of the clergy, uh, of the defense forces, both serving and retired, of An Garda Síochána, and of the local fire service, ladies and gentlemen.

Is, um, an óra speisialta dom a bheith anseo, a bheith anseo inniu chun, chun freastal ar an gcomóradh seo, comóradh ar na rudaí thubaisteacha a tharla féiche bliana ó shin i gcathair Nua-Eabhrac, cathair Washington agus i stát Pennsylvania, uh, nuair a cailleadh b'fhéidir, um, trí mhíle duine agus b'fhéidir gur, go raibh aireacht, uh, as an tír seo ag b'fhéidir míle de na daoine a, a, a fuair bás, um, ar an lá thubaisteach sin.

So, um, there are not many times i- in your life when you can remember exactly where you were when something happened internationally.

In fact, I can only remember two occasions like that.

Well, what are your memories of this day 25 years ago? Where were you and what were you doing?

Yeah.

Yeah, but I think it's likely that these issues will be brought up, certainly by the Taoiseach.

They will have a meeting that will probably last the best part of an hour, I'm assuming.

And in order to fill that hour, I mean, I'm pretty sure the Taoiseach will talk to him about how important Ireland is to America economically, the success of American companies in Ireland and the increasing number of Irish companies investing in America and employing people there.

But I do think there's also an opportunity here to ask him, for example, about Gaza, what is actually happening to his peace plan for Gaza.

It really hasn't got past the first stage of the ceasefire, which is maybe partially holding, but there's no evidence of any kind of movement towards the political stage.

I think it would be reasonable for for the teacher to raise those kind of things with him.

Will he be aware of that?

Yeah.

Yeah, but I think it's likely that these issues will be brought up, certainly by the Taoiseach.

They will have a meeting that will probably last the best part of an hour, I'm assuming.

And in order to fill that hour, I mean, I'm pretty sure the Taoiseach will talk to him about how important Ireland is to America economically, the success of American companies in Ireland and the increasing number of Irish companies investing in America and employing people there.

But I do think there's also an opportunity here to ask him, for example, about Gaza, what is actually happening to his peace plan for Gaza.

It really hasn't got past the first stage of the ceasefire, which is maybe partially holding, but there's no evidence of any kind of movement towards the political stage.

I think it would be reasonable for for the teacher to raise those kind of things with him.

Will he be aware of that?

Because how did Irish diplomats counter the, quote, Northern Ireland is an internal matter for the UK? How did they counter that argument?

Remember, this is a general problem for Ireland.

It wasn't just in America, right? Paddy Hillary, in 1969, went across to London to sort of ask the British government.

He was foreign minister at the time.

Asked the British government to sort of do something to stop the violence in Belfast, where Catholics were being attacked and so forth.

And his counterpart refused to see him.

He was seen by a junior minister.

And that's hard to deal with.

Where did your own journey with Ulysses start? What are your roots to this?

Obviously, at university, I studied literature, so Joyce was part of the curriculum.

But Ulysses was not part of the curriculum at UCC at that time.

I don't know why it wasn't taught, but it wasn't taught, even though we had a very good English department at UCC, University College Cork, back in the early 70s.

But we never got a chance to read Ulysses.

The book was always looming there.

In fact, at school in Waterford in the southeast of Ireland in the late 60s, early 70s, we had a kind of a radical teacher.

Yes, we know Ireland was just so different to what was so poverty stricken in terms of finance, why the culture and the writing was burgeoning.

There's a lot of, um, lots of analysis of the budget, but, uh, a lot of it could be summed up by income tax, income tax, income tax.

Yeah.

Look, um, most of us can remember the, uh, the years before the, uh, you know, the great, uh, recession of, uh, 2008, '9, '10, when there was this exuberance and a sort of a belief that we could keep spending and everything was gonna be hunky dory, uh, forever and a day.

And then we had the crash, and, and now we s- we're back in a situation where, uh, we're having a, a budget, a big budget surplus because of a extraordinary, uh, f- inflow of, uh, corporation tax receipts.

And I suppose the risk is that when there's plenty of money around, it's very difficult to, to say, "Let's put the brakes on.

Let's squeeze things." So I can understand why there's pressure for more spending from the public on, in particular areas, and also why there's, um, a, a desire to reduce taxes, 'cause if you have a government surplus, well, why wouldn't people feel that they should have a tax reduction? So I'm, I mean...

And of course, uh, the way it's being presented, um, today in the papers is very much a personalized thing of Simon Harris and Jack Chambers, Simon Harris wanting to push, uh, the idea of tax cuts hard, a- and Jack Chambers talking about the need to, uh, to sort of watch our spending, to control.

... is there a stronger approach, uh, being taken by the German authorities, notwithstanding the, the Irish concerns?

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

I did actually write about E.L. Godkin because some years ago I got interested in writing a book about Irish war correspondence.

And obviously the first one is William Howard Russell.

of the Times who reported from the Crimean War.

When I started investigating the Crimean War, I came across this other Irish figure, Edwin Lawrence Godkin, and I got interested in him.

And I wrote a piece about those two Irish men who reported on the Crimean War.

story

It is to Irish people who have fallen bad on their luck.

It was one of the greatest privileges of my career to have contact on a very regular basis.

Once or twice a week, I would go to Irish community centres and meet a mainly older generation.

These are people who came over in the 60s and 70s, some in the 50s indeed, and they remembered the life they had at that time, which wasn't easy for anyone.

And I also came across... particularly older men who had never married and were now on their own and had not been back to Ireland for many, many years and were living in bad conditions.

And there was a programme for trying to help those people.

They didn't even necessarily get the social welfare benefits they were entitled to because they had not connected with the system very much.

You were originally, correct me if I'm wrong, were you originally against the bill? I was

Donald Trump has done what nobody else could.

Were things ever any different in the history of diplomacy? One of the key rules of diplomacy is that you always claim victory from visits like this.

So it doesn't surprise me that Donald Trump in particular and the American side are trumpeting great successes.

I think the proof of the pudding is in the eating of it.

And we'll see what happens in the coming months and years.

Because remember, this is a rivalry for the ages.

This is going to be the key global rivalry for the next 30, 40, 50 years.

Do we read anything into that?

Dan, having really poked China in the eye for a long time and started what looked to be an exercise in massive international brinkmanship with a tariff war, is this an olive branch?

Well, who knows? Look, these kind of head of state meetings happen all the time.

But this is a really big one.

And it's a really big one because here you've got the two most powerful countries in the world, no doubt about that, I think.

Secondly, you've got two ultra personalities.

Donald Trump, who's probably made himself the most powerful American president in living memory.

And President Xi, who's probably the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.

And therefore, Donald Trump will want to try to put whatever pressure he can to get them to reduce their spending, to put further pressure on the regime in Tehran.

Does he need to be careful getting into that space?

No, I think we have an incredibly good story to tell there.

We always talk in Ireland about the tax paid by American companies.

But remember, if they pay 12.5% tax, it means that they retain seven times that amount, which becomes a profit that's retained and therefore transferred back to their ownership in the United States.

So we are a huge asset for the American economy because we are a net...

There's net gains made here by American companies, which ultimately reflect on the United States because they become part of the wealth of the United States.

Why do you think that our GDP is so much higher than our gross national income? It's because of the funds that are not part of the wealth of Ireland, but become to a large extent part of the GDP.

What are the chances the Taoiseach walks into a room over the next coming days and finds himself facing somebody who has been found civilly liable for sexual assault and expected to play nice?

What, if anything, should we do?

Well, look, I mean, this is a very confused situation, right? You had a Supreme Court judgment.

Then you had President Trump saying on the day that he would impose 10% tariffs.

The following day, he said it would be 15% across the board.

But it's clear from reading the commentary in the United States that this doesn't apply to everything, that there are other regimes in place that will not be overtaken by this 15% tariff.

Look at the confusion there is now.

For example, if you're in Britain, you had an agreement with a 10% tariff.

And with every day that ticks by, he gets closer and closer to what may be a defining midterms.

But what can and should they do?

Well, this is a uniquely difficult situation because I don't think anybody anticipated things getting to this stage.

But we now have the threat of tariffs, periods of tariffs being imposed on a number of EU countries in two weeks' time.

And I just don't think it's possible for the EU to just take that lying down.

I think there has to be some reaction.

Now, It's a difficult choice that has to be made because there's no one in their right mind would want to see a thing like this, a serious trade conflict between the US and the EU, given the importance of transatlantic trade and investment for both economies.

But I sort of fear that, you know, the last straw may have been reached and we may now be at a point where the EU has little option but to hit back with...

But is there merit in that argument that Ireland is particularly exposed should this go ahead?