Ben Lowry: I hope, but doubt, unionists are able to benefit from Sinn Fein's boycott of the Trump White House

I suspect it is a safe move for them, and unionists won’t be able to benefit from the absence of the republican party because Irish Americans won’t let them benefit.

In other words, even though unionists are far more in line with the world view of Donald Trump and JD Vance, the president and his vice president will be none the wiser that Irish nationalists are more hostile to them.

In Monday’s News Letter we will be publishing a blistering and almost satirical piece by the brilliant – but disgracefully cancelled – Irish writer Kevin Myers on the cold reception that the Taoiseach and Tanaiste, Irish prime minister and deputy, Micheal Martin and Simon Harris can expect in Washington DC this year.

Ireland has often been at odds with America on key matters of foreign policy such as Brexit (which under Donald Trump’s first term the US was pro), notably now over Israel. Given that Ireland has had the nerve to, for example, join a South African international criminal bid to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, and thus treat the hyper civilised, ultra western, Israel as morally culpable with the mass murdering Islamic extremist savages of Hamas, I hope that Kevin is right.

I hope so also because Ireland has had the sheer nerve to sue the UK over its shelved plan for a Troubles amnesty when Ireland has long given the IRA a de facto but flagrant amnesty, and when it has wholly escaped scrutiny for its role in the deaths, such as refusing to extradite hardened murderers.

Brilliant though Kevin’s essay is, as you will see on Monday, I am less optimistic – the web version of this essay will link to one I wrote 18 months about Irish exceptionalism (‘Irish exceptionalism means that Ireland can be so unfriendly to Israel’, October 2023). The very society whose intelligentsia write about British exceptionalism – the alleged belief of the arrogant Brits that they can do as they please – is in fact the society that gets special treatment in the US capital, no matter how often it is at odds with mainstream American views, most recently over the Middle East.

Just recently that the Dr Saeid Khalouzadeh, Chargé d’Affaires of the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran to Ireland, was warmly received in the Irish parliament. Is anyone telling that to President Trump, who in his last term binned the Iran nuclear deal, calling the Iranians “a murderous regime”.

That is an Irish parliament where there was a cross-party haranguing of Israel and its representatives, until the Israeli ambassador quit the country. It is, as said, backing South Africa in its criminal bid against Israel – a South Africa that is, rightly, in Donald Trump’s sights for its Zimbabwe-style turn against white farmers.

Incidentally, Kevin Myers lost his Sunday Times column over the grotesque suggestion that he was anti semitic and he was effectively hounded out of Irish commentary. It was a quite extraordinary inversion of right and wrong about a man who has been a long-standing defender of Israel in one of the most Israel-hating countries in Europe.

Last weekend I wrote about my own wariness about President Trump, and that is even more pertinent in light of the point I was making about the looming betrayal of Ukraine. It is quite absurd, however, for NI to turn up the great honour of an annual invite to the White House.

The reason I suspect this is a safe bet for SF is that there is a big White House reception with so many people present that it will not be noticed if some NI parties are absent. Also because I expect the more intimate meeting between NI first and deputy first minister with the president and vice president to be shelved, rather than allowed to go ahead with only the unionist deputy first minister.

After all, in 2005 all NI parties were uninvited from the White House after the IRA murder of Robert McCartney, not Sinn Fein alone.

• Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter editor