Owen Polley: Let's hope unionists raised the Irish Sea border while with President Trump

Some southern commentators suggested that the taoiseach had ‘played a blinder’ and avoided a much anticipated dressing down. But aside from a little gushing language, Trump delivered a harsh message to the Republic.

The Irish government had taken advantage of the US, he said, by using low corporate taxes to lure American companies away from their own nation. “The United States shouldn’t have let that happen,” he continued, “we had stupid leaders who didn’t have a clue.”

The president threatened to “even out” the trade imbalance that has developed as a result of Ireland’s tactics.

This is the model that the celebrated American economist, Paul Krugman, once derided as the ‘leprechaun economy’.

Over the past decades, the Republic has successfully persuaded large US companies to set up headquarters in Ireland, in order to avoid paying higher tax bills at home. The multinationals generate their profits elsewhere, particularly in America, but funnel them through Dublin.

This strategy, which the Irish journalist Kevin Myers described recently in the News Letter as ‘parasitic’, is now squarely in Mr Trump’s crosshairs.

The president may have indulged in some paddywhackery last week, but he didn’t bother disguising his real intentions, despite warm words about the ‘auld sod’.

Admittedly, Mr Martin deserved credit for avoiding the childish antics of Sinn Fein, the SDLP and the Alliance Party. Their self-styled ‘boycott’ of the White House had not even come to Trump’s attention, before journalists raised it with him last week.

For unionist politicians, the three parties’ tantrum simply meant they had a freer hand, on their annual St Patrick’s Day jaunt. They could promote Northern Ireland in the way they favoured and raise their own concerns with the new administration.

Hopefully, at the edges of those events, they found time to highlight ongoing problems with the Windsor Framework, which continues to blight our economic prospects.

Last week, the president was particularly scathing about the EU’s attitude to the US. The European Union, he said, “treats us (America) very badly”. On his social media platform, Trump claimed the bloc was “one of the most hostile and abusive taxing and tariffing authorities in the world”. It had been formed, “for the sole purpose of taking advantage of the United States”.

It would not have taken a genius for political communication to tap into this anti-Brussels mood and draw parallels with Northern Ireland, during conversations in Washington.

Our province has certainly been treated badly by the EU. During the Brexit saga, its negotiators insisted that we were cut off from the rest of the UK’s economy, on which we overwhelmingly relied, on the basis that this was necessary to ‘protect’ their single market.

The resulting Irish Sea border has imposed punishing levels of bureaucracy on Great British firms selling goods here. This worsening picture has scarcely been covered by the media, outside the pages of this newspaper, but at Westminster last week trade groups again explained the problems with the Windsor Framework.

The director of the Northern Ireland Retail Consortium, Neil Johnston, told the committee that supermarkets were being asked to fill in a “vast amount of paperwork” to bring products to Northern Ireland. The UK Internal Market Scheme (UKIMS), which was formerly known as the ‘green lane’, is so onerous that some traders are simply using the ‘red lane’ instead.

That route requires a full slate of customs declarations, and is just like sending goods abroad, but at least companies know where they are.

The government claimed that the number of checks would go down, thanks to the framework and ‘Safeguarding the Union’, but instead they have steadily increased. In fact, the EU has repeatedly claimed that the UK is not going far enough in its imposition of trade barriers, taking repeated legal cases aimed at making the sea border even more damaging.

The former SDLP minister, Nicola Mallon, who now represents Logistics UK, said last week that she was “very concerned” about the impending parcels border, which comes into effect at the end of this month.

Mr Trump has already started his own trade war with the EU. This involves levying punishing tariffs on goods it sells to the US. The UK will undoubtedly be caught up in aspects of this struggle, like the steel and aluminium levies that were applied last week.

In a recent meeting with Keir Starmer, though, the president suggested that he was open to a deal with Britain that would avoid increasing tariffs. The problem is that it seems likely Northern Ireland would be excluded from important parts of a UK trade agreement with the US. Under the terms of the framework we will probably be lumped in instead with the EU.

This scandal shows the extent of what has been imposed on this province.

No-one would be naive enough to think that Trump cares much about Northern Ireland. Still, some of our struggles on the sea border might resonate, at a time when the president is taking on Brussels’ protectionism. The EU justified the protocol, after all, by arguing that it needed to protect its precious single market.

At the very least, there’s an opportunity to highlight our difficulties to an international audience, at a time when the Labour government and Conservative opposition simply do not want to know.