THE decision of President Catherine Connolly to refer to the saint simply as ‘Patrick’ in her address marking the national day has attracted commentary and exercised plenty.
The hottest reaction is found on social media, which in turn prompts eye-rolling from those who approve of her excising the honorific from the title of the national saint.
What’s the big deal, they innocently ask?
And for most people, it’s not a big deal, but it does prompt another question: why? Why drop the ‘Saint’ part?
It’s a deliberate decision, and one that comes across as petty and pointless.
But it’s also of a piece with the passion for rewriting history that animates progressives in this country.
President Connolly’s deliberate decision comes across as petty and pointless
We’ve been subjected to years of this baloney around St Brigid’s Day.
She is now celebrated not as a saint of the Church but as a proto-feminist who, according to a preposterous homage from our Department of Foreign Affairs this year, would have been a supporter of repealing the Eighth Amendment.
And it was inevitable that this passion for reimagining figures in our national story as champions of contemporary causes would eventually reach St Patrick – sorry, Patrick.
Give it a year or two and someone will have dreamed up a story about him as an early advocate for trans ideology.
Patrick’s Pronouns is a children’s story waiting to be told – and ideally through the use of public funds, and via a slew of eager NGOs.
People see through this silliness, and they understand it for what it is.
Micheál didn’t survive Oval Office… he thrived
THIS was a triumph for diplomacy, for sure-footed statecraft, and for Micheál Martin personally. Most important of all, this was a triumph for Ireland.
To the extent that US president Donald Trump can display generosity, the most powerful politician on the planet showed it towards the Taoiseach and this country.
This should end for once and for all the wearisome annual charade of Opposition politicians demanding that the Taoiseach boycott the St Patrick’s Day visit to the Oval Office.
The priceless access that an Irish government gets to the most important political operation in the world should never be risked just because some are offended by the US president of the day.
Trump’s enthusiasm for the Taoiseach’s visit was in evidence at the start of their engagement
The Taoiseach understands that as an experienced politician who, whatever his faults, has a long record of serving his country in a meaningful way.
And his performance in Washington yesterday was nothing less than an act of patriotism. He really did the State some service.
As expected, the Taoiseach lavishly praised Trump and laid on the blarney in celebrating the deep ties between Ireland and the US.
Much less expected were his two deliberate interventions, one to defend British prime minister Keir Starmer and stress the importance of the relationship between Ireland and the UK, and the second one to defend Europe after a typically bloviated lament from Trump about the impact of immigration on the continent.
Those two contributions, artful fusions of pushback and flattery, didn’t have to be made.
The Taoiseach could have stayed silent, gripped the arms of his chair and prayed that when Trump stopped talking he had somehow survived it.
In eschewing that and deciding instead to defend a close ally and our European neighbours, Martin was undoubtedly showing deft political instincts given he will work more closely in any given year with the leader of the UK and his European peers than with Trump. But this was also the decision-making of a statesman, someone who understands that there are occasions that demand a response.
In both instances he made those interjections with skill.
There was no sloganeering from the Taoiseach, no lecturing, no jumping on the hot-button issues that a voluble and endlessly indulged constituency in this country were demanding he address. The truth is there was nothing the Taoiseach could do beyond wearing a keffiyeh and screaming in Trump’s face to please opponents who see politics as shouting louder than people who disagree with you.
The Taoiseach clearly understands that, and one wish is that he returns to this country determined to lead a government not swayed by every twitch in the consensus that holds such sway in public discourse.
It was hard to suppress a rueful smile, for instance, when in his defence of Europe, Martin said that ‘our view’ is that ‘robust and fair’ rules are required around immigration.
This is a position that it took mainstream Irish political opinion many years to reach. It’s not long since any questioning of the liberal consensus that held sway on this emotive issue drew cries of ‘far right’ in response.
Trump didn’t look especially impressed by Martin’s defence of the European approach, but that wasn’t the point. There is no position beyond supine, submissive simpering that would have met with his approval.
But Trump’s enthusiasm for the Taoiseach’s visit was in evidence at the start of their engagement.
It was a wonder to behold his childlike satisfaction at pointing out there are more people with Irish roots in the US than in Ireland. This was a win for America in his calculation, and it was one Martin was delighted to give him.
Once those preliminaries ended was when the danger arrived. These Oval Office set-pieces have seen Volodymyr Zelensky shamefully bullied by Trump and JD Vance, his vice-president.
Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa, had to sit and watch while Trump showed footage purporting to show victims of white genocide.
Much of it was a gross misrepresentation, but the damage done in that office, under the barrage of reporters’ questions, is not easily undone.
That is why it was generally agreed that the Taoiseach simply had to get in, hand over the shamrock, smile and get out in one piece.
As it transpired, he did rather better than that. Trump’s Iranian folly meant that dominated as a topic for the US reporters in the room, and even when he was asked a question about President Catherine Connolly’s criticism of the war on Iran, his response was relatively muted.
The microphones weren’t off long when the criticism came from Opposition politicians, who decried the Taoiseach’s failure to raise the talking points that do such thriving business in their political bases.
Most of them didn’t want him to go in the first place, preferring isolation and student-union petulance to engagement with the most powerful administration in the world.
These unserious postures are now a hardy annual.
If it was hard to justify taking them seriously before yesterday, the adroit handling of a volatile man by Micheál Martin exposed them as mere white noise.
This wasn’t an act of survival by the Taoiseach.
It was a dignified triumph for the country.