By Eoin Madigan
The warmongering, corrupt and fascistic US President Donald Trump will visit Ireland in September to attend the Irish Open golf tournament at his property in Doonbeg, Co. Clare, where he’ll likely meet with Taoiseach Micheál Martin. Despite this not being an official state visit, the Irish state will of course roll out the red carpet for this man, who is so despicable both personally and politically – in another act of embarrassing servility.
Not only a war criminal, Trump is a serial sexual assaulter, who is mentioned over 30,000 in the Epstein files – not including the huge amount still unreleased by his administration. These include claims of sexual assault, including from a woman who was 13 years old at the time. The fact that the Taoiseach, Tanaiste and the rest of the Irish establishment will be falling over themselves to welcome a man with at least two dozen accusations of sexual assault or sexual misconduct against him is nothing short of disgusting.
National disgrace
The problem is, of course, that Trump is precisely the kind of person that the system of global capitalism produces, elevates, and rewards. And Trump, in turn, has been a willing steward of American empire and foot soldier of international capital. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his material and ideological support for the Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people. Like Biden before him, Trump is in this sense merely an avatar (albeit a particularly odious one), an expression of US imperialism taken to its logical conclusions.
Not content with the genocide, he has also gone to war with Iran, a blunder which may yet prove to be the US’s “Suez moment”. While future historians will have to litigate that one, the war has had an all too predictable effect on the global working class by exacerbating the unending cost-of-living crisis. And so, effectively, the Irish state will roll out the red carpet for the man responsible – insofar as any one person can be responsible within the system of global capitalism – for an acute deterioration in living standards in Ireland.
Writing this article got me thinking about the Irish state’s annual genuflection at the altar of Foreign Direct Investment, i.e. presenting the sitting US President with a bowl of shamrock at the White House on Saint Patrick’s Day. I mused for a few minutes on why so many people find this ritual so galling, then it hit me. It is a symbol of everything we don’t have in this country – adequate housing, healthcare, public transport, and infrastructure – because the entire Irish state is geared towards attracting and placating international capital, mostly from the US.
This yearly humiliation is necessary because our ruling class is incapable of conceiving of a country that is not completely subservient to foreign capital, and would be too cowardly to pursue such an independent course even if it could.
Join the protests!
In a very real sense, then, Donald Trump – and indeed every US president before him – is a representation of the system that has left Ireland so critically underdeveloped, despite being on paper one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Genuinely, think about this the next time you bemoan our purposefully engineered housing crisis, our healthcare service being run into the ground as an excuse for privatisation, or the dismal state of our public transport infrastructure.
More than that, let it galvanise you to get out and protest Trump’s presence in Ireland next month. A protest in Dublin has been called by the Irish Neutrality League and the Irish Anti-War Movement for 1pm Saturday 12 September. Spread the word now, so we can send a message to the world that Trump may be welcomed by Ireland’s cowardly Government, but he is fiercely opposed by the vast majority of its people.
