Taoiseach Micheál Martin goes to the Oval Office on Tuesday – St Patrick’s Day – for what is the biggest test of his diplomatic skills since the last time he put on the obligatory green tie and visited Donald Trump at the White House. This time 12 months ago, Irish officials were on edge, anxious that the ambush that awaited Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy at the White House might be repeated during the St Patrick’s Day event a few weeks later. On the day, Trump was genial enough and the meeting passed without incident.
But on Tuesday Martin will find himself back on that tightrope, eager not to provoke an erratic, preternaturally sensitive US president while holding to Irish positions on everything from Gaza and trade to the illegal war Trump has launched on Iran. Helpfully for Martin, everyone in Ireland seems to have a view on how he should handle the visit. We asked 15 of them – a list that includes writers, historians, diplomats, charity workers and politicians. “Whatever you say, saying nothing,” suggests the novelist Colum McCann. “Skip the shamrock ceremony,” advises Labour leader Ivana Bacik. “Just lie back and think of Ireland,” says the Irish-American writer Michael Brendan Dougherty. Washington Correspondent Keith Duggan and Political Editor Pat Leahy will be at the White House on Tuesday, and you’ll be able to follow every moment live on irishtimes.com.
Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture Michael Healy-Rae was in the news this week after the latest Dáil register of members’ interest highlighted his huge property portfolio and extensive business interests in Co Kerry. In this fine profile, the result of interviews across the county and a deep-dive into public records, Current Affairs Editor Arthur Beesley looks at how Healy-Rae has amassed a vast empire of interests while tending to a constituency that consistently delivers him one of the largest first-preference votes in the country. The cap-wearing landlord, reputed to be the wealthiest TD in the Dáil, is an avid capitalist: he declared 14 houses for letting in Co Kerry, in addition to three guest houses, one rented commercial unit, a vacant premises and a single apartment for letting. This list goes on. “Rough calculations based on Eircode property transaction data for 2025 – collated by the Central Statistics Office – suggest Healy-Rae’s rental housing and guest house properties could have a market value of some €5.6 million,” Arthur writes.
About 166,000 vehicles use Dublin’s M50 every day, making it Ireland’s busiest road. It reached capacity in 2019, had a brief respite during the Covid pandemic but is now clogged once more. Sarah Burns speaks to some of the commuters and hauliers who keep getting stuck on the ring-road and explores what might be done to fix it. Elsewhere, writing from the port at Rosslare, Hugh Dooley examines the fight against cigarette smugglers, who are meeting rising demand with ever-more creative tactics and increasingly use Ireland as a back door into Britain. In just one week this month, 27 million cigarettes, valued at €25.3 million, were seized by Revenue.
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The French regional elections will be watched closely across Europe, Europe Correspondent Naomi O’Leary observes, with some big questions to be settled over the two-round ballots that begin this weekend. Will the Socialists lose Paris city hall for the first time in 25 years? Can the far-right National Rally take the second city, Marseilles? What role might a pig’s head play in the contest for control of Nice?
In the Opinion section, Cliff Taylor identifies a feature of Ireland’s housing crisis: starter homes are becoming forever homes. And Ronan McGreevy has six lessons that modern politicians should take from the career of Seán Lemass.
In Culture, I enjoyed these interviews with Neil Jordan and Anna Burns.
The Oscars are ridiculous. As our editorial notes, “voters more often than not get it wrong, preferring the ponderous and worthy over the comedic and strange. Winners’ speeches oscillate between the banal, the lachrymose and the list-based.” The competition generally ignores most of the world’s film-making. And yet. The 2026 ceremony takes place tonight, and Jessie Buckley looks unbeatable in the Best Actress category. Our Film Correspondent Donald Clarke runs through the categories and suggests who will win and who should win in each. You can follow tonight’s ceremony on our Oscars live story, where Laura Slattery will be at the helm through the night.
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