Leo Varadkar does not often give set-piece speeches about Irish public values. Perhaps it is just as well.
Last Wednesday he gave one in Washington DC. It was outstandingly silly even by the standards of the boilerplate banality typical of gala dinners. For this speech comes when Ireland is at a very important juncture in its modern history.
The Taoiseach speaks for a country that is being forced by Donald Trump and Brexit to think deeply about its place in the world and how it negotiates its most crucial international relationships: those with the United States, Britain and the European Union.
Instead, we got from the Taoiseach a cringe-making display of forelock-tugging sycophancy. His message was that Ireland should be loved in Trump’s United States because Ireland is really, truly American: US ’R’ Us.
Before we come to the speech’s silliness we must acknowledge its gutlessness. An Irish leader speaking in the United States cannot avoid the subject of immigration. The test of basic decency is whether this address extends to today’s immigrants, who are under attack from a president who makes cynical and relentless use of the same nativist hatreds that were turned on the Irish in the 19th century.
Varadkar failed this test ignominiously. He hailed the US as “a country that welcomed migrants from all over the world – Jews, Catholics, Irish – and so many more who were drawn to your beacon of hope”. This is doubly evasive and therefore doubly shameful. The use of the past tense evades the present. And those weasel words “so many more” render invisible the Mexicans, the Muslims, the real people who are the current objects of Trump’s abuse.
Leo Varadkar's parents met through, and continued to cherish, the most un-American institution in the world, the British National Health Service
This spinelessness is the context for the rest of the speech. The core of what the Taoiseach had to say was that Irish values are American values, plain and simple. This matters because it goes beyond toadying. Varadkar’s point is not merely that the United States is great. It is also that Ireland has no values of its own, that it takes nothing from its long pre-Christian and Christian cultures, nothing from Britain, nothing from Europe – but everything from the US.
No one would deny that the United States has been a major influence on Ireland, just as Britain has been a major influence. But imagine the Taoiseach had said that Irish values are British values, that everything we aspire to and hold dear is British. If you can do that you can begin to appreciate how self-abasing this speech was.
Here is the Taoiseach’s core point: “American ideas and American values that spread around the world meant that a young boy growing up in Ireland, with an Indian father and an Irish mother, could dream of one day becoming the leader of his country, believing that the time would come when people would be judged on their principles and their ideals, on the content of their character and the quality of the work, and not on their sexuality or the colour of their skin. These are our Irish values today . . . These were American values before they were ours.”
Almost everything in this is nonsense. Leo Varadkar’s parents met through, and continued to cherish, the most un-American institution in the world, the British National Health Service. Varadkar himself benefited from another un-American value: a cheap medical degree. (The annual cost of medical school in the US is between $35,000 and $59,000.) It was not American values that made it possible for a privileged, highly educated son of the Dublin professional classes to become Taoiseach: we’ve created those privileges of class and gender all by ourselves.
Does the Taoiseach really not know that it was the European Court of Human Rights, in the Norris case in 1988, that forced Ireland to decriminalise homosexuality?
As for not judging people on the colour of their skin being an American value before it was an Irish value, it is hard to know which is worse: the ignorance of modern US history and the contemporary realities of racial oppression, or the implication that we Irish were all racist savages until the Americans showed us how to respect black people. And as for American values making it possible for gay Irish people to be treated as equal citizens, does the Taoiseach really not know that it was the European Court of Human Rights, in the Norris case in 1988, that forced Ireland to decriminalise homosexuality? Who does he think drafted the European Convention on Human Rights? Richard Nixon?
All of this could be written off as a mere embarrassment were it not a return to a previous ideological template: Mary Harney’s claim in 2000 that, “spiritually, we are probably a lot closer to Boston than Berlin”.
There is ideological method in this daftness: we are to understand ourselves as rugged individualists in the American mythological mould, not as soppy Europeans whose self-reliance has been sapped by luxuries like public healthcare. Varadkar actually claimed that American “individualism” “inspired Irishmen and women to fight for freedom” – a ludicrous travesty of the collectivist national and social ideals for which they actually fought.
But at a time when we are in effect choosing a European destiny his imprinting of the Stars and Stripes on the Tricolour is even sillier than Harney’s. Just as we take a decisive turn to Europe the Taoiseach tells us that we are nothing if not American.