Up on the Capitol it is that giddy time of year when the sound of bagpipes travels through the marbled halls, when it is advisable for staff to raid the wardrobe for something – anything – green, when president Joe Biden is in a mood to quote an Irish poet and when the White House pulls out all the stops – the security, the best china – for the Irish.
As it unfolds the unavoidable observation is, annually, the most obvious. All of this is an audacious diplomatic coup. How do we get away with this?
And having breakfasted with vice-president Kamala Harris, having then conveyed Ireland’s stance on Gaza to president Biden in the Oval Office, under the sharp, benign eye of Abe Lincoln’s portrait and all that ... history ... drifting through the circular room; having afterwards dashed across the city to the Capitol for lunch with the republican Speaker Mike Johnson and the Friends of Ireland Caucus, Leo Varadkar had to admit that there was maybe an element of getting away with it about all of this.
[ US working towards Ramadan ceasefire in Gaza, Biden tells TaoiseachOpens in new window ]
“I believe that Ireland is perhaps the only country in the world that can get away with turning its national holiday into a week of international events,” he told the guests of Speaker Mike Johnson in the Rayburn room. The president was beaming. Minutes earlier the president had just asked Michelle O’Neill and Emma Little-Pengelly, the new faces of Northern Ireland, to stand up. “Who’d a thunk it?” he said.
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Beside Biden, Johnson smiled and nodded as Varadkar extended an official welcome to Ireland. Neither of the American politicians would have enjoyed chummy chats in the corridors of late. But here they were, Irish men all for an hour. Maybe if they could celebrate St Patrick’s here every week of the year the Republicans and Democrats would be passing bipartisan bills in jig-time. At the very least they’d know their poets.
The potency of this annual showcase is that it is, in a sense, illusory. The speeches are often cloaked in fuzzy platitudes to hope and history – it was almost a miracle that the morning passed without reference to Seamus Heaney’s immortal line. Still, the Taoiseach had come to Washington this year with a clear and explicit message to deliver on Gaza. He delivered the night he arrived in Boston and repeated it at all locations on Friday.
It helps to be a lucky general. What the Irish Government party could not have bargained on as they flew across the Atlantic was that even then Chuck Schumer, the House majority leader and the most senior Jewish politician on the Hill was penning a lengthy, deeply personal lecture on the Middle East delivered on Thursday. It was scathing in its criticism of the Israeli leadership and urgent in its call for a ceasefire and an end to the horrific death toll visited on Palestinians. It was, by some distance, the most explicit criticism of Israel by a senior Democratic figure. And in the Oval office, after the president and Taoiseach exchanged pleasantries, Biden described it as “a good speech”, saying that Schumer had “expressed a serious concern shared not only by him but by many Americans”.
It put Varadkar in the room on what seemed like the moment that signalled the limitations of White House patience towards Israel. Soft diplomacy – set to a traditional Irish air.
Biden did not stay for long in the Capitol but skipped down the steps of the Capitol with Johnson and Varadkar. These Irish days seem to give him the elixir of youth. He smiled from “The Beast” as the vast cavalcade moved off. The day had been such a roaring success that the Taoiseach might have chanced the oldest Irish farewell by rapping his knuckles off the bonnet of “The Beast” as it pulled away.
But you can only get away with so much.
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