In the News

Big US companies with operations in the Republic of Ireland will protect their interests in Ireland, even if they will try to avoid public clashes with US president Donald Trump, a leading congressman has said.

Much of the big corporations’ attitudes will remain publicly unspoken for now as they try to calibrate how to deal with the Trump White House, the long-serving Massachusetts congressman Richard Neal told The Irish Times.

“They won’t pick a fight, but they have a clear interest in profit margins,” he said, adding that those margins are satisfied by foreign investments and by Europe’s 500 million consumers, “by the way”, he told The Irish Times.

The outcome of the White House meeting between Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Mr Trump on Wednesday – an encounter long feared by the Irish Government – will be seen “internationally” as a victory for Mr Martin, Mr Neal said.

The Democratic congressman said the White House gathering will have received far greater attention than usual internationally in the wake of Mr Trump’s recent treatment of other recent guests to the White House, especially the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Illustrating the scale of the planning put into the meeting by the Irish side, Mr Neal said 27 members of Congress met diplomats from the Irish Embassy in Washington led by Irish Ambassador to the US Geraldine Nason three weeks ago.

Asked to give a flavour of the advice that the US politicians offered to the Irish side, Mr Neal, the co-chair of Friends of Ireland, said: “The flavour was obviously not to let the meeting descend into emotion and stick to the facts.”

The congressman, who is a ranking member of the House of Representatives’ powerful Ways and Means budgetary committee and has had a decades-long interest in Ireland, met, along with other congressional members of Friends of Ireland, with Mr Martin after the White House encounter. “He seemed quite satisfied that things had gone well.”

Asked how Ireland should position itself in coming years in its dealings with an unpredictable White House administration, Mr Neal said: “It’s not just a tax question. It is a well-educated population. It is the closest geographically to the United States.”

However, he particularly focused on the importance on Ireland’s legal system: “It has rule of law and intellectual property rights. I think that that’s something that needs to be part of the discussion and the equation as we go forward.”

US multinationals are not in Ireland just for tax reasons. “There is a misunderstanding of why a lot of these companies have located there. They also want to be close to Europe for the purpose of making sure they’re dispensing those opportunities in many industries.”

Asked about the impact of Ireland’s position on the Israel-Hamas conflict, and its much-repeated criticism of Israel’s conduct, Mr Neal said he did not believe that it had attracted as much attention in the US as some in Ireland think.

“I don’t think that it’s an overwhelming issue. It is on the minds of some people, but I don’t get the impression that it’s very far-reaching,” he said.