The Taoiseach, Tánaiste, and seven other government representatives are going to the US, a country that has been important to us economically and politically at the best of times and is in the midst of a looming constitutional crisis (though history will likely say that it was in the full grip of one by March 17, 2025).

Calls to boycott a visit to the White House are not without cause, but reality dictates that Micheál Martin needs to make the trip. 

Trump is, ultimately, a transactional president. He’s all about deals, even if right now he’s fixating on annexing Canada and Greenland. 

Still, a good or even half-decent interpersonal relationship between our leaders could pay off, even if all that means is minimising the damage.

We can’t afford for Martin and the others not to go, even if our politicians are visiting 40 countries overall (each one of them now an even more valuable trading partner). 

As America retreats into itself, so it behoves us to go wide in our expeditions.

The opportunities for Martin to gauge the situation when Trump is not performing in front of the cameras, if he gets the chance, will be invaluable. 

This is a country where Georgia Republican Buddy Carter has proposed legislation that would authorise Trump to engage in talks to acquire Greenland, then rename it to “Red, White, and Blueland”. 

Normality has gone out the window.

As American companies based here begin to roll back on their diversity programmes, as per diktats back home, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that companies based here will come under pressure to tailor their policies to suit US politics.

Just this week, an Associated Press reporter was barred from the White House because his news agency — global in reach — was not following the Trump policy of referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. 

Quite apart from its implications for freedom of the press, the perverse and focused childishness of it sets a worrying precedent.

And that’s quite apart from the cruelty of families being broken up because of deportations — and there are an estimated 50,000 Irish in the US who could be hit by this.

Another law working its way through the system would require people to vote under the name on their birth certificate, which critics say could disenfranchise tens or millions of married women if it were to pass both Congress and the Senate.

That’s not to say that world leaders should just roll over in the face of US policies, but they should be prepared.

The bizarre events at the White House this week, where unelected government employee Elon Musk lectured reporters on the importance of democracy while the actual elected official, Donald Trump, sat quietly at a desk for 30 minutes, show that there is a peculiar new dynamic at play.

Will Martin have to meet Musk before Trump? Or meet them together? 

Musk is as likely to have burned his bridges with the president by then as to have enhanced his position.

Given the power Musk — who, let’s not forget, gave a Nazi salute after Trump’s inauguration — wields, and given statements by Trump and his vice-president JD Vance disparaging the courts for doing their duty in upholding the laws being trampled over by the administration, it seems more important than ever to counter with whatever soft power we have as a country.

Joe Biden was likely the last US politician to hold a sort of sentimental attachment to Ireland, though we should have confidence in what we bring to the table.

Shinzo Abe, while prime minister of Japan, developed a sudden passion for golf during Trump’s first presidency which worked to the country’s advantage in avoiding punitive tariffs. 

Given that there has already been talk of Shane Lowry and Rory McIlroy as somehow forming part of our soft power leverage, perhaps the Taoiseach would be well advised to brush up on his skills.

We wish we were being wholly facetious, but in a deeply unsettled time when US tariffs on EU goods could curtail some of the biggest employers in the State, there is something to be said for using all assets at your disposal.

Disheartening ignorance of climate risk

Perhaps the American drive to “drill, baby, drill” and abandon climate mitigation measures was capturing the zeitgeist, with a PwC survey showing that the number of Irish CEOs concerned about climate change risks has fallen from 96% to 76% in three years.

That comes even as just under one third found that climate change investments had increased their revenues, and despite the relentlessly grim news over the same time period showing that the effects of climate change are increasing and ongoing, something we’ve seen with the proliferation of storms battering our island on the edge of Europe.

But it’s not just our electrical grid and flood defences that are taking the brunt of it, something we perhaps all instinctively know but don’t necessarily appreciate

Just this week, in her Outdoors column, Anja Murray highlighted that as many as 20% of Irish species are at risk of extinction, including eels, curlews, and wild Atlantic salmon.

The last one has been important to Ireland for so long it was a key part of mythology, with the salmon of knowledge granting Fionn MacCumhail great powers of wisdom.

On the last, she writes: “Over just 40 years, the numbers spawning in Irish rivers have declined by 60%. 

"The causes of this demise include plummeting water quality in Irish rivers and lakes; over-fishing; contamination with sea lice from salmon farming operations; barriers to upstream migration; and ocean warming due to climate change.”

Their survival is very much within our gift, and we have the assets at our disposal to make a difference. 

If we can’t fix things in other countries, the least we can do is work to fix things in our own.

We don’t need a salmon of knowledge to tell us this.