Taoiseach Micheál Martin has told Irish businesses to hold their nerve in the face of tariff threats from the White House.
He was speaking in Texas ahead of his meeting with US President Donald Trump tomorrow.
Today, Micheál Martin is going to meet state legislators here in Austin, Texas in the morning, before catching a flight to Washington DC.
Then tonight, there is a reception for St Patrick’s Day at the embassy there, and after that, it’s straight into preparations with his big meeting tomorrow with Donald Trump – also meeting JD Vance tomorrow morning.
And yesterday, we got a good sense of how he’s going to approach it.
And that is by saying that actually, when you factor in services, there isn’t a trade deficit between Ireland and the USA.
And that here’s a whole lot of spending that doesn’t fall into the data about how those deficits are actually captured – things like plane purches from the likes of Ryanair, 40 billion euro gone to Boeing.
So, they’re trying to reframe the economic argument.
And it’s interesting – there’s certainly no sense of panic among the Taoiseach’s team.
Obviously, a healthy degree of nervousness about meeting Donald Trump, particularly at the moment.
But they think they have a good game plan going in for how to actually to handle him, and think that he is pretty well disposed to Ireland.
Of course, that can always get turned on its head when it comes to Donald Trump and a meeting at the White House.
But going into tomorrow, they’re pretty confident it’s going to be a positive one.
