Israel and the US bastard child of England are both colonial brutes. Ireland and Palestine are both historical victims of English colonialism. Whereas the English directly invaded, occupied and brutalized the Irish for centuries, in Palestine they sent their wealthy European Jewish allies to colonize Palestine on their behalf.
The lines are drawn. The stakes never so clear.
But just as Ireland managed by "liberation activites" (referred to as "terrorism") to kick the English out of their land and their lives (and now working on finishing off the last colonial bastion of the so-called "Northern Ireland" scam), Palestine's "liberation activities", now in their 100th year against the invading hordes of religious barbarians from the steppes of Russia and eastern Europe, will inevitably lead to a Free Palestine.
To the convicted criminal felon Trump and his Zionist criminal friends: Terror and money can't buy you love!
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Trump is on a collision course with Ireland – and it could spell economic disaster
Michael Murphy
Sat, August 30, 2025
Micheál Martin speaks with Donald Trump during the taoiseach’s St Patrick’s Day visit to the White House in March - Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images North America
Open the welcome book at Shannon Airport – thick with the pleasantries of visiting dignitaries – and you’ll find a rare pairing, a few lines apart.
“To all our friends at Shannon, with gratitude for always making us feel at home away from home,” wrote Antony Blinken, Joe Biden’s secretary of state, in 2024.
This year, Scott Bessent, Donald Trump’s treasury secretary, left two words directly below: “AMERICA FIRST!”
The contrasting messages provide a snapshot of how swiftly Ireland’s fortunes have shifted. A little over two years ago, Joe Biden walked on to the stage at St Muredach’s Cathedral, Co Mayo, and declared to a delighted audience that the county was now “part of my soul”. With Dropkick Murphys’ I’m Shipping Up to Boston roaring in the background, it felt like the summit of shamrock diplomacy by the United States. Leo Varadkar, the taoiseach at the time, gushed that Biden, whose ancestors were from Mayo, was “the most Irish of all American presidents”.
Biden had earned that description with more than ancestry. His hardball stance during Brexit hampered Britain and helped Dublin extract concessions. He once even rebuffed a question from the British press: “The BBC?” he said, smiling, “I’m Irish,” before walking away.
The contrasting messages left by Antony Blinken and Scott Bessent in the welcome book at Shannon Airport - EdwardLawrence/X
That was then. Now Ireland finds itself on a collision course with Trump over a mounting ledger of economic, legal and ideological differences.
Earlier this year, the US president grumbled that Ireland “took our pharmaceutical companies and other companies” and signalled his intention to claw them back. Almost overnight, the $500bn (£370bn) of American capital invested in Ireland – generating some 400,000 jobs and one in four euros flowing into Dublin’s coffers – appeared to be on borrowed time.
Trump had even mooted the idea of triple digit tariffs on pharma imports. But last week, to Dublin’s relief, Washington agreed to cap tariffs on EU pharmaceuticals at 15 per cent, meaning Ireland’s £38bn of annual pharma exports to the US appears to be safe.
That is, for now, one less front to worry about in what has become a low-simmer diplomatic war. The Telegraph has been told that the US State Department is compiling a list of Irish officials to be issued with travel bans over the country’s role in policing speech on US social media platforms headquartered in Dublin.
Only this week, the administration signalled that it was considering imposing economic sanctions on European Union states which enforce the bloc’s Digital Services Act – a regulation which obliges platforms like X and Facebook to police hate speech, disinformation and scams. The unprecedented step leaves Dublin, one of Europe’s foremost regulators of online speech laws, uniquely vulnerable.
Trump’s regime is also increasingly turning on Ireland over the republic’s vociferous activism in relation to Israel. Earlier this month, 16 Republican senators wrote to the treasury secretary asking him to consider adding Ireland to a “boycott list” after the Irish cabinet approved legislation banning trade with parts of Israel. The Occupied Palestinian Territory (Prohibition of Importation of Goods) Bill proposes a ban on the import of goods from parts of Israel deemed illegally occupied under international law, including Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.
Despite warnings from senior US lawmakers that Ireland “is on a hateful, anti-Semitic path that will only lead to self-inflicted economic suffering”, Simon Harris, the minister for foreign affairs and trade, said his government intended to plough ahead.
Simon Harris, the minister for foreign affairs and trade, said Dublin intended to implement legislation banning trade with parts of Israel, despite US warnings - PAUL FAITH/AFP
“Anyone in Ireland who thinks this is not serious or newsworthy doesn’t know a lot about how the big, bad world works,” warned Dan O’Brien, the chief economist at the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin.
Normally a cautious analyst, O’Brien added: “The damage the political class is doing to Ireland’s place in the world is rising rapidly, and causing growing alarm among some civil servants tasked with batting for Ireland.”
The disquiet has reached cabinet level. The Telegraph understands that at least two government ministers have privately opposed the Israel legislation. Yet the bill still advances.
O’Brien had been invited to discuss the risks posed by the bill before the Irish parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Trade committee, but his invitation was revoked hours before the session began.
The submission he prepared, later published online, warned that the US had an “almost endless series of laws, measures and instruments in the economic and financial fields to further its global interests”.
It added: “I know of no economy in the world which is so dependent on the companies of another country for its prosperity and wellbeing... It is my considered judgment that Ireland and the Irish people will face a very significant cost if this bill is enacted.”
By way of explanation for the government’s enthusiasm for the bill, O’Brien wrote in an online magazine: “The political class is becoming more interested in niche activist campaigns than in the things that are within its power to bolster Irish interests.”
Irish government actions ahead of Trump winning the US election did little to counter that perception. Harris, while taoiseach, flaunted a Kamala Harris baseball cap, having years earlier dismissed Trump as “an awful gowl”, Irish slang for “idiot”. He later insisted it was light-hearted banter.
Nor has Ireland’s apolitical diplomatic corps escaped criticism. “They shunned Trump people for four years,” Sean Spicer, Trump’s former press secretary, said earlier this year. “They made a big mistake betting the whole lot on the Biden administration.”
The Irish government has traditionally opted for caution over bluster when it comes to its dealings with Washington. The Occupied Territories Bill – first proposed in 2018 – was quietly shelved twice, including under Biden, after warnings of the potential for diplomatic fallout.
Last year, Claire D Cronin, Ireland’s US ambassador during the Biden administration, sent an email warning Dublin of “consequences” if the bill passed, as well as the potential of “economic uncertainty for almost 1,000 US companies operating in Ireland”. Ninety minutes later, according to The Ditch news site, which obtained a copy of the email, Micheál Martin, then minister for foreign affairs, announced that the bill would undergo a review.
The government has since narrowed the legislation to exclude services and ban only the import of goods – worth €240,000 (£200,000) last year – in an effort to avoid violating American anti-boycott laws, originally introduced in 1977 to prevent US firms co-operating with the Arab League’s boycott of Israel.
Eugene Kontorovich, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School in Virginia, says the laws have “far broader” reach than the Irish government appears to realise. “They prohibit adhering to, complying, facilitating, or in any way accommodating oneself to a foreign boycott,” he said. “If you are complying with the [new Irish] law and you in any way signal that to the government, you are violating federal law.”
People march during a pro-Palestinian protest at Shannon Airport in October 2024 - Anadolu
It would, says Kontorovich, be “impossible for an American company to be located in Ireland and not commit some level of violation of this law”, if the Occupied Territories Bill were enacted.
The penalties for US firms breaching America’s anti-boycott laws are severe, including federal investigations, fines starting at $250,000 (£185,000) per offence, and even potential criminal liability. “No CEO will want to face that,” he says.
Earlier this year, Irish officials even feared the annual St Patrick’s Day reception at the White House might be cancelled over the bill, according to a source in contact with civil servants at the time. Behind the scenes, diplomats scrambled to reassure Jewish organisations in Washington that it was neither anti-Semitic nor ill-intentioned.
“There was great anxiety” that Trump would raise the issue when he met Martin in the Oval Office in March, the source says.
“But the meeting went well. They came out feeling they’d got away with it – in their heads there were no adverse consequences in the States to what they were doing.”
The meeting was overshadowed days later, however, by the guest of honour at the Oval Office on St Patrick’s Day itself. Conor McGregor, the former mixed martial arts fighter seeking to become the president of Ireland, swaggered into the White House press room, where he accused the Irish government of overseeing an “illegal immigration racket”.
Government ministers pared back their statements on Israel ahead of the Oval Office meeting, according to one source, only for the cabinet to press ahead with the Occupied Territories Bill once the hour-long sit-down with Trump had occurred.
Why, then, risk a clash with Ireland’s largest trading partner at a moment of acute economic tension?
One explanation is domestic politics. “The Gaza situation has struck Irish consciousness,” says Brendan Scannell, Ireland’s ambassador to Israel between 1996 and 2001. “There’s a groundswell of people who see what’s happening as reprehensible. You see images of Gaza every night on our news, and politicians need to act and show leadership. It’s not going to achieve an awful lot.”
Others argue that the government is fuelling the public mood. Alan Shatter, the former Irish defence and justice minister and board member of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations, accuses ministers of “further inciting emotive reactions” through their anti-Israel rhetoric, including in social media posts.
Public opinion appears to be shifting. A recent Irish Times/Ipsos B&A poll found only 20 per cent of voters wanted the bill passed quickly; 38 per cent said the consequences should be examined first. When the issue was last polled, in April, a small majority said the bill should be introduced as soon as possible.
The Trump administration has so far refrained from mentioning the bill directly in public.
“There’s no agenda against Ireland,” says a source in the State Department. “But given Israel is in many respects America’s closest ally, it would be strange if the US did not respond robustly against a spurious boycott.”
Another source close to the administration describes the bill as a “Maga win-win” as pro-Israel hawks oppose it, while isolationists resent US companies shifting jobs to Ireland.
The timing is especially risky. Washington sees Dublin as the “front line” of efforts to impose European censorship laws on US social media platforms. The State Department has twice sent teams to Dublin, where several social media giants have large bases, warning of repercussions if Ireland fines or censors American firms. The administration has indicated that those repercussions could include “additional tariffs” and even travel bans on key officials.
A banner showing Ireland’s support for Palestine is displayed over the Ha’penny Bridge in Dublin in 2024 - Eman Mohammed/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
One well-placed source says it would be no “small thing” for the US to impose travel bans on senior Irish officials over the issue, as the source believes Trump’s administration is now considering doing.
“This is a totally new departure,” says the source.
In response to Trump’s threats, Barry Andrews, an Irish MEP who chairs the EU Development Committee, has suggested Europe should avail of its “big bazooka” anti-coercion laws to effectively issue counter sanctions against the US.
Merely the mention of sanctions would have been unthinkable two years ago. Now, Ireland’s most important relationship is straining in ways not seen in living memory, a remarkable fall from the heights of Biden’s green-tinted diplomacy.
“Joe Biden was deeply proud of his Irish heritage,” says Daniel Mulhall, Ireland’s ambassador to the US from 2017 to 2022. “Donald Trump does not have ancestral ties, but he has a positive attitude based on his experience when he bought his golf club at Doonbeg [in County Clare].”
When Trump was inaugurated in 2025, Simon Harris congratulated him on his “magnificent golf links in Doonbeg”, possibly to smooth over previous insults.
But in the diplomatic minefield now opening between Dublin and Washington, golf may not be enough to save par.
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