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In March, a Minister’s place is still in the airport lounge, ready to depart

Ireland’s Global Greening is over, but the Great Global Scattering of Ministers is only warming up

Joe Biden presents Leo Varadkar with shamrock last year at the White House. Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP

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Laura Slattery
Tue Mar 12 2024 - 06:00

You have to hand it to this Government – its referendum timing was impeccable. Sure, marrying a Yes-Yes result to the platitude-strewn aftermath of International Women’s Day was the aim, but a No-No defeat landing within smelling distance of March 17th has one clear upside: every single glum ministerial face can now scarper abroad.

Seat belts on, tray tables up, domestic humiliations forgotten. It is now completely legitimate promotion-of-Ireland business to disappear somewhere absolutely no one will have heard of Aontú.

By the time Cabinet members disembark at their St Patrick’s Day destinations, the blows of the “double wallop” inflicted by the electorate will have been replaced by Kensington Palace-style beams, no Photoshop required.

Roderic O’Gorman, Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, is off to Japan, for instance, which puts a helpful 9,500km between himself and the detritus of campaign failure, although unlike his Coalition colleagues he should probably refrain from using Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer triumph at the Oscars as small-talk fallback.

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Micheál Martin is bound for Canada, where the Tánaiste definitely won’t be making an unexpected confession, flogging cryptocurrency schemes or defending a (non-existent) legal action from Bank of Ireland – all claims made in a spate of fake, tiresome online ads, most recently spotted on X, that use his name and image.

Minister for Media Catherine Martin’s itinerary, meanwhile, is listed as Nashville, Tennessee and Austin, Texas, suggesting enough flight time to catch up on any RTÉ documentation she might have missed of late.

Other representatives of the State will be venturing overseas in the name of Ireland’s most celebrated snake-banisher – some 35 others, according to the Department of Foreign Affairs – with the March travel extravaganza now a fully embedded chunk of the political calendar.

One element of official St Patrick’s Day activity has been consigned to history, however, with Tourism Ireland confirming that it will no longer operate the Global Greening campaign that saw landmarks around the world illuminated in Kermit-esque shades of our national colour.

Individual embassies may still arrange these “greenings”, but there will be no co-ordinated push. Indeed, there hasn’t been one since 2021, the second of two pandemic years in which the Global Greening came into its own as a Covid-safe way to remind people of Ireland’s existence.

After 13 years of proliferating greenery, the campaign was suspended at the eleventh hour in 2022 shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with Irish embassies invited to encourage participating landmarks to shine in blue and yellow instead. Then, in 2023, Europe’s war-triggered energy crisis did for it.

The genius of the Global Greening lay in its simplicity. As a spectacle, it could be repeated from year to year and scaled up, seemingly without controversy. True, the phenomenon said more about the participating countries than Ireland, about which it said nothing much at all, but a touch of showy vapidity has never stopped anyone on social media and that’s where the campaign really flew.

Year in, year out, the catalogue of greened-up tourist hotspots could be relied upon to rack up “earned media”, aka free publicity. But even solid marketing campaigns run their course eventually. That this one has been discontinued in an era when the most anodyne of symbols and gestures are subject to intense scrutiny and liable to be contested – often for good reason – doesn’t feel entirely coincidental.

Ireland’s more nuanced projection of itself through diplomatic channels continues, naturally, and though you suspect that effortlessly likeable Murphy – as newly crowned “short king” of Hollywood – would be second only to Taylor Swift on many parade organisers’ ideal guest lists, sometimes you just have to make do with a dance troupe and a semi-anonymous Minister of State.

The Government has somewhat defensively described St Patrick’s Day as an “unparalleled opportunity to promote Ireland as a great place to visit, work, study, trade with, and invest in”. This does slightly smack of Irish exceptionalism while simultaneously glossing over pragmatic matters like where those workers and students would possibly find somewhere affordable to live.

But the Great Global Scattering of Ministers has real, tangible benefits for the State that go well beyond lurid lighting initiatives and mossy clouds of shamrocks on lapels.

Not exactly dispelling the notion that the State’s reputation is at something of a crossroads, the Department of Foreign Affairs says the theme for this year’s St Patrick’s Day is Ireland’s Future in the World and that this will include a focus on young Irish people and the diaspora, their perspectives and Ireland’s place in the “world of the future”.

Apparently, this will “highlight the impact and achievements of young Irish and diaspora leaders across the fields of innovation, creativity, community development, business and academia”, which sounds lovely and commendable.

But that’s not all. Ministers will also “emphasise Ireland’s commitment to international peace and security and the rules-based multilateral system, especially at this time of conflict and turbulence”.

Certainly, it does seem important that Leo Varadkar can use his White House meeting with Joe Biden this Friday to raise Irish concerns about Israel’s actions in crisis-stricken Gaza and reiterate the State’s call for an immediate ceasefire.

[ Mr Varadkar goes to Washington: Is the Taoiseach’s St Patrick’s Day trip to the US really worth it? ]

The Taoiseach’s stated intention to do so is, in itself, a more meaningful intervention than the alternative, which would be to agree with those seeking a boycott of the US over its allyship with Israel and just stay at home, saying those exact same things from this side of the Atlantic only with fewer international news outlets there to capture the moment.

This is an age of frequent backlash to anything perceived as “wishy-washy”. Any chance for the State’s representatives to nail Irish colours to the mast, rather than just standing back and basking in temporary illuminations, should be welcomed. That doesn’t mean throwing diplomacy in the bin. These are complicated times – but, in March, a Minister’s place is still in the airport lounge, waiting to depart.

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