The different rhetoric deployed by Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Tánaiste Simon Harris this week was hard to miss as Europe wrestled with another barrage of threats and criticism from Donald Trump’s White House.
On Wednesday, the Fine Gael leader didn’t hold back with Pat Kenny on Newstalk. It was, he said, an “extraordinarily dangerous time”, saying that if the United States went ahead with its tariff threats in furtherance of a goal of controlling Greenland, a Rubicon would have been crossed.
What’s more, Harris narrowed his critique beyond the policy or the US government, locating the problem squarely in the Oval Office. Turning one of Trump’s favourite phrases back on him, Harris said Trump “doesn’t hold all the cards” and that Europe shouldn’t respond to “his vulgarity or bombast”, adding of his behaviour that “if you saw it from your children you’d tell them to stop”. On Friday, he said it would be “a brave person to try and predict the president of the United States’s mind in relation to this”.
Meanwhile, Martin – who will be in that same Oval Office in a few short weeks for St Patrick’s Day formalities – has been more cautious. In Brussels, he said he would have concerns about Trump’s board of peace plan, but moderated that by saying it could still be a vehicle to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Harris, by contrast, all but dismissed the idea of joining an organisation that he characterised as potentially undermining the United Nations, saying in the Dáil he could see no scenario in which the Republic would participate.
READ MORE
Has the EU learned that a tougher line might work with Donald Trump?
So, is there a meaningful gap between Taoiseach and Tánaiste? Assessing this is not helped by a certain wooliness about what exactly is meant by a board of peace. Such a concept was endorsed by the UN Security Council last November: a transitional administration to set the framework and co-ordinate funding for the redevelopment of Gaza. Trump seems to have a more expansive and typically nebulous idea in mind – one which focuses on him personally and which appears to involve the transfer of political loyalty and taxpayer cash to his dominion.
So the Taoiseach – who also expressed concern about Trump’s idea, albeit cautiously – may be expressing a broad diplomatic openness to the concept outlined by the security council, while the Tánaiste more squarely criticises what seems to be coalescing around Trump.
It is also the case that heads of government, given their central role in communicating foreign policy, will tend to be more guarded in their public comments. “The president of the USA makes an offer, you don’t just refuse it straight away,” a Fianna Fáil Minister said. It is further the case that the conclusions for the EU Council on Thursday, which Martin attended, referenced “serious doubts about a number of elements in the charter of the board of peace”, referencing its scope, governance and compatibility with the UN charter.
These are not necessarily divergent views nor indicative of a split within the Government, but they are clear evidence of stylistic differences and contrasting political instincts. Or, as one Fine Gaeler put it, Martin had probably said the same thing but “in more boring language”.
Sources in both parties said any suggestion of a schism was overblown. Martin is by nature more cautious – he was guarded on the threat of using the EU’s “big bazooka” as trade tensions escalated, and talked down the prospect of the EU not honouring the Turnberry deal on tariffs, which was agreed last year. Harris’s first instinct is to communicate. More bluntly, one Fianna Fáil Minister assesses, he “would throw any of us under the bus for a headline”.
