The urgency around investing in Ireland’s security is “only growing”, and the importance of this has been made clearer by recent comments from US president Donald Trump about Ukraine, the Minister for Finance has said.
Paschal Donohoe Paschal Donohoe said the Taoiseach will be emphasising that the Government has clear views about “who the aggressor is and the harms that has been done to the people of Ukraine” when he meets Mr Trump next month.
Mr Donohoe also said any reduction in EU-US trade would result in job losses and higher prices across the globe.
Mr Trump called his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskiy a “dictator” who could soon lose his country earlier this week. Relations between the leaders soured after Kyiv was excluded from US-Russia talks on issues including the war in Ukraine.
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Mr Donohoe said the US president’s comments had “consequences”, and that he profoundly disagreed with the analysis Mr Trump had offered of recent events in Europe.
He said it underlined the actions needed to be taken to make Europe and Ireland more secure, and also the steps needed to strengthen the Irish economy and build up Europe in a world that was becoming “more volatile and a lot more uncertain”.
“Whether that is decisions that we make regarding employment here in Ireland, our public finances, and then the obvious decisions that we are already implementing regarding investing in our own security, the urgency of this is only growing,” he told reporters on Thursday.
Mr Donohoe said while the invitation from the White House for the St Patrick’s Day visit had yet to arrive, the Government expected to be in a position to go ahead with the programme of events planned for Washington and across America.
The Fine Gael TD said the Government held a “very different view” on the issues Mr Trump was raising but that it made it all the more important to engage with him.
He said Taoiseach Micheál Martin would be acknowledging the “value of the friendship” Ireland holds with the US, but also that Europe is “a really important player” within the world from a security and an economic point of view.
“I think it will be a very balanced discussion where we will acknowledge the friendship that is there between Ireland and America, but also acknowledge the very clear challenges and difficulties that are there due to what is now unfolding in Ukraine, and due to the challenges that we could face from a tariff point of view and indeed a tax point of view,” he said.
“I expect the message that the Government of Ireland will be giving is these challenges are real, but they are best dealt with from the point of view of negotiation, co-operation and, even in these difficult moments, partnership.
“We want to, through the European Union, negotiate with the United States to avoid the worst, and to try to find agreed and better outcomes versus taking actions that could cause huge challenges to the global economy, to America, to Ireland.”
The Minister said there was billions of euro in trade of goods and services every day between the EU and US, describing it as the “biggest economic relationship of its kind in the world”.
“Any reduction in that trade, anything that could damage it, would result in higher prices, could result in the loss of jobs, could result in tax revenue being lost that we all need to fund public services across the world,” he said.
“That is a real risk that I believe we should all work together to avoid, and it is a particular risk for an open trading economy like we have here in Ireland. We have avoided a scenario developing like that now for many, many years, and I believe in the weeks that await we should continue with our efforts to try to avoid that happening.”
