It is hard to overstate the implications for Ireland and the world of Donald Trump’s tariff announcement, made at a characteristically bizarre event in the White House rose garden on Wednesday. The immediate impact was felt on Wall Street, where $6 trillion was wiped off the value of shares in three days with more losses feared when the markets open on Monday.
A US recession is just one of the threats posed by Trump’s tariffs to Ireland’s business model, which Cliff Taylor argues is in need of a compete rethink. If the foreign direct investment that has been such an important source of jobs and revenue is under long term threat, Ireland will have to devise a new economic model and work out the steps needed to get there.
“While you can come up with a range of scenarios, there will be no going back to the way things were. April 2nd was a turning point,” Cliff writes.
The Government will soon have to make other decisions, including how much support to offer to sectors most directly impacted by the tariffs. As we reported on Saturday, the Coalition is reluctant to offer relief on the scale of payments issued during the coronavirus pandemic.
As Pat Leahy notes, the days of giveaway budgets may be over and the greatest political threat to the Government lies in how the public will perceive the belt-tightening that may be required.
“If the Coalition finds itself in a position where austerity becomes unavoidable, it will almost certainly be destroyed,” he writes.
China has already hit back at Trump with a 34 per cent tariff on imports from the US and the European Union is considering a similarly robust response. Ireland is among the member-states urging a more emollient approach but as Jack Power reports from Brussels, we can expect a less sympathetic hearing than during the Brexit negotiations.
Trump’s tariff policy is part of a broader reordering of America’s foreign policy priorities that is reshaping relationships with allies and adversaries alike.
As Sally Hayden reports from Syria, the carte blanche Trump has given to Binyamin Netanyahu has seen Israel violate the borders of more of its neighbours. And as Ukrainian army officer Yulia Mykytenko writes from the frontline of the war with Russia, Trump’s warmth towards Vladimir Putin and his predatory minerals deal with Volodymyr Zelenskiy have left many of her compatriots on the edge of despair.
“I tell myself that the Trump administration will not last forever. Trump cannot destroy everything the US has built up over centuries,” she writes.
Ruadhán Mac Cormaic
Editor
Five key reads
- State-run asylums were Ireland’s ‘largest form of institutional confinement’ but they have never been subjected to a statutory inquiry into the treatment of their patients. Here Kitty Holland takes an in-depth look at the story of Ireland’s psychiatric hospitals.
- Who would buy a gangland house that was seized by the Criminal Assets Bureau, Conor Lally asks.
- In the wake of Michael Lowry’s two-fingered salute, columnist Diarmaid Ferriter offers a history of Ireland in 25 Dáil insults - underlining that some things were actually better in the old days.
- With the football championship beginning this weekend, our columnists Darragh Ó Sé, Dean Rock and Conor McManus look ahead to the summer. As you’d expect, the dramatic rule changes dominate their conversation.
- Why do only half of Irish fathers take paternity leave, Emmet Malone asks.
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