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TAOISEACH MICHEÁL MARTIN has claimed that world leaders can get labelled as right-wing or far-right “very quickly”, and warned that people should not “buy into the label” or the stereotyping of people.
Martin made the remarks while during a ‘fireside chat’ hosted by US Chamber of Commerce president Suzanne Clark in Washington DC, where he once again boasted about the strong economic ties between the US and Ireland.
Characterizing the relationship as a “shared value system and genuine belief in the importance of the entrepreneurial spirit”, Martin said the Irish-US trade relationship is “increasingly a two-way street”.
“We have up to 900 U.S. companies in Ireland. U.S. companies contribute 200,000 jobs, and we’ve got about 770 Irish companies in the States creating over 150,000 jobs,” Martin told the gathering of business leaders.
Many of the Taoiseach’s remarks echoed the comments he made during his meeting with Trump in the Oval Office yesterday, where he also highlighted that foreign investment is “a two-way street” between the US and Ireland.
Asked how the US business community can adapt to the changing politics in the EU, Martin told the Chamber of Commerce that “one has to be careful of overreacting”.
“People get labeled very quickly – leaders get labeled as being far right or too right. I always take people as I meet them and engage with them,” Martin said.
Singling out Belgium, where right-leaning parties dominated in elections last June, Martin claimed that a number of EU nations are “looking at shift in terms of greater disposition towards less regulation and more innovation”.
He said that a lot of people on the right “got alienated by being labeled too quickly”, adding that there wasn’t “space created to allow people to articulate their position or their views on something” without the fear of getting shut down.
“Social media has created that idea of the polarizing sound, so you’re either at one camp or you’re in another.
“That’s the bit that’s missing at the moment in public discourse – the continuum of nuance, the complexity, things are not simple. There’s always much more gray in life, in my view, and that’s missing the public debate at the moment,” Martin said.
Martin was vocally critical of EU overregulation during the discussion, where he said that the “winds of change” were blowing towards innovation and “reduction of regulation”.
“There’s a move within the European Union now to simplify regulation. I think the penny has dropped. The message has got home.”
Martin said that Ireland was committed to working with the D9+ group of countries (Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Slovenia and the Czech Republic) to advocate for the simplification of regulations in the EU.
“It’s not been satisfactory. We in Ireland understand that, because a lot of the companies are located in Ireland.”
He said that there was “growing recognition” across Europe for the need for a reduction in regulations, but added: “That has to be matched by action and real concrete development.”
The Taoiseach also told the commerce conference that it is undeniable that European defence spending will increase.
He said it is “very clear” that Ireland will “have to play its role” in European security, while taking its traditional military neutrality into account.
“I can predict that the next multi-financial framework, which is the European Union budget, will involve a significant increase in European Union spending on defence capability, which will be focused on increasing opportunities and capacities from member states to increase their expenditure.”
Martin explained that Ireland will become a “net contributor” to defence capability across Europe through a collective debt instrument.
He added: “But Ireland in itself will have to increase, and we are doubling our defence – coming from a very low base – defence expenditure.
“But again, we have to do it in a targeted way. Cyber security, sub-sea cables, maritime security – those are probably the most immediate vulnerabilities.”
Additional reporting by PA and Jane Matthews in Washington DC
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He’s done it many times..
@Sickof thisshit: this slither is an absolute hypocrite . How on earth did this snake became taoiseach again is beyond belief.
Mícheál tossing the Ireland is Full crowd a bone here, I see
@Áine F: Dáithí Ó Sé called. He wants that extra fada on the i back.
@Áine F: Ireland is full.
@Dolly Mounted – Norside Drag Queen: Mícheál is how the name is commonly spelt as Gaeilge. I’m sure he won’t lose any sleep because I spelled it that way.
@President Musk: Well it’s definitely not full of housing, that’s for sure.
@Áine F: Sin mícheart. Go look up how he spells his name on any official content in English ot Gaeilge.
@Dolly Mounted – Norside Drag Queen: Ní mo locht atá ann go litríonn sé a ainm mícheart.
@Áine F: How does your opinion matter? You don’t know the difference between men and women…
@President Musk: …Full of online trolls.
You make one Nazi salute and suddenly you’re far right. Threaten to take over Canada, Greenland, Panama and Palestine and people come with the labels. Good job somebody is defending those guys.
@Evan Keane: God forbid someone point their arm diagonally!
@Evan Keane: there’s a difference between playing hard ball and actually invading a country. Big f##ks small
They have been throwing around the words far-right for a few years now. Ironic
@common sense: It’s a made up ditch for the far left to hide behind.
@common sense: Oireland – if you don’t write with your left hand you must be ‘far-right’. FFS
@common sense: Exactly
Mickey should quit while he’s ahead. Close to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Shutty.
@Dolly Mounted – Norside Drag Queen: Serious risk that Mehole’s head will be too big to fit through the door of the plane home
@Brian O’ Leary: worse than that Senator Martin “Triple Locked” Conway for not knowing the word “enough”. He’ll blow it.
@Dolly Mounted – Norside Drag Queen: don’t think you are qualified to be talking about snatch’s
@Ciaran: oooooh saucy, big boy! DM me.
The definition of far-right is long established in politics, religious fundamentalism, anti-immigrant, homophobic, racist, ultra-nationalist etc. Which leaders is Martin saying have been incorrectly labelled?
@Jacintha Dumbrell: Yes yes. The world is full of them! Check under your bed tonight, they’re everywhere! A friend of mine, that I trusted, waved at me with his hand outstretched diagonally. Omg I thought. Not another one!
@Fran Ken: you’re mixing with the wrong people, if you’re suspicious of your friends
Far-right… up their own ar**s!
@Daniel Skelton: & whoosh… article went miles over the ol’ noggin
@Chutes Idiot: look at Daniel pic and author,,,snap.
@J B: right, I see the resemblance
@J B: Ye always let yourself down, don’t you @ J B. Your childish comments are quite frankly embarrassing.
Didn’t the same pri ck, along with the rest of the FFG/g cabal, call anybody in Ireland who disagreed with them far right?. What an arrogant two-faced clo wn.
@Gerry Lamont: doubt he called Mary Lou far right and she calls him out daily
It’s easy for Micheal Martin to say that from the comfort of his position because there are no proper free-market right-wing parties in Ireland at the moment for voters to pick. You get to choose from either the centre-left parties of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, the left-wing parties of Sinn Fein, Labour and the Social Democrats or the far-left Marxist PBP. If a well-organised and well-funded anti-Keynesian and anti-Socialist party popped up Ireland and started to poll well, you can bet your bottom dollar that Martin would immediately change his tune and attack them as far-right, radical, extremist and whatever other lines he could pull out from the recycled progressive playbook. It’s a damn shame that Ireland is the only country in Europe that doesn’t offer voters that option.
@William Jennings: There were a few racist parties you could have voted for at the last General Election, unfortunately for you the Irish people rejected the lot of them. Maybe move to Hungary or the US and stop crying?
@Jacintha Dumbrell: Exactly, they were racist parties. The Irish Freedom Party and The National Party are full of disgusting xenophobic, protectionist, anti-immigration, antisemitic, economically illiterate debasers. I have no interest in ever voting for those parties because they would bankrupt this country both fiscally and morally. This is precisely the problem that I’m talking about. Everyone on the right is lumped into one big monolithic category which is totally incorrect. I want a party that will shrink the government, abolish income tax, support free trade, support legal immigration while clamping down on those that break immigration laws, support constitutional gun rights, privatise the HSE, abolish zoning laws and end rent control. Classical free-market right-wing policies.
@William Jennings: of course you know where any party espousing your views will end up. And god help the unfortunates who have to live in the world it would create. Although in fairness they could cruise the ruins with the weapon of their choice (maybe knock off a few illegals in the process…added benefit, if they were poor shots the victims would have no hospital treatment available to them)
@Alan: Are you drunk or something? Your response is pretty incoherent and full of nonsense. What’s so shocking about what I said? Everywhere proper free-market policies have been tried, they work. Look at Switzerland, Singapore, America, South Korea, Japan and all the other countries that have implemented policies that choose freedom over government. They have prospered and are the richest countries in the world as a result. Just because the HSE is abolished, that doesn’t suddenly mean healthcare no longer exists. It simply means that hospitals would compete with each other for consumers and patients would directly pay hospitals rather than through their tax money by choosing from menu-style health plans that suits their income. Gun rights allow people to protect themselves from criminals.
@William Jennings: lol. Away with your nonsense lad
@Alan: Cry more Alan. You’ve offered no coherent rebuttal to the points I made. Is that because you know I’m right?
Why aren’t Muslims ever labelled far right? They hate people who are homosexual.they consider women inferior to men.They don’t support women in the workplace.They look down on infidels.They think they are better than everyone else.
What could be more far right???
@Johnny King: and here we are importing them into Ireland in bucket loads with zero checks taking over communities completely never integration into society and taking every benefit under the sun, this has to be stopped before Ireland is completely destroyed
Great idea by UK to dismantle the NHS its a drain on the government and over employed, we should look at this,for instance the children’s hospital seems to have been forgotten about, and undoubtedly over paid for.
@Phillip Smyth: Very true, look how well mass deregulation is going over in the US! … Oh, wait-
@Phillip Smyth: you’re not very bright.
@Phillip Smyth: private healthcare is a joke. My eight year old niece needs treatment on her foot, but the doctors at the private clinic her family attend ‘don’t treat children for that, if they’re under twelve’. Previous to the clinic being privately owned, it was a GP office. Quietly became private during covid.
@Dolly Mounted – Norside Drag Queen: on the flip side how do you come to that conclusion (dolly}}
Sadly mass media have created a phantom figment of their brain matter that has no relationship with reality and the real world.
and MM and SH calling us Irish far-right for speaking out against the plantation of unknown people into our communities when services were struggling and now there stretched so far that the elastic band is creaking with marks that’s it’s about to snap
Hamas are extremely far right, yet the far left lumpheads support them lol
The far left are unhinged, very emotionally damaged, insecure and need psychiatric evaluation and then sectioning, if they are to be cured of their disease
@Tired Jim: nailed it
If only it had a hammer, tho .
Are we all ready for the big man united win a team that shamrock rovers would have beaten
@John Kenny: crowd Spurs were playing weren’t up to much either….. but a win is a win as the ol’ saying goes
@John Kenny: yet you’d be the first man on here slating them if them if they lost too, you big fanny.
As MM has done…On many occasions
He’s for the birds
Nothing wrong with the far right. It’s the regressive lefties, woke liberal idiots and their Hirscfeld paymasters that have western societies slowly crumbling.
@Pelagius Asturias: All the predictable ‘left’ words in one sentence there congrats.
Far right for talking absolute s*** like Michael Martin does on a daily basis come back to Ireland and do your job instead of talking porky pies over there
Mehole has a point, sure didn’t his party founder write a letter to Germany lamenting the death of Hitler and he only did that because people kept calling Hitler far-right.
have your say