 Rhaid i chi'n gwybod, a rhaid i'n gweithio am y dyfodol a bod y byddai'n gweithio ar gyfer yr unig ar y Llwg USA ac mae'r preffindydd yn y minell. Rwy'n gweithio am y tîm Llywodraeth Ddannu. Mae'n gweithio ar gyfer y llyfridd. Rydym yn ni'n meddwl i fwy o ddweud o'r llyfridd. Rydym yn ni'n meddwl i ddweud. Ond mae'n gofio ar y llyfridd. Mae'n gwneud ymlaen o'r llyfridd ar y Llwg USA i 1998. ac mae'r Prosesion yn gweithio'r ddechrau. Mae'n dweud y George J. Mitchell Scholarship Programme ac mae'r Oscar Wild Awards. Mae'r Prosesion yn gweithio'r ddechrau ac mae'n ddiddordeb yn gweithio'r ddim yn ddod o'r Prosesion mewn Michael Dukakis ar y tyfnod o Bairic Obama o'r isu Ysgrifennu. Yn gyfwyrdd yma, mae'n gweithio'r shenanigans, ac mae'n gweithio'r styr. Yn gyfawr, mae'n gweithio'r ddod o'r hyn. As usual, to the regulars here, you'll know the speaking part that Trina will be giving is being filmed. The questions and answers section will not be. The questions and answers will be done under chat and house rules. So just for clarity, because sometimes people mix that up, it means what you say can be reported, but not attributed to whoever has said it. So perhaps we give a welcome to Trina please and starter up on the top. Thank you. Thanks for having me here today. I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you, Sarah, for that. I said the short of the intro of the battery for me. I was asked to speak for about 20 to 25 minutes about the US Ireland relationship, a lot of which is covered in the book and about some very specific topics, so I'm going to do this. If you're looking from behind and you think that looks a bit ominous, it's only because I've been using a really big font. When I started working for Senator Kennedy, I would have to print out his speeches. I was only in my 20s. I thought, what is with this big type print? Now that I'm getting a little older, I'm a little more appreciative of the need for the blowing up the speeches. I've been involved, as was said, in the relationship for over 30 years, 10 of the years as Senator Kennedy's foreign policy adviser, and for the last 20 years as the founder of the US Ireland alliance. I wrote my book shenanigans because I've been trying for the past 20 years to really get to the bottom of a question that I've had since I created it, and that is, is there sufficient interest in the relationship for future generations? Because if there is interest, it will take serious strategy and resources that I've yet to see really apply to the relationship. Some critical mass is necessary, but it's not sufficient. I feel like the relationship needs shared vision and resources are really required if it's not to continue into decline. I've long been concerned about the complacency about the relationship. This has not been helped by Brexit, which understandably has taken up a lot of the bandwidth, but my concern about the relationship actually predated Brexit. I recently heard Patrick Honohan talk about the financial crisis in 2008, and he noted that Ireland let things get much worse before they did anything. He said, there seems to be a habit of pretending that everything is fine until it's too late. If you're one of the canaries in the coal mine, which I feel that I am, warning about these things, and I think there's often a bit of annoyance that you haven't simply worn the green jersey. You can read more about that in the book. I worked for Senator Kennedy until 1987 when the Good Friday Agreement was achieved from 87 to 98, and that was a pivotal time in Ireland's history, and it marked a turning point in the relationship. It was the time of both the peace process and the Celtic Tiger. The success of the Good Friday Agreement in Ireland becoming a wealthy country coupled with changing demographics in the United States has meant a decline in the interest in the relationship. Some of that's for good reasons, for positive reasons, and it was inevitable, but that also makes it all the more important that we put in a serious effort to build the ties for future generations. For years, I have to say, Irish politicians have come to America with a sort of the same laundry list, which was always, can you help sort Northern Ireland? We give us money for the international fund for Ireland, which was related to Northern Ireland, and we sort the Irish who are illegally in the US, and so much has changed over the past 25 years, and yet it's almost the same exact ask 25 years later as it was when I was on the hill. So I'm going to touch briefly on a variety of these issues that I think reflect the decline in the relationship, and I'm going to start with Irish Americans and the demographics and what I call the non-existent Irish American vote. When I worked for Senator Kennedy, the number of Americans who checked Irish as their ancestry on the census box was 44 million people. The current census, the last one done, which nearly 10 years ago now, was 36 million people. It'll be interesting to see how the numbers change in the 2020 census, but as the generations of Irish who came to America keeps declining, it's kind of understandable why fewer Americans are checking that box. There's less of the association that maybe their parent had and their grandparent had who are identifying as Irish. The connection to Ireland is actually greater with older generations. I saw at first hand when I was with Senator Kennedy and others in his generation, but right now in the United States, millennials outnumber baby boomers and they are just the interest at that level is just not there. There is no monolithic Irish America and therefore there is no Irish vote every time I hear that phrase and I heard it last night on the news, it makes me cringe. Irish Americans are the Republicans, they're Democrats. I mean look at the number of Irish surnames right now that surround Donald Trump. They don't vote as Irish Americans. I spent 24-7 working on US-Ireland relationships and it would never occur to me to vote for the president on the basis of his take on Ireland. That would be like suggesting would you vote for your TD on the basis of how he or she feels about America. That would not be a top, for me it's actually who they're going to put on the Supreme Court, which would drive my decision about who I would vote for. Irish Americans of which I am just one are basically white Americans. There are some that aren't but for the most part white and in the US you are black, white or Latino. Nobody cares that you're Irish American and part Italian American and in fact no one even tracks voting on the basis of ethnicity in the US except for Latino. So if somebody ever tells you the Irish voted this way or that way, ask them for the polls, ask them for the evidence of that because we simply don't count the votes on that basis. What some try to claim is the Irish American vote is often the Catholic vote, but the Catholic vote doesn't actually equate with an Irish vote and that's because for starters more than half of Irish America is Protestant. So when you just take the Catholic vote and say that's how the Irish vote, you've left out half of Irish America. And then there's the fact that the Irish are just one piece of the Catholic vote. The majority now is made up by the Latinos but the Americans who are actually Polish and French, you name it, are also part of the Catholic American vote. So in fact the Latinos now make up the largest part of it. Nor can you assume that all Irish American Catholics vote on the same issues. For some it's death penalty, it's the abortion issue. So the Catholic vote actually swings between parties. So I would argue that it's actually inaccurate and misleading to suggest that the Catholic vote is somehow synonymous with an Irish vote. Demographics and political power in the United States have been rapidly changing. In 2011, Rahm Emanuel became the first Jewish mayor of Chicago which had long been controlled by the daily family. In fact just recently Chicago just voted in anew. I think she's African American gay mayor of Chicago for the first time. She was just elected when Thomas Menino became the mayor of Boston in 1993. He was the first non-Irish mayor in 60 years. Joe Crowley as a lot of you may know in New York lost to what we call our AOC. I can't even remember a real name anymore. And that was long thought to be, oh this is an Irish stronghold and Joe Crowley would keep winning. He was quite senior in the house to lose his job. Ted Kennedy, Tip O'Neill, Daniel Patrick Moynihan are all no longer with us. And the members of Congress who have some Irish ancestry don't really identify with it to the extent the previous generations did in the numbers that they did. There's certainly always a couple of exceptions to that rule. But by and large it's nothing like it once was. And that means that Irish American influence has been greatly exaggerated. An example that I give in the book was in 2014 that were St Patrick's Day parades in New York and Boston. Again thought to be very Irish places. And the two mayors of those cities refused to march because the LGBT community was not allowed to march in the parades at that time. They weren't interested or worried about are we going to offend the Irish by not being in this parade. They were concerned about the flack they would get from the LGBTQ community. So again I think that just shows you even Guinness pulled its sponsorship. So I would also say as with many ethnic groups there's the majority and then there's those who are loud. And it's easy to confuse the two. I would suggest that Ireland needs to help create the Irish America that it wants. Some of you may have seen. I was recently in a bit of back and forth with the t-shirt about male only organizations. I wrote to the t-shirt and suggested that they should not send diplomats to organizations that are male only organizations. And unfortunately he doesn't seem to have a problem with them. I find it really hard to get my head around. I'm not interested in being part of an Irish America that excludes people unless they're white or Catholic or male or straight. And I don't know anybody who is. And when that's the image and when a t-shirt doesn't take issue with that it makes it very hard for people like me who are trying to interest that next generation, the millennials in Ireland when they see that sort of message. Some Irish have gone along with the fiction of Irish American influence because it's one of your prominent journalists told me it's what we want to believe about ourselves. But the concern for me is that these misrepresentations result if everybody thinks I'll find the Americans love us, the relationship is great it results in a complacency about the real work that we really have to do if we are going to secure the relationship for future generations. Now a little about what has been called the de-prioritization of Europe U.S. attention to both Europe and Ireland has been in decline and having worked for Ted Kennedy and having been an advisor to the Obama campaign in 2008 you can guess what my personal political leanings are the U.S. Ireland alliance is totally non-partisan but you can tell I guess what I have but I would be remiss if I didn't note that that de-prioritization of Europe began with the Obama administration and when Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State in 2011 she wrote a lengthy piece for foreign policy magazine entitled America's Pacific Century and the title says it all she wrote one of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will be to lock in a substantially increased investment in the Asia Pacific region and while noting that our post World War II commitment to building a comprehensive and lasting transatlantic network of institutions and relationships has paid off many times over the time had come she wrote for the United States to make similar investments as a Pacific power. President Obama maintained his Asia focus throughout his presidency in the Atlantic in April 2017 he was interviewed by Jeffrey Goldberg who wrote about Obama he said he has fixated on turning America's attention to Asia and Europe about which he is unromantic is a source of global stability that requires to his occasional annoyance American handholding personally I never understood why pivoting to Asia meant we had to have any kind of a decline in the relationship with Europe and our commitment to Europe these things I don't find to be in any way mutually exclusive it should go without saying that Trump's view of Europe has just moved the needle from disregard to disdain so I think that's no better a bit about immigration I became persona non grata in some quarters here because of an op-ed I wrote in the Irish Times in 2007 in which I said that there would not be a special deal for just the Irish who were illegally in the US I was simply being honest and some of you may know I've been attacked for that ever since I support legal immigration a path to citizenship I would have been in agreement at the time with the sort of Kennedy McCain efforts on immigration front and as much as I love Ireland and as much as I want increased immigration by the way the United States our own demographics mean we need more immigration it's like when Donald Trump said the country's full it's not full we need more people and I want more Irish but it would be wrong and I still maintain what I felt then it would be wrong for the US government to usher to the front of the line a subset of those who are illegally in the US because they're white and they speak English American politicians are also politically they are not going to irritate millions of Latino voters for a couple of thousand Irish in 2014 Speaker Pelosi referenced racism as a reason why Republicans were not dealing with immigration in a Sunday business post piece by Niles Stannage he quoted Pelosi as saying I think race has something to do with the fact that they're not bringing up an immigration bill I've heard them say to the Irish if this were just you it would be easy I would love to have more Irish come to the US but I don't think that divide and conquer is the right strategy and it's not a good thing for Ireland's long term relationship with the United States once again when I'm trying to interest the next generation in this relationship anything that's massive racism doesn't help that effort and I personally believe that Irish government ministers have spent too much limited political capital on this issue in the US while a post September 11th tightening on immigration was a real thing and it did make things more difficult as Ireland became wealthy fewer Irish chose to move to the US so these are interesting numbers while more than 17,000 Irish immigrated to the US in 1994 alone just before the economy was beginning to take off here the number of Irish immigrants in any given year since 1996 has never exceeded 1600 people so the decline actually predated September 11th this decrease in immigration is of concern in that it causes a reduction of the number of people who can educate Americans about contemporary Ireland but relying on immigration to sustain the ties is futile and we should not hope for economic disaster in Ireland as a way to sustain the relationship John DC has been trying as many of you know to get the unused Australian E3 visas for the Irish that failed at the end of the last year because a Republican Senator prevented passage I suspect that will be tried again in this Congress all I can say to DC is fair play he was very close to having it happen he's making an effort on that front I've been asked about my views on the E3s for the Irish and I have to say I don't oppose them they're unused visas so it's not like putting anybody at the front of the line in a sense they're unused visas but I'm not sure to be honest if I were Ireland that I would be excited about the E3s I'm not even sure how much demand there would be for them because the E3s are for skilled workers university degrees we'd be happy to get your computer programmers but I'm not sure why you would want to encourage what would feel like a brain drain to the US because the E3s will not help those who are illegally in the US they're two very different issues I still believe that the Irish who are illegally in the US will only be sorted as part of a comprehensive plan and if as I said by some unlikely chance some sort of special deal ever you know I think it could be a bigger problem for Ireland down the road in years when a dominant constituency will not likely forget that the Irish were for themselves alone on special envoys former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright wrote in one of her books about the positive role Senator Mitchell played as President Clinton's special envoy to Northern Ireland but she also noted such tools can be overused and should only be employed when the challenge is too much for conventional diplomacy or if only a small push is needed to get an important job done when Obama was running for president I was the campaign's adviser on Irish issues and I wrote in his statement that as president I had him say he would consult with the Taoiseach the British Prime Minister and party leaders in Northern Ireland to decide if a special US envoy for Northern Ireland continues to be necessary that was hardly earth shattering stuff I'm going to consult with everybody involved but there was an outcry from a small number of people again the loud people because Obama just didn't promise an envoy and in campaigns I find there is a tendency to tell people what they want to hear to get past the campaign and then they'll worry about what they promise later and Dennis McDonough who was Obama's chief of staff and who I worked with on the Irish stuff I remember I was actually on the steps of Paul's house one day waiting because I was to meet them at their home and you were a little bit late and I was standing on the steps and this call came through and it was Dennis and he said I'm being beat up by these people because they want Obama to say there will be a special envoy so I'm just going to say it he wanted me to say yeah sure go ahead and say it and I said you can say that but it's not my advice I still feel like you should wait at that moment in time there was absolutely no need for a special envoy so he promised what anybody wanted to promise and Obama won and Clinton became the Secretary of State and no special envoy was ever appointed so it depends on how you feel about just telling people what they hear once Trump became president those who regularly called for a special envoy were doing so again in September 2017 congressman Richie Neill said he got President Trump to promise him a special envoy it's two years later there's no envoy history shows that the chatter about a special envoy tends to pick up when Irish politicians visit and then it fades away when they go from the United States until recently the Taoiseach had consistently sent the signal and rightly in my opinion that an envoy wasn't needed but on his most recent visit to the U.S. he suggested he's now for an envoy I would be asking toward what end no one ever seems to actually define what this envoy would really do and I'm always confused you know Sinn Fein has always been for an envoy and I'm perplexed as to why Sinn Fein thinks that a representative of President Trump who is a fan of Brexit and borders would somehow help the situation what Senator Mitchell did in the mid 1990s was critical and it was necessary but what's needed now is for Northern Ireland's leaders to simply lead I'm going to say only a brief word about corporate tax issue because I'm not an economist I do find that these shell games about moving all the money around can only be understood by certain people maybe lawyers and economists so the economists can explain better feel free but I do know that it worries me as a citizen I've long been concerned about Ireland's reliance on low corporate tax rate because it's not winning you friends as many here have written I've always thought that if the EU continues to stand with you on Brexit that I'd be surprised if they didn't use that to squeeze you on tax harmonisation maybe there we are behind the scenes Americans who look at the Irish corporate tax rate I've either one or two camps we're either annoyed that we're not getting that revenue or if you're a Republican you just want to bring our tax rate down to match yours and Donald Trump has already succeeded in dropping the US corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% Britain's corporate tax rate is about to fall to 17% and I feel like if we want to race to the bottom we will get there and when less corporate taxes are collected services and programs are what suffer on Brexit I personally feel like a return to the border would be awful on so many levels I was just up there in September and drove from the Cooley Peninsula over to black lines zigzagging back and forth across the border and it is actually amazing how much better it is there now than it was 30 years ago and I think anyone who would jeopardise that should go down in history alongside David Cameron the DUP confounds me now as much as it did in the 90s I feel that a hard border will only increase the likelihood that there would be a border pull sooner rather than later and so I think the DUP's approach is counterintuitive so now that I've made clear my opposition to a border and I have a very strong opposition to a border let me play the devil's advocate on a couple of things when I think about the hype in terms of the US-Ireland relationship I think it applies to this issue as well save for a few exceptions I didn't hear any American politicians talking about Brexit in the border until about the beginning of this year and really mostly around March at the time of that deadline Brendan Boyle, whose father came from the US came to the US from Ireland he's a congressman represents a constituency in Pennsylvania in January he introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives that expressed opposition to a hard border as of now that bill has only 14 cosponsors I thought of 435 I guess members of congress 14 cosponsors that's a really small number for something that I would consider is very non-controversial and I don't think a similar resolution has even been introduced in the senate and just to put that in perspective back in 1994 when it was my job to make sure Jerry Adams got that visa we had 50 members of congress sign the letter in support of a visa for Adams and that was really controversial so 50, 14 to me again these things just show a bit of a decline in the relationship in London when Speaker Pelosi was here in April she said that there would be no chance of a US trade deal with the UK if there is any weakening of the Good Friday Accords and then in the Dolls she added including but not limited to a seamless border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland and my difficulty was that I don't know how weakening and seamless are being defined because the border is not mentioned in the Good Friday Agreement when Congressman Richie Neill was here at the same time he called into question even a US EU trade deal so let me play the cynic and living in Washington for all these years causes you to become cynical trade deals in the best of circumstances take years to negotiate we already trade with Europe we already trade with the UK and Ireland that's not going to stop the Obama administration even abandoned its own attempt at a US EU trade deal Trump's focus is on China Canada, Mexico some members of Congress would want a trade deal with Europe first but President Trump has said just in the last couple days that he wants a trade deal with the UK first I sense that the government here and people who are in the government can correct me I sense that the government here swings between two places and one is that we want to be helpful to Britain vis-a-vis Europe because that benefits us that's important to us but then sometimes I get the sense that they're feeling a bit nervous that the EU would ultimately throw them under the bus and so when I read what Congressman Neill said about an US EU trade deal my immediate assumption was that somebody in the government said it would be helpful if you said something like that it's just the immediate thing that came to my mind because I know the power of business in the United States is you can bet they do not want to interfere with trade in any way and no matter how much some may care about Northern Ireland or the Good Friday Agreement I just don't see how the votes would be there to block a deal I think we should definitely use whatever influence we can to try to be helpful but I think we should be honest about what the limits of that of our ability vis-a-vis Brexit really is as trade goes on with both the US and the UK without trade deals I think the threats about these things would seem to have limited value I created the US Ireland alliance in 1998 with the aim of building the future in a variety of contemporary ways we've been successful, disproportionate to our funding so the real question I have going forward is is there a willingness to contribute to the kind of work that needs to be done I'm going to only say briefly about the sort of couple of things that we do in the alliance then if you want to talk in Q&A about it I'm happy to expand on the George J. Mitchell Scholarship program and somebody mentioned the Irish Times piece this week and I'm happy to expand on that in the Q&A if you want but we had 370 applications this year for 12 spots to send the top American students over here for postgraduate study there's now 230 Mitchell scholars they are great ambassadors for Ireland, they are great PR for Irish universities they are, as I said, turning down that we interview on the same day that we consider Oxford and the majority have been turning down the Rhodes interview to take the Mitchell and that's a huge achievement when you consider Oxford's always in the top 5 of any global rankings and the highest here is Trinity which is I think below 100 in I think the Times rankings so I think the Mitchell Scholarship is one of those important ways to nurture and interest the next generation of Americans in Ireland and not just Irish Americans I mean our Mitchell scholars I feel like if you can get people to Ireland they will love it and we can keep them hooked for life and we found that that's been our experience we also did the Oscar Wilde Awards every year in Los Angeles and that's resulted in many things not least of which is Star Wars being filmed here which means millions of dollars for the Irish economy way into the future I mean just recently I saw a piece here in the Irish Times that 58 million euros was spent in Northern Ireland last year alone on Game of Thrones tourism so given how much bigger Star Wars is you can imagine what that's like we used to do a high school program or I mean a golf tournament I have a lot of ideas for a high school education program but I think our focus really has to be on business and education and culture and that building those ties will translate into political influence when it's needed in 20, 30 years from now and I'll leave you with one sort of final thing the Mitchell Scholarship is a sort of microcosm of an opportunity the most desired scholarship for young American leaders and just I want to just think about some numbers here there's a scholarship program now called the Night Hennessy it was created by Phil Knight who was the founder of Nike and he just gave Stanford $750 million to attract the best graduate students including the Americans to Stanford $750 million Stephen Schwartzman I think was Black Rock he raised $300 million of it was his own to launch his scholarship for study in China he made no secret of the fact that he wants the program to compete with the roads the roads has hundreds of millions of dollars we're the ones who are competing with the roads we're only trying to raise $40 million we've been working on this for 20 years again more evidence of the decline that you can't find that immediate interest for a scholarship that is at the top rung and bringing students here and remember how I said there were 30 million Irish Americans there are less than 6 million American Jews I get that they are much more motivated because they fear for the very existence of the state of Israel but still 36 to 6 APAC just one US Jewish organization has an annual budget an annual budget of 70 million that's just one Jewish organization and we have this much difficulty with the Mitchell so again I just leave you with this question is there enough interest in the relationship can we sustain it for future generations will everybody sort of plow into it what's necessary which first requires that everybody recognize that the relationship is in decline or is it inevitable that it declines and this all just sort of fades away for future generations and maybe I'll stop there and take any questions thank you