World of Politics with Harry McGee

There was a time when the Irish economy wasn’t performing quite so spectacularly that column writers liked to do a home-grown version of the cascading effect of a butterfly fluttering its wings in some corners of the world.

It was always a variation on the notion that, when America sneezes, Ireland catches the flu/double pneumonia.

It’s still kind of true, although I have not heard anyone use the term in quite some time.

The recent beating of the war drums by Donald Trump reminds us how vital – and potentially fragile – our relationship with the United States has been. We export over €70 billion worth of goods to the US each year, most of it medicines and chemicals.

We have benefitted hugely too from US multinationals posting profits in Ireland. Not only have we got the Apple tax windfall, we are also getting that bonus every year thanks to corporation tax — a secular version of Manna from Heaven.

There are big economic risks but there are others too — security risks, political risks, and risks for human rights, for our democratic systems, and for humanity.

Here are some of those we now face right now.

Gaza

It’s like District 11 in the Hunger Games — only worse. Israel began another brutal and callous wave of attacks last week. It wants to eliminate Hamas, it says. But it also wants to eliminate all of Palestine, its lands, its people, its children.

It kills them. It starves them. It pens them in. It treats them like cattle. So indifferent to the tens of thousands of lives it takes, to the hundreds of thousands injured, and maimed; to all those children.

If it were any other country perpetrating such outrages and genocide, there would be horror. But Israel gets a free pass from the US, and not a whisper of criticism from the UK or from Germany.

This is scorched earth ethnic cleansing, and it is posing a huge threat to democracy, to the rule of law, to human rights, to right-based values — and it poses a huge risk to us all.

Pictured: A still from a new documentary, the Phoenix of Gaza, which will be screened in the Mick Lally Theatre, Galway, next Thursday, April 3, at 8pm, followed by post-show discussion live in-person with the director Yousef Alhelou.