Ireland in Trump’s Western Hemisphere - do you feel owned yet? |
Does anyone realise that we’ve just been claimed? Last week, after the US seized the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, its state department posted on X an image of a resolute-looking Donald Trump with the slogan “This is OUR Hemisphere”. Just in case we missed the point, OUR was highlighted in lurid blood-red letters. It is worth underlining that this was not a random tweet from an incel in a fetid bedroom – it was an official declaration by a superpower.
At the United Nations, the US ambassador Mike Waltz spelled it out a little more: “we’re not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be used as a base of operation for our nation’s adversaries, and competitors, and rivals of the United States.”
All of Ireland (along with all of Iceland and Portugal) lies within the Western Hemisphere, which is defined as the half of the globe west of the Greenwich prime meridian and east of the 180th meridian. For a long time, kids in Irish schools were taught that they should take considerable pride in being “born in the same hemisphere as the United States”.
As it happens, there is also a geological basis to this designation. The northwest of Ireland is formed by the North American Plate. About a third of Ireland, roughly beyond a line from Dingle to Clogherhead, was located originally on the continent of Laurentia, which morphed in what is now most of modern North America. Trump has natural claims on us dating back at least 400 million years: God made it so.
I’m being facetious about the geology, of course. But........