The only time Martin politely pushed back was when Trump complained that Ireland had hoovered up far too much U.S. corporate investment with “smart” tax incentives — and vowed that his administration would somehow reverse this. (Trump pulled the U.S. out of OECD-led international cooperative efforts to address aggressive tax competition earlier this year.)
Martin stressed, as expected, that U.S.-Irish trade was growing strongly in both directions to the benefit of both nations. He cited Ireland as the biggest buyer of Boeing aircraft outside the United States, namechecking airline Ryanair and aircraft lessor AerCap.
Trump took that as his cue to condemn America’s failure to block U.S. pharmaceutical companies, in particular, from shifting their headquarters and profit-reporting centers to Ireland.
Provisions in Trump’s 2017 tax reform, inspired by earlier OECD-led global reforms, make such moves by multinationals less effective. Nonetheless, most of Ireland’s record-high €72 billion in goods exports to the U.S. last year were for drugs and related chemicals produced overwhelmingly by American multinationals that shifted to Ireland before Trump first took office.
“We do have a massive deficit with Ireland, because Ireland was very smart,” Trump said. “They took our pharmaceutical companies away from presidents that didn’t know what they were doing — and, you know, it’s too bad that happened.”
Trump said that had he been president since Ireland started winning Big Pharma investments in the 1990s, he would have punished any firms that tried to sell Irish-made products back into the U.S. market.