Irish Times: ‘How Mike Pence shat on the carpet in Ireland’s spare room’

Mike Pence apparently thought that he could game the Irish with saying a “special prayer” for them and choking up over Ireland being his ancestral home — wrong. Having been to Ireland and being of Irish descent, I can tell you that the Irish have world class bullshit detectors and they don’t mind telling you how they feel about people. To a guy like Pence, this is anathema, because he’s used to a phony front getting him where he needs to go and people being too repressed, or polite, to talk about it.

The Irish did an epic troll of Donald Trump’s ineptitude in June, when he suggested that a wall was needed between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.And they are under no illusions about Mike Pence, whose visit there will be remembered, but not in the way that he hoped. Unlike Donald Trump, Mike Pence stays on script, and when he admonished the Irish to cooperate with Boris Johnson over Brexit, the party was over and Pence was toast. Miriam Lord, Irish Times:

Like pulling out all the stops for a much-anticipated visitor to your home and thinking it has been a great success until somebody discovers he shat on the new carpet in the spare room, the one you bought specially for him.

US vice-president Mike Pence met President Michael D Higgins and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar on Tuesday during an official visit. His Irish hosts, up to their oxters for the last three years in Brexit worry, hoped to impress upon him Ireland’s fears about the consequences of a no-deal Brexit for the country. […]

Pence, after all, is Irish American and wastes no opportunity to go misty-eyed about his love for the “Old Country” as he lards on his Mother Machree schtick on both sides of the Atlantic. He couldn’t praise Ireland enough on Tuesday – “deeply humbled” and “honoured” to be going to the hometown of his mother’s grandmother and so on.

But, after he said all these nice things about the “Emerald Isle” and how much his boss Donald Trump – he sent his best wishes, by the way – appreciates us and all we do to help American security in Shannon, he delivered a very strong endorsement of Boris Johnson and Brexit.

Ouch. Stupid move to make, at least phrased as bluntly as Pence did, admonishing those present that Ireland and the EU should “negotiate in good faith” with Boris Johnson. So, what does he think, they were negotiating in bad faith before? And they needed Mike Pence to set them straight?

Things went downhill swiftly from there, and columnist Miriam Lord let Pence have it between the eyes with both barrels, as “Irish eyes definitely stopped smiling…he was channeling His Master’s Voice.” Yes, that’s Pence to a tee, lapdog to Donald Trump and the interests of whomever he’s a lapdog to.

And this, after such a lovely morning, with Pence and his mother meeting the Taoiseach and his mother.

His Irish mother, as Mike calls her. He dotes on Nancy. So he should have known that any Irish mammy will tell you if you can’t say anything good, say nothing at all.

The visit went on to the much-touted luncheon-with-the-gay-guys, with Mike Pence, both mothers in tow, his biological mother and his wife, Karen, Leo Varadkar and Irish President Michael D. Higgins and their spouses — and the mockery is worthy of Oscar Wilde.

But for all that, Michael D’s sprayed-on smile when the US vice-president came to visit him in Áras an Uachtaráin was a joy to behold.

The Áras was bedecked with flowers from the garden for the visit of the anti-gay-rights Pence. All the flowers were in shades of pink. The only other colour was lavender. […]

The talks between the President and the vice-president didn’t take long. Soon, they were waving goodbye from the portico. The dogs didn’t put in an appearance.

He didn’t call the vice-president a “w*****r”, [Higgins called Graham a “wanker who whips up fear”] which is what he did when he had a row many years ago on radio with a famous American conservative commentator. Michael Graham was his name. Michael D might easily have become confused, because Mike Pence is an adherent of the “Graham rule”. This is where he doesn’t stay alone in a room with a woman who is not his wife so as not to give rise to bad thoughts and the like. […]

You can never be too careful. In the end, Pence brought his wife, his mother and his sister to the Old Country, where it seems a lot of the natives have turned alarmingly heathen in the generations since his ancestors left our shores.

Brave Mike sat down to lunch with the Taoiseach and his partner Matthew and managed not to choke on his Dublin Bay prawns. The VP’s wife Karen, who recently took up a part-time teaching position in a school which bans LGBT pupils and staff, kept her fillets of venison down despite the company.

And now the Pences wend their way across the Irish Sea to meet with Boris Johnson. Since he’s a serial philanderer, buffoon, and political joke, who fell on his ass the minute he took office, they should feel right at home.