Trump adds Ireland to trade ‘blacklist'
Donald Trump has added Ireland to the White House's official blacklist of countries for the nation's trade surplus with the US.
Ireland joins fellow new entrant Switzerland in the US treasury's bad books, on a list that includes regular US targets including China, Japan, Germany, Vietnam and South Korea.
Appearing on the watchlist puts Ireland, whose dominant industries are pharmaceuticals and technology, at the front of the queue of countries likely to attract Mr Trump's ire. If escalated, it can open the door to tariffs and other sanctions.
The US president has previously singled out Ireland as a country whose trade surplus hurts the US economy. 'We do have a massive deficit with Ireland, because Ireland was very smart. They took our pharmaceutical companies away,' he told Micheál Martin, the Irish Taoiseach, in the Oval Office in March.
He even considered putting a 200pc tariff on US pharmaceutical imports from Ireland. 'We don't want to do anything to hurt Ireland. We do want fairness,' he said.
Ireland's goods exports to the US surged by 49pc in the first quarter of 2025 from the same period a year earlier, the country's statistics office reported this week, as exporters scrambled to get shipments off before any of Mr Trump's tariffs kicked in. The export surge fuelled a 9.7pc bounce in Ireland's GDP in the first quarter.
Irish exports are under dire threat from Mr Trump's potential tariff of 50pc on goods imports from the EU. Dublin and other European capitals are now sweating on Brussels' negotiations with Washington to avoid this levy hitting the bloc in early July.
On Friday, the German central bank warned that if the two sides did not strike a deal, Europe's biggest economy would remain mired in recession until 2027.
German data issued on Friday showed a 1.4pc drop in factory output in April and a 10.3pc slump in German exports to the US from a month earlier, as pre-tariff, front-end loading of trans-Atlantic shipments came to a halt.
The two sides' trade negotiators met in Paris this week. Maros Sefcovic, the EU trade commissioner, said afterwards that talks were 'advancing in the right direction at pace', while Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, declared himself 'pleased that negotiations are advancing quickly'.
They have slightly more than four weeks until the expiry of a 90-day pause on Mr Trump's tariffs on July 9. The president has frequently expressed hostility towards the EU over its trade policies, but was peaceable towards a visiting Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, at a meeting in the Oval Office on Thursday.
'We'll end up hopefully with a trade deal,' he told reporters. 'I'm OK with the tariffs, or we make a deal with the trade.'
The US treasury's report on Friday – a twice-yearly 'Monitoring List of major trading partners whose currency practices and macroeconomic policies merit close attention' – had some advice for both Germany and Ireland.
Dublin was urged to focus on boosting activity in its domestic economy', to help Ireland 'address its over-reliance' on export-focused multinational companies.
Berlin was told that Germany's unbalanced trade with the US was caused by German businesses and consumers failing to open their wallets and spend their savings.
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