(ANTIMEDIA) Washington, D.C. — Donald Trump is spending St. Patrick’s day meeting foreign heads of state at the White House. One such leader was Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who gave a joint press conference with Donald Trump on the topic of Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland and immigrant the holiday is named after.
However, as Kenny’s remarks show, the Irish Prime Minister used his address to the press to subtly slam Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda. Trump, who ran on an anti-immigrant, anti-refugee platform, has capitalized on xenophobic sentiment in the U.S. that Irish immigrants themselves similarly experienced when they first began arriving in America in waves nearly 200 years ago.
You can find the transcript and video of Prime Minister Enda Kenny’s comments below:
“It’s fitting that we gather here each year to celebrate St. Patrick and his legacy. He too of course was an immigrant. And though he is, of course, the patron saint of Ireland, for many people around the globe he’s also a symbol of — indeed the patron of — immigrants.
“Here in America, in your great country, 35 million people claim Irish heritage, and the Irish have contributed to the economic, social, political, and cultural life of this great country over the last 200 years. Ireland came to America because, deprived of liberty, deprived of opportunity, of safety, of even food itself, the Irish believed.
“And four decades before Lady Liberty lifted her lamp, we were the wretched refuse on the teeming shore. We believed in the shelter of America, in the compassion of America, in the opportunity of America. We came and we became Americans. We lived the words of John F. Kennedy long before he uttered them: We asked not what America can do for us, but what we could do for America. And we still do.”
“We were the wretched refuse on the teeming shore,” Irish prime minister says with Donald Trump in the room. pic.twitter.com/7jEfTVvIzE
— Barry Malone (@malonebarry) March 17, 2017
Creative Commons / Anti-Media / Report a typo / Image: World Economic Forum
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