At Áras an Uachtaráin, President Catherine Connolly welcomed Donald Trump with the courtesies owed to a visiting head of state. Her choice of gifts, however, allowed Ireland’s saints, stories and poets to say rather more.

Diplomatic gifts are rarely accidental.

They are selected, catalogued and presented with care. At their most conventional, they offer a visiting dignitary something attractive and recognisably national. At their best, they become a form of speech: courteous enough to respect the occasion, but rich enough in meaning to survive beyond it.

President Catherine Connolly’s gifts to US President Donald Trump during his visit to Áras an Uachtaráin belonged firmly to the second category.

They included a St Brigid’s Cross woven from rushes, an edition of the Navigatio Sancti Brendani — The Voyage of St Brendan — and a collection of poetry by the late Belfast poet Michael Longley containing his sonnet Ceasefire.

No denunciation was necessary. The gifts carried their own argument.

The cross over the door

The St Brigid’s Cross is familiar enough to risk becoming decorative. Each year rushes are gathered and woven into the form associated with Brigid of Kildare. The finished cross is traditionally placed above a doorway as a sign of protection and blessing.

Yet Brigid’s symbolism extends well beyond the domestic threshold. The traditions surrounding her repeatedly return to hospitality, healing, peace, generosity and care for those with little power. Her authority is not expressed through domination but through the creation of space: room at the table, shelter for the stranger and dignity for the poor.

Presented to a President whose political language has so often divided the deserving from the unwanted, the citizen from the migrant and the strong from the vulnerable, Brigid’s Cross becomes more than an attractive piece of Irish craft.

It asks what a doorway is for.

Is it principally a barrier, guarded against those who may approach it? Or can it also be a threshold across which the stranger is received?

A cross intended to hang above a door is a particularly Irish way of posing that question.

Brendan and the open sea

The Navigatio Sancti Brendani tells of St Brendan’s search for the Promised Land of the Saints. Composed in the early Middle Ages, it belongs to the Irish tradition of the immram: stories of voyages across seas where geography, pilgrimage, danger and spiritual discovery flow into one another.

Brendan leaves the security of the known shore. He entrusts himself to a fragile vessel, depends upon the hospitality of others and encounters communities and creatures beyond the boundaries of his familiar world.

His voyage is not a programme for modern immigration policy, nor should a medieval sacred narrative be forced into becoming one. But its moral imagination sits uneasily beside the politics of sealed borders, frightened nationalism and the treatment of migrants as an invading mass.

Ireland knows something of departure.

For generations, Irish people crossed the Atlantic in vessels far less romantic than Brendan’s curragh. Some fled hunger. Others fled poverty, political failure or a society in which they could see no future. They arrived in the United States seeking precisely the opportunity and welcome now denied to many who make dangerous journeys for similar reasons.

The Navigatio also reminds its recipient that the Atlantic did not begin with European conquest or American power. Long before modern states divided the ocean between them, Irish imagination understood it as a place of encounter, risk and possibility.

Brendan travelled without certainty of ownership. He did not cross the sea to make it his.

Poetry in the room

Then there was Michael Longley.

President Connolly’s collection included Ceasefire, the Belfast poet’s brief and devastating reworking of a scene from Homer’s Iliad. Priam, the aged King of Troy, enters the camp of Achilles to beg for the body of his son Hector, whom Achilles has killed.

Longley ends the poem with Priam describing the terrible humility required of him:

“I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.”

The poem was written against the background of the Northern Ireland peace process and published shortly before the IRA ceasefire of 1994. It does not pretend that reconciliation erases grief or makes enemies innocent. Priam’s son remains dead. Achilles remains his killer.

Peace begins, instead, with the recognition of shared humanity amid unresolved loss.

That is a much harder vision than the language of victory. It requires the powerful to receive the grief of those whom their power has wounded. It asks whether an enemy’s bereavement can be acknowledged before every political disagreement has been settled.

Against the present suffering in Gaza and across the wider Middle East, the choice of Ceasefire could hardly be treated as politically neutral. Nor, one suspects, was it meant to be. The inclusion of Longley’s poem was specifically highlighted by the Áras following the meeting.

Yet the President did not wield the poem as a slogan. Poetry resists that sort of use. It enters by another route, asking its reader to inhabit a moment that political rhetoric would rather keep at a safe distance.

Whether the recipient reads it is another question. The duty of the giver is to choose well.

Courtesy without silence

There were those who wondered how President Connolly, a longstanding critic of Trump and his policies, would receive him at the Áras. The answer was with constitutional dignity and diplomatic courtesy.

That was not capitulation. The Presidency is not a platform for personal performance, and hospitality does not require the abandonment of conviction.

The ceremonial welcome and the quietly eloquent gifts demonstrated that courtesy and candour need not be opposites. Ireland could receive the President of the United States without pretending that every exercise of American power is benign or that every presidential policy deserves approval.

A woven cross spoke of the protection owed at the threshold.

An ancient voyage spoke of migration, vulnerability and welcome across the Atlantic.

A Belfast poet spoke of the grief that must be recognised before peace becomes imaginable.

None of those objects shouted. None needed to.

At Áras an Uachtaráin, Ireland’s President allowed the country’s traditions to speak in their own voices. Brigid, Brendan and Longley made an unusual diplomatic delegation.

Their message was gentle, but it was not obscure.