On Saturday in Philadelphia, the St Patrick’s Day hordes were out from lunchtime in their green costumes and their jewels and leprechaun hats, their repurposed Eagles tops, Philly students from all corners of the US in T-shirts with slogans saying “Irish Goodbye Expert” and “Feckin Eejit”. The day was cold, overcast: definitively March. There was an echo of the lost, manic 1990s-New York hard-drinking energy about the scene: hundreds of people in some shade of green, mainly young, the lines three and four deep to get into the pubs from early on. Philly prides itself on its attitude and a punky up-for-it edge. And on its annual homage to Érin Go Brágh, the spirit was there in force. But if you spent half an hour walking down Spruce Street, a quiet redbrick historic preserve, you eventually come to Philly’s Famine Memorial, Glenna Goodacre’s intricate and powerfully lonely bronze sculpture, which is set a stone’s throw from Penn’s Landing and the Delaware river. Shortly after three o’clock on Saturday, Tánaiste Simon Harris arrived to lay a wreath. The gathering was small and mainly confined to those who conceived the idea for the memorial two decades ago. A Defence Forces piper played. There were photographs, a few words. These ceremonies are invariably just a gesture, but there is always something solemn and heavy about the mood in the great Irish-American cities during the St Patrick’s festivities. The imprint of the original emigrants has been well documented and remains profound, even as it is reflected in slickly-marketed Irish regalia this week. There is something dateless, too, about the St Patrick’s Day rituals in the United States, caught as they are between honouring the past and an Irish-American story that is making a lightning transition into becoming something else. During his four-day visit to Philly and New York, Harris will pay tribute to the enduring Irish influence while trying to impress the message that, despite the radical upheavals generated by president Donald Trump’s new administration, the transatlantic story continues. He will march in Monday’s parade down New York’s Fifth Avenue as Tánaiste, but will take part in engagements with what he described as “a heavy and intense economic focus” as Minister for Foreign Affairs, Trade and Defence. “I want to reiterate my very strong view, the very strong view of Ireland and the European Union that tariffs are bad news for consumers,” he explained after the wreath-laying. “They are bad for economies, in my view, on both sides of the Atlantic. President Trump is a politician but he is also a businessman and I am really hoping that in the coming weeks we can get to a point where a deal can be reached between the US and the EU that is good for both. I think it is really clear we are heading into a turbulent time. But we need to intensively engage and we need to stay calm and together we need to work our way through this.” Taoiseach Micheál Martin flew home on Saturday, his Washington mission generally regarded as a triumph after he did all he humanly could to mollify and acquiesce to the whims of the US president. But after the laughter and warm speeches fade, Harris is aware that the cold realities remain. “I think the meeting in the White House was important. I think it was useful, it was helpful. We as a country should never take for granted – and we don’t – that opportunity annually to engage in the Oval Office. But we should also hear clearly what President Trump said. And he did make clear his views, not just then but on many occasions, in relation to trade and tariffs. And he means what he says. “What I would say to our friends in America, what I would say to the US administration, is that Ireland, and the EU as a whole, we want to engage. We want to find a way forward and we want to do more business with the United States.” The Ireland of Trump is a fantasia composed of his fleeting visits to the golf resort he owns in Doonbeg and his property developer’s knowledge of the Irish construction tradition from Queens and the Bronx, in those decades when the culture was defined by a hard-drinking nights and a savage work ethic. The renewed focus on immigration by the Trump administration has highlighted the once-prominent cause of the undocumented Irish – those who arrived with the multitudes in the 1980s and somehow stayed and often thrived and settled without ever securing official legal status. “What I would say to those people living here and to their families is that we haven’t given up on that cause,” said Harris. “It is challenging and the climate and backdrop in terms of migration policy is challenging. But there is a very particular case in relation to the undocumented Irish that I think does garner support on a bipartisan basis. I think there is an understanding and an appreciation of the positive contribution so many have made. But it’s an issue we need to keep working on.” On Saturday night, the great and the good among the “Friendly Sons and Daughters of St Patrick” gathered in the Union League building, on Broad Street, for the 254th annual gala dinner. Harris was a guest of honour and a speaker. As Brian O’Neill, a venture capitalist and founder of the Recovery Centres of America programme, outlined in his keynote address, not many Irish would have made it through the stately doors of the Union League when it was founded in 1862. In 1900, the Irish were still the poorest demographic in Philadelphia. Thirty years later, they ran the police force and municipal services. In the 1980s came the ambitious strides in the world of business and entrepreneurship. A ferocious work-ethic fuelled by historical anger was, O’Neill said, the source of this success. Now, in 2025, the descendants of the Philadelphia famine migrants gathered in their finery in one of the city’s most august dining halls. A huge green Érin Go Brágh banner was draped along the rear wall. Hundreds of dead men – including the civil war general Philip Sheridan, whose parents emigrated from Cavan – gazed out from gold-framed portraits. “You have always had so much to offer Ireland,” Harris told them. “Tonight, let us honour both the past and the future potential between our two countries. Let us honour the Irish who made the journey to get here, unsure of what their futures would hold.” The circumstances are different now, and the rank impoverishment of the first arrivals are just a folk memory preserved through memorial art. [ Undocumented Irish in Trump’s America: ‘They are not looking for the likes of me. They are looking for the criminals’Opens in new window ] But as Philadelphia went hell for Irish leather on Saturday night and New York readies Fifth Avenue for its 264th solemn procession of the Irish story, a trace of those uncertainties and doubts are again discernible in Irish eyes.