Patrick Comerford
Well, it looks like I’m not going to be able to go to the World Cup next year. Not that I ever planned to. But it’s quite clear by now that I’m not welcome.
I’m still hoping that Ireland qualifies in the playoffs against Czechia in March and then against either Denmark or North Macedonia. But I’m going to have to cheer on Ireland and England next summer from the welcome warmth of the pubs in Stony Stratford.
In my wildest dreams – even if I could afford to, even if some unexpected generous benefactor made the unexpected gift of a World Cup package – I would never think of spending most of June and July being ferried around Mexico, Canada and the US. I have no doubt that it’s going to be fun, and the fans who get there are going to have wonderful experiences – at least in Mexico and Canada.
But there are no circumstances I can imagine that would allow me to be in the US at this time: not for the World Cup, not for holidays or family celebrations, not even through sheer curiosity. Even if I was presented with the impossible, unimaginable surprise gift of an all-expenses-paid package, I am not going to be in the US next summer, under any circumstances. Frankly, I am not going to be in the US for at least the next three years.
It’s not that I would not like to go. I have been to Florida, and I once stopped briefly in New York, and I always thought I would be back. When I was working on the Foreign Desk in The Irish Times between 1974 and 2002, I was involved in planning and editing the news of no less than seven US Presidential elections (1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000), and I worked on editing US news on day-to-day basis.
I always thought I would get there for more than a holiday, perhaps for a short period of work experience, or an academic exchange or conference. At one time in the 1990s, I was invited to consider taking a course at Episcopal Divinity School beside Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an offer I have sometimes regretted not taking. There are still so many places I dream of visiting and seeing, from Boston, New York and much of New England or Quaker Pennsylvania to California and Oregon.
But I’m not going to the US as a tourist, a football fan or out of theological or cultural curiosity for the next three years at least.
Over the past week, US government agencies and departments have started imposing Donald Trump’s demand that all tourists to the US have to reveal their social media activity from the last five years. The mandatory new disclosures apply to the 42 countries whose nationals are currently permitted to enter the US without a visa, including Ireland and the UK.
The US Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) is also demanding that any potential visitors or tourists disclose any and all telephone numbers and any email addresses they have used in the last decade, provide face, fingerprint, DNA and iris biometrics, and hand over the names, addresses, birthdates and birthplaces of family members, including children.
I cannot remember the six or seven email accounts I have had to use professionally within the past ten years, and I no longer have access to them. I have no problem with biometric details been garnered from my passport at many airports these days. But I certainly have no permission to breach all data provisions and provide intimate personal details of my sons, my ex-wife, my sisters and brothers, their spouses, their children and their grandchildren – even if I did know them.
I deleted my XTwitter account many months ago because there was so much far-right extremism there, and the hatred and racism were not only tolerated but encouraged. I certainly am not going to allow some goon from ICE or Homeland Security at an airport leaving me standing and abused verbally as they scroll though my many Facebook accounts, my Pinterest pins, my YouTube clips, or my four different blogs.
All of this is in response to an executive order issued by – a diktat from – Donald Trump demanding restrictions to ensure visitors to the US ‘do not bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles’.
Of course I ‘do not bear hostile attitudes’ toward US citizens. How could any have blanket hostility towards the citizens of any one country?
I have many distant cousins – second, third or even more distant cousins – who are US citizens. I cannot imagine I agree with all of them on every political issue, all the time. But they are part of my extended family, and long after Trump has left or been removed from office, those US citizens shall remain part of understanding of what extended family means.
When I was a child, my father’s first cousin in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Margaret Linders, regularly sent us bundles of children’s books and comics, so I was familiar with Clark Kent, Lana Lang, Lois Lane, Lex Lothar and life in Smallville long before they featured in films. I was still in my teens, still thinking Woodstock was the most creative event my generation had heard of, when my brother moved to Durham, North Carolina, as a PhD research student at Duke University – he died there 55 years ago this week, and is buried there. One of the last photographs of him was outside the United Nations Building in New York in front of the sculpture by Yevgeny Vuchetich, ‘Let Us Beat Swords into Ploughshares’ (1959).
Of course I ‘do not bear hostile attitudes’ toward US culture. Part of my growing up included heavy doses of US pop music, musicals and composers, television comedy and domestic soap operas, Hollywood films and actors, and works of literature, architecture and art, from Elvis and Joan Baez to George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein; from Jack Benny and Woody Allen to Mr Ed and Green Acres; from TS Eliot and Robert Frost to Sylvia Plath and Maya Angelou, Bob Dylan and Alan Ginsberg; from Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry to Walter Gropius and Abram Edelman; from James McNeill Whistler and Man Ray to Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock; from Fiddler on the Roof and the Wizard of Oz to ET and Apocalypse Now. I too enjoyed the work of Rob Reiner, and find Trump’s response to the double murders loathsome and beneath contempt. And for that I am content to be labelled the organge felon as being infected with what, in his schoolyard bullying tnatrums, he smugly refers to as Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Every journalist admires and is indebted to the bravery and innovative work of Pulitzer Prize-winning writers like Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and Harper Lee, and Truman Capote who never did actually win the Pulitzer Prize.
Every campaigner for human rights and social justice and against war and racism has been inspired by Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day and the Berrigan Brothers.
Every theologian I know has read Thomas Merton, Paul Tillich, Rosemary Radford Ruether and Katie Cannon, has read Walter Brueggemann, Stanley Hauerwas, John Shelby Spong and William Stringfellow.
Of course I ‘do not bear hostile attitudes’ towards US institutions. I have been to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral and would never think of changing the name of the Kennedy Center in Washington to anything crass or vulgar.
Of course I ‘do not bear hostile attitudes’ towards the US ‘founding principles’. If only US politicians today – and the President in particular – shared my respect for those principles, including the rights to life, liberty and property, for popular sovereignty and the rule of the people rule, for republican principles or representative rule, for individual liberty, the rights to free speech and due process, for equality, the separation of powers and the separation of religion and state, for checks and balances, federalism, and majority rule with minority rights, all codified in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
My respect for those ‘founding principles’ includes a desire to see them extended to all democracies and all nations, including Trumps new allies and friends in Russia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and North Korea. This respect leads to a desire to see the present president of US being impeached for breaching each and every single one of those principles. In a letter in the Guardian today (16 December 2025), Wal Callaby writes: ‘You couldn’t make it up. You quote Donald Trump as saying “But we always take people from places like Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? … The only thing they are good at is going after ships.’ … the day after US troops seized a tanker of Venezuelan oil. Piracy is piracy, no matter who does it.’
But, I have to admit I ‘bear hostile attitudes’ towards the US government – not any or every US government, but this specific administration, its president, its vice-president, its senior office holders, and the putrid, fetid, racist, hate-filled atmosphere they have created, encoraged and sustained.
Not that they need access to my passwords. They already have their bots at work. The biggest rises in views of my blog postings this year coincided with three major events this year: Trump’s inauguration, Trump’s farcical birthday parade, and Trump’s demands for access to the social media accounts of potential tourists. What a dreadfully insecure president the man is, but we must continue to insist in saying that the emperor.
Nor are they are going to miss me. California is already preparing for a significant decline in foreign visitors this year, for example, and Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles already reports a 50% fall in footfall.
There were growing fears that the World Cup is going to be chaotic with US immigration raids continuing apace. Human rights organisations are warning that Fifa risks becoming ‘a public relations tool of an increasingly authoritarian US government’. With cross-border travel between Mexico and the US increasingly fraught, the Sport and Rights Alliance is demanding Fifa ensures protection against ‘racial profiling, arbitrary detention, and unlawful immigration enforcement’, both of local communities and of visiting fans during the tournament.
I shall be watching the World Cup – and cheering on England and (hopefully) Ireland – next summer from the welcoming comfort of the Old George and some of the other pubs in Stony Stratford.
