I have two quick questions to get things underway.

Were the first and deputy first minister's right to cancel their planned trip to Washington this week?

Yes, appearances are everything.

This was in keeping with the prevailing mood and they would have been criticised for going.

Yes, absolutely. It would have looked pretty awful to them standing around glad-handed in Washington, D.C.

While over here people were cancelling parades

and counting the number of people affected.

And when Northern Ireland's political leaders

went to Washington for St. Patrick's Day events in the past,

did it make a difference?

Well, we didn't have coronavirus, that's for sure.

It's a question that people often ask. There is no doubt if we go back

as far as the Adams visa and events during the Clinton White House years, clearly that was an

important building block to getting the piece that we have now. Are they right to go every year and every year in the past 10 years?

Questionable and certainly if you ask people in the street, I think a lot of them will say, why bother?

Well, it's all about access and I think it's the possibly again the optics.

As Gar said, in the past it was more important because they were players.

But this time, I think it's just the idea that people from an administration as small as this one

gets to sit with the president of the United States, even if it is Donald Trump.

I was going to say that.

Well, rightly or wrongly, coronavirus has pretty much scuppered this year's celebrations in Washington.

Gareth Gordon and Mary Kelly are stalwartes of St Patrick's Day Pilgrimages in the past.

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