There's a distinctly American flavour to our conversation today, thanks in no small measure to the pronouncements of the new man in the Oval Office, Donald Trump, and in particular the potential fallout from his economic pronouncements.

His plan to make America great again leans heavily on a number of well-rehearsed policy planks and there are, of course, potential consequences if he follows through,

not least the possibility of trade wars between the US and the UK and the US and the EU.

So on this week's red lines, we're discussing how things might change over here.

If Donald Trump pulls the levers, he says he wants to pull over there.

And with me to do that are the financial journalist Paul Colgan, who's a former economics correspondent at Virgin Media News.

Ali Renison is a former UK government special advisor on trade who got to know the politics and economics of this place during the Brexit debate.

And John Campbell is, of course, our economics and business editor. Welcome to you all.

Hello there. Hi. We'll get our thoughts on all of that in just a moment, but I want to hear first from the Irish economist David McWilliams. When I was speaking to him in Dublin recently, I asked him what he makes of the potential implications for Ireland, north and South, of this second Trump presidency.

Trump has to deliver the MAGA set of policies for his people.

One of those policies is tariffs.

And the other one is the first cousin of tariffs,

which is to look at American industry and say,

where are you putting your money?

And of course, the problem is Ireland sits in the middle. The way I look at it is that Ireland is

almost marked like a jockey ride in two horses. You have the American horse here and you have the

European horse here. And as long as American Europe are running together, the jockey's position is just about tenable.

But when Europe and America are separating and moving apart as they are now, the jockey's position becomes very, very difficult.

And my sense is that we have had 30 years of almost everything going our way in Ireland.

We had free trade, we had no tariffs, with the free movement of capital, we had a White House

that was very pro-Irish. Conroe Cleary wrote a book, I think about 20 years ago, called

The Greening of the White House.

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