What unites China's Xi Jinping, Barack Obama and The Pope? Ireland

First it was Ronald Reagan. Then came Barack Obama. Now China's president in waiting is in the old country for trade talks and a bit of craic in the Emerald Isle.

Xi Jinping, the Chinese vice president, tries the Gaelic sport of hurling during a visit to Croke Park in Dublin. Reuters

First it was Ronald Reagan. Then came Barack Obama. Now China's president in waiting is in the old country for trade talks and a bit of craic.

The Irish like nothing more than a visit from a world leader in times of economic hardship to put some colour back in the austerity-sallowed national cheek. When Pope John Paul II visited back in 1979, the country was on a high.

I remember being woken in the early hours to make a long journey that ended in a vast field filled with tens of thousands of people all waiting anxiously for what turned out to be a tiny white speck moving slowly across the horizon. To this day I don't know whether it really was the Popemobile or just a passing Toyota Hiace van. But that was not the point. The Pope had visited Ireland. And he hadn't touched down at Heathrow: that was better than an away win against the English football team.

Four decades later, the country is in similar awe as China's president in waiting tucked into an Irish medieval banquet at Bunratty Castle in County Clare this week.

Bunratty Castle is an authentic slice of Irish culture in the same way that Dubai's Irish Village is.

In Ireland this week, Xi Jinping, the vice president, has been busy playing hurling, the national game, and talking to farmers, the national pastime. By all accounts, he's gone down famously well with them and has had a calf named after him in a town in County Clare.

Some cynics are asking why the leader in waiting of the world's second-biggest economy has made Ireland his only stop in the EU as the country struggles to get back on its feet after receiving a bailout from Brussels?

We don't care. He loves hurling and Riverdance, so let's leave it at that, can't we? Good man yourself Xi Jinping I say.

Others have darker theories.

If you live in a country of 1.3 billion people expanding at the rate China has been, Ireland must seem like a gigantic potential vegetable patch. Xi Jinping could be in the country to draw up the final specifications for his top-secret Super Plough project, capable of travelling from Cork to Donegal in fifteen minutes, ripping up entire fields of potatoes and planting rice in the furrows left behind.

Or he could be looking for wives for the estimated 40 million men in China who will be unable to marry over the next two decades as a result of the country's demography-warping one-child policy. Taking our spuds, taking our women. Where will it end?

The real reasons behind the visit may not be as much fun. Perhaps the least plausible of the explanations offered by the pundits this week has been that China has something to learn from Ireland's template of attracting foreign investment. Despite everything that has happened to the Irish economy in the past three years, the country still receives delegations from abroad carrying clipboards and hoping to learn how to cook up their own Celtic Tiger recipe for success. They seem to forget about how the last bit went.

This trip is more about the world's most populous nation seeking to extend its sphere of influence. Ireland is preparing to take over the EU presidency next year. From an Irish perspective, the prospect of China buying up its bonds must also be appealing. Food security is another priority for Beijing, with lots of obvious agricultural trade potential between the two countries.

I just hope that does not involve the export of veal, for Xi Jinping's sake - that's the calf from Clare, not the vice president from China.