Next stop: SNN
When I land at Shannon Airport (SNN) in Ireland a week from today, I’m picking up a rental car and heading north and west on N68 to Doonbeg, home of Trump International Golf Links & Hotel. The trip should take about an hour.
Not to golf. Green fees ($600+ for 18 holes) are more than I’m bringing in euro currency for this, my fifth trip to Ireland. Not to stay at the hotel. One night’s stay with an ocean view is more than my monthly mortgage. But to have a pint at Tubridy’s Bar on Main Street in Doonbeg and sample life in the epicenter of what the President's kids call Trump Ireland.
Trump senior bought the 500-acre layout in west Clare a year before he was elected the first time for $17.5 million from some South Carolina golf course developers who ran up losses of $60 million in 12 years. Just the kind of distressed property Trump loves. The Greg Norman-designed golf course (7,200 yards, par 72) was beautiful to look at but brutally difficult to play, even when the wind wasn’t blowing in off the Atlantic. That didn’t help the bottom line. In fact, when Trump bought it, he had it redesigned. It took a decade before his people turned things around with the finances, but it looks like better days have arrived.
So, why make this stop number one on this year’s tour of the West of Ireland? To see for myself how The Irish handle The Donald. His golf course and hotel operation has been called “the most economically important business in west Clare” by people who should know. There are about 250 employees on site, from those who sell the $25,000 memberships to those who serve the drinks or cook the food, clean the rooms or park the cars. Then there are the local suppliers who deliver food and drink and other service industry essentials. Don’t forget those who grow the produce and raise the livestock. The population of Doonbeg, according to the 2022 census, is 275. The golf course and hotel are the straws that stir the drinks in Doonbeg.
Trump International Golf Links & Hotel will be hosting the Irish Open a year from now. Trump is interested again in this business, even though after getting elected the first time he said enough with Ireland already.
“We spent a lot of money on making it just perfecto and now it’s doing great. But I don’t care about that stuff anymore. It is like small potatoes, right,” Mr. Trump said in remarks broadcast live on US TV in 2016. “I’ll let my kids run it, have fun with it, let my executives have a good time, but I don’t care about it. I care about making America great again. That’s what I care about.”
That was then, this is now. He’s all in again on Ireland. So, what better place to see how that looks than Doonbeg. After all, some serious storms in the winter of 2014 made him a believer in climate change, it seemed. The Atlantic Ocean is eating away at the 18th fairway and he wanted to drop 200,000 tons of rock to build a wall.. “A permit application for the wall, filed by Trump International Golf Links Ireland and reviewed by POLITICO, explicitly cites global warming and its consequences — increased erosion due to rising sea levels and extreme weather this century — as a chief justification for building the structure.”
That “justification” came from lawyers for the man who once said, “This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our scientists are stuck in ice.” He eventually settled for a wall made of 49,000 tons of rock.
I’ll be curious to see if the golf course and hotel look as spectacular in person as they do online. And if Doonbeg’s become a Trump company town. In 1956 Doonbeg was a Gaeltacht town where the main language spoken was Irish. In 2026 the modern language is tourism.
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