Justine McCarthy: See you in Doonbeg? I’ll be there with my placard to welcome Trump

All you need is some sturdy cardboard, a marker, a few squiggles of glue, a stick of wood and a pithy slogan. I’m toying with “BUZZ OFF – YOU’RE NOT OUR TYPE”, but I may have to rethink it. AI says to keep it under six words for maximum impact. And I want my placard to hit Donald Trump where the sun don’t shine – in his dark heart.I’d been dithering about joining the protests against the US president visiting the Irish Open at his golf course in Clare next weekend. Then I heard a fellah vox-popped in Doonbeg say the warmonger will get a céad míle fáilte in the village but that [home-grown] protesters are not welcome.Decision made. See you in Doonbeg, folk of Ireland, whose gardaí are being deployed at great cost and inconvenience to indulge a whim of, arguably, Earth’s sulkiest, most irrational and blundering enemy.Do not be fooled. Trump is coming here because he likes golf – not because he admires Ireland’s 40 shades of green. The man’s regard for the natural world can be summed up in three words: “Drill, baby, drill.” READ MORENor is his interest in Doonbeg altruistic. His Irish operation may provide wages for the coastal village of about 280 residents, but it raked in nearly $20m (€17m) last year for its greasy-fingered sex-offender owner. He’d turn the place into a fighters’ cage in a nanosecond if he thought it would make him more bucks. Loyalty isn’t his thing. We’re talking Mister Fickle. Just ask South Korea. Or Giorgia Meloni, Keir Starmer, his own Cabinet colleagues – Marco Rubio and Scott Bessent – left to fly home on Air Force One after their boss bailed on being told Iran might attack the plane.Trump-welcomers have been direly warning that protests will damage Ireland Inc or, at least, Doonbeg Inc. Nonsense. They’re likely to do the opposite. The 75 million Americans who didn’t vote for him in 2024 and the masses joining them as he free-falls down the opinion polls may find succour in the sight of a picket. Ditto the Greenlanders he wants to rule; the Ukrainians he promised he’d save, within 24 hours, from Russia killing them; the Palestinians whose land he eyed up for a Mar-a-Lago-on-the-Med while Israel was slaughtering them with US weapons; the Spanish he called “hopeless, bad people”; the Canadians he aspires to turn into Americans; the Iranians on whom he has waged an unprovoked war; the Afghans, Haitians and Somalis whose countries he called “shitholes”; the Europeans whose countries he deems to be “decaying” and, as he says: “I know Europe better than anybody”; the women of the world whose bodies he feels entitled to grope, including E Jean Carroll whom he denied sexually assaulting because “she’s not my type”, but a jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Come on, Ireland, let’s shake off our Flurry Knox complex. Fawning over the absentee landlord has never been attractive or smart. For Trump giveth with one hand and taketh with the other by slapping tariffs on anyone he has a grudge against, and that includes us. He’s threatening more in retaliation for EU regulatory fines on his tech bros in Silicon Valley. If the killing of 120 children by a US strike on a school on day one of its war on Iran is insufficiently horrific to cool Ireland’s ardour for Trump, people of west Clare might consider the Cold War landscape that has emerged in their own backyard. Ships set sail from the Shannon estuary with product from Aughinish Alumina that ends up being smelted in Russia, by companies which supply the Russian military industry. US warplanes stop over at Shannon Airport loaded with soldiers and – for all we know, because there are no inspections – their guns. And up the road in Doonbeg, their president swings a nine iron.Trump has a penchant for colonisation-by-renaming. See the Gulf of America (the Gulf of Mexico), Lake America (Lake Ontario) and, if he fulfils his latest fantasy, Trump Strait (the Strait of Hormuz). Doonbeg better watch out he doesn’t delete the first four letters of its name by executive order.Reasonable people argue that democratic principles oblige Ireland to extend its hand in welcome to Trump, including a meeting with President Catherine Connolly. But this is not a State visit, or even an official one. It’s a jolly for a man whose idea of “fun” is sinking ships. If Irish democracy is worth its salt, it will not hide the protesters away from view by blocking roads and erecting barriers to keep them out of sight. Democracy demands that the people must not only have their say, but that what they say must be heard.[ Donald Trump to meet Catherine Connolly and Micheál Martin in Phoenix ParkOpens in new window ]Democracy, however, has become the fig leaf du jour. How often has Israel’s murderous onslaught on Gaza been excused on the pretext that it is [nominally] the only democracy in the Middle East? Trump announced in January he was barring citizens of 75 named countries from entering the US, but Binyamin Netanyahu is at the White House as often as the postman, despite being on the International Criminal Court’s wanted list for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Instead of handing him over, the world’s ostensible greatest democracy has sanctioned the top judge and pledged to “dismantle” the court. That 120 countries support it appears irrelevant. Is not Trump’s contempt for international law enough reason for our independent state to give him the cold shoulder?Ah, but if we do that, he might pull his business out of Ireland, reasonable people argue. Maybe – and somebody else will buy it and golfers whose conscience prevents them from darkening its door while Trump’s name is over it might decide to spend their money there. A business dissociated from someone who orders that boatloads of civilians be blown asunder at sea would have a certain attraction for reasonable people.As I listen to Trump-welcomers justify a love-in as an economic necessity, the rallying call of a former Irish rugby captain provides the backing track. “Where’s your f***ing pride?” Ciarán Fitzgerald exhorted his under-confident teammates when they went on to win the 1985 Triple Crown. Maybe that’s a catchcry for another day.For now, all suggestions for a pithy slogan shall be gratefully received.