Donald Trump has sent a message to July 4th guests at the US embassy in Dublin that he is considering descending upon us for the Irish Open in just 10 weeks’ time. His ambassador reckons the chances of a visit are better than 50-50. Ed Walsh has hinted that, while here, the American president might sally on up to Dublin and jab a ceremonial shovel in the ground for the construction of his country’s new embassy. No doubt he’ll be bringing his own bucket of gold paint.
Anticipation is fizzing in Doonbeg as the clock ticks down to the golf tournament at Trump International on the glorious Clare coast. There’ll be dancing leprechauns and lepping politicians itching to welcome him at the venue he bought out of receivership. The optics should be pure gold back home in the rust belt as the midterm elections loom.
“I think the Irish love Trump,” the warmonger modestly opined in the White House last year. “We won the Irish with a tremendous amount of [their] vote.”
The mute response of Ireland’s golfing community to the threat of a visit by this man – one of the most harmful figures on the planet – is antithetical to the footballing community’s refusal to countenance Israel playing on Irish soil. Shamrock Rovers captain Pico Lopes, who has delighted us with his exploits in Cape Verde’s shirt at the World Cup, told the FAI in a letter that the loss of tens of thousands of Palestinian lives had “to take precedence over any sporting consideration”.
READ MORE
The old joke goes that soccer is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans, rugby is a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen and Gaelic is a hooligan’s game played by hooligans. Add to that: golf is a rich sport with poor principles.
The Football Association of Ireland announced this week that the Nations League “home” match against Israel in October would be played in Serbia in the absence of spectators. The U-turn was achieved by the power of people who care about humans being killed and oppressed. Their protests culminated in football fans chanting Free Palestine and throwing tennis balls depicting the Palestinian flag on to the pitch during a friendly against Qatar at the Aviva Stadium. Even dedicated fans are satisfied that missing the game is the quid pro quo for standing up against Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and its annexation of Palestinian lands in the West Bank.
But one sportsman’s poison is another sportsman’s wagyu beef. The Irish Open is building up to be one of the best-attended and most lucrative golf tournaments, due in part to Trump’s potential arrival. Reportedly, he wants to play in the pro-am on September 9th. Booking websites say his Clare hotel is full to the gills for the week and homeowners in the wider locality are renting out their gaffs to golf aficionados for a pretty penny. All this enthusiasm is unconstrained by the facts that:
- Trump launched an unprovoked war on Iran, precipitating the slaughter of more than 100 children in a missile attack on a school, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and global price inflation;
- His administration has been arming Israel with killing machinery for its rampages in Gaza and Lebanon;
- He ordered the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro in Caracas by America’s elite Delta unit;
- He threatened to seize Greenland by military force;
- He has had numerous boats and their occupants blown up in the Caribbean;
- A civil jury found he sexually assaulted a woman in a store changing room and then defamed her, calling her a liar and “a nut job”;
- He shut down the US Agency for International Aid and slashed humanitarian funding, making it harder to get help to Myanmar after last year’s earthquake and hampering efforts to contain the ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo;
- He publicly humiliated Volodymyr Zelenskiy and told him to surrender Ukrainian territory to the Russian invader, Vladimir Putin;
- He threatened “a friendly takeover of Cuba”;
- He has sanctioned judges and lawyers working at the International Criminal Court;
- He has dismissed global warming as “a hoax”, urging America to “drill, baby, drill”.
What more cruelty does Trump have to visit on humankind before the golfing community cries stop?
The lesson the football community has taught Ireland is that waiting for the authorities to intervene is futile. While players and fans appealed for something to be done to stop the Israel game going ahead in Dublin, the Government and the blazers passed the buck faster than Lionel Messi can pass a football. Expecting individual players to boycott the game would have put an unfair burden on them. Besides, the one-minute wonder of it would not have been as effective as the solidarity of the sport’s community. It left Uefa with no choice but to move the fixture to the other side of Europe.
[ Trump’s moneymaking as president ‘completely unprecedented’Opens in new window ]
Some might argue that the world’s top professional players are rich enough to forgo the tournament’s prize money by taking an ethical stand and withdrawing from the competition. That, too, would be an unfair burden and a passing of the buck. Rory McIlroy, for one, has already demonstrated his gumption with his consistent criticism of the Saudi Arabia-funded LIV golf tour. All individuals have to pick their battles.
There is strength in numbers, though, as football fans have demonstrated. They were harder to seduce with the lure of corporate entertainment tents or even a prawn sandwich. Golf is a huge money-spinner for and in Ireland, rendering utterly predictable the warnings not to go and spoil it all with a symbolic gesture against a man who’ll be gone from the Oval Office in a couple of years anyway.
The US’s own sports fans might beg to differ. They booed their president at the national basketball finals. They booed him at a football league game in Washington. And they booed him at the US tennis open.
Contrary to denials, sport is political. Human involvement in both makes them inseparable. I wonder what political whimsies have overtaken Trump, the golfer, while lining up a putt.
Ireland’s golfing community needs to get its own buckets of lurid paint and tell him in the big capital letters he can understand: STAY AWAY FROM OUR COUNTRY.
