{"id":303205,"date":"2026-01-25T17:34:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-25T17:34:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/303205\/"},"modified":"2026-01-25T17:34:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-25T17:34:10","slug":"will-donald-trumps-advance-on-doonbeg-be-kept-in-check-by-a-humble-snail-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/303205\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Donald Trump\u2019s advance on Doonbeg be kept in check by a humble snail? \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Should Irish dignity survive St Patrick\u2019s Day, there is the Irish Open to think about. The golf competition is slated to take place in September in Doonbeg, Co Clare, at the Trump International Golf Links \u2013 a venue that was coincidentally announced at the first possible opportunity<\/a> after the return to power of Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Control of the course passed to his sons, Donald jnr and Eric Trump, when the big man got the nuclear codes again, with Eric visiting this week<\/a> to discuss what has been described in local media as the \u201cBallroom Development\u201d.<\/p>\n

The proposal would involve the construction of a new single-storey ballroom building with all the bells and whistles, including \u201cChampagne and tea stations\u201d. The planning application has been made to Clare County Council, following the commencement of works on its sister ballroom at the White House<\/a> last year. Chino-wearing cash-rich Americans at the Irish Open will also get to view a Trumpian ballroom in construction if all goes to plan. <\/p>\n

Planning documents claim there will be no further impact<\/a> on Vertigo angustior, the whorl snail in terminal decline on the Clare dunes. But Friends of the Irish Environment, who were there arm-in-arm with the snail in 2000 when the original permission for the links was granted, want no further approvals<\/a> to be made until the conservation situation improves.<\/p>\n

The snail appears to be the greatest source of resistance to Trump developments locally, despite the unpredictable potentate\u2019s recent campaigns against Greenland, Venezuela and Minnesota. Fianna F\u00e1il councillor Rita McInerney, a Doonbeg resident who was shouted out by Taoiseach Miche\u00e1l Martin in the Oval Office last year, told Overheard there was a \u201cgeneral welcome\u201d for the ballroom, which can help expand the seasonal golf-focused trade into a year-round business, with consequent benefits to local prospects.<\/p>\n

As for a presidential visit? \u201cWe are always aware that a US presidential visit can happen at any time,\u201d she says. \u201cWe have worked as a community with the relevant authorities and agencies to ensure that they are conducted without major incident and we will continue to do so.\u201d <\/p>\n

It will be a chance to \u201cengage with the office of the US President to negotiate and discuss issues pertaining to our own country\u2019s relationship and trade with the US as well as highlighting international issues\u201d, she says. <\/p>\n

Plenty to talk about, in that case.<\/p>\n

\"LeoLeo Varadkar’s birthday is celebrated at Jaipur Literature Festival Jaipur on tour<\/p>\n

Happy birthday to Leo Varadkar<\/a>, who celebrated this week not in one of the chic Dublin restaurants he frequents but in Rajasthan in northwestern India. The former taoiseach was a decent draw at the long-running Jaipur Literature Festival, where he spoke about leadership, leaving politics and helping to cultivate links between Europe and diverse, democratic India. <\/p>\n

On Trump, he warned that the US president\u2019s \u201cbig-country, almost imperialist view\u201d treated the people of Ukraine, Gaza and Greenland as though they didn\u2019t matter. \u201cNobody\u2019s home should be treated as real estate,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

And if Trump does pursue Greenland further? Europe might have to break up with the United States. Europe would have to say, \u201cThis marriage, which has worked very well for 75 years, isn\u2019t working any more,\u201d Varadkar said. \u201cWe have an abusive spouse and we\u2019re leaving this time.\u201d <\/p>\n

The audience went on to serenade him with a happy-birthday singalong for his 47th. <\/p>\n

Jaipur Literature Festival will, it turns out, be coming to Ireland later in the year for a 10-day-trip taking in Belfast, Armagh, Dundalk and Dublin, bringing with it various Indian authors and intellectuals.<\/p>\n

Irish ties to India are long-running, although not necessarily always in the shared-values sense. At one point, almost 50 per cent of the British army garrison in India was Irish. Coole Park, so inspirational to Yeats, was bought by a Gregory with an Indian fortune, and the Duke of Wellington\u2019s brother \u2013 a sturdy Meath man \u2013 was governor general.<\/p>\n

Overheard would expect the Irish hosts of the Jaipur tour to focus more on the postcolonial links than the colonial ones, however. We can use as many friends as we can get.<\/p>\n

\"SorchaSorcha Nic Eoin, head of commercial B2B at Dublin Airport; Michael Wright, CEO of Wright Group; Cathy Gelling, granddaughter of Mary Ryan; Ronan Fitzsimons, commercial director of Dublin Airport; and Allen Harrington, group operations director at The Wright Group, launch the pub. Terminal trouble<\/p>\n

\u201cShould I buy Ryanair?\u201d asked Elon Musk<\/a> amid his recent propaganda war with the low-cost airline, \u201cand put someone whose actual name is Ryan in charge?\u201d Brushing past his obvious ignorance of Tony Ryan\u2019s entrepreneurial achievements, a similar question might be asked of Ryan\u2019s Pub, recently opened in Dublin Airport. <\/p>\n

The pub \u201cblends the charm of a classic Irish local with the buzz of Ireland\u2019s busiest international gateway\u201d, ominously, and \u201cpromises plenty of craic\u201d from the moment it opens, every day, at 4am. <\/p>\n

The pub is named after Mary Ryan, photographed in 1988 by Tom Lawlor hanging out her washing against the backdrop of a jet. Many of the Ryan family, a helpful press release informs us, have worked at the airport in the decades since. It\u2019s a short commute.<\/p>\n

No guarantee of a real Ryan behind the bar, however. It\u2019s a venture by the Wright Group, one of its eight outlets. <\/p>\n

Musk threatened to buy Ryanair as part of a somewhat technical argument about wifi and aerodynamic drag. He can\u2019t, even if he wants to: retrieve Regulation (EC) No 1008\/2008 from your mahogany bookshelf and find article 4, which demands European majority ownership of European airlines. <\/p>\n

Michael O\u2019Leary<\/a>, for his part, held a press conference to thank Musk for the free publicity. He is unlikely to be seen in Ryan\u2019s Pub, however. It\u2019s in Terminal 2, a Ryanair-free zone. <\/p>\n

\"BrownBrown sludge on the beach at the Shelly Banks in Dublin adjacent to the Poolbeg wall. Photograph: Alan Betson Busting the sludge<\/p>\n

There you sit, Irish citizen, coffee in hand, glasses on, ready to perform an important piece of admin you\u2019ve been putting off through a State agency. But what\u2019s this? A broken link. Interminable jargon. Unclear process. The requirement to print out a form and post it to Kerry. <\/p>\n

This, it turns out, is called \u201csludge\u201d, and researchers at UCD have tackled it in the paper Reducing Friction, Promoting Fairness: Behavioural Perspectives on Sludge in Irish Public Services, published this week. <\/p>\n

\u201cSludge describes procedures or processes that waste time, sap energy, or discourage participation,\u201d say Margaret Samahita of the UCD School of Economics and Leonhard K Lades, visiting from the University of Stirling with his pressure-washer ready to blast away the blockages in Irish bureaucracy. <\/p>\n

The paper describes sludge\u2019s various forms and how they affect different service users, including those who have less administrative literacy, are older, are time-poor or simply have less mental energy to be embarking on a quest to secure their permit, advice or refund. <\/p>\n

They make some recommendations: plain language, logical steps and helplines are among them. They also suggest \u201cperiodic sludge audits\u201d to find things that can be improved. Sounds good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Should Irish dignity survive St Patrick\u2019s Day, there is the Irish Open to think about. The golf competition…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":303206,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[9,10,356,18,1647,13,14,6,19,17,11,12,34886,15,16,1843,5,7,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-303205","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-elon-musk","13":"tag-featured-news","14":"tag-featurednews","15":"tag-headlines","16":"tag-ie","17":"tag-ireland","18":"tag-latest-news","19":"tag-latestnews","20":"tag-leo-varadkar","21":"tag-main-news","22":"tag-mainnews","23":"tag-michael-oleary","24":"tag-news","25":"tag-top-stories","26":"tag-topstories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115956944928036980","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/303206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}