Trump tried to build a wall

When Donald Trump tried to build a wall

The Irish coast isn't the Rio Grande, but they are connected by one man, his forceful nature, and the fierce opposition he engenders. 

By Ben Schreckinger

Doughmore beach, where children play in dunes beneath putting greens and surfers dot the emerald waves, is a long way from the dust and scorched pavement of Laredo, Texas. But the beach and the border town are united by a single man and his desire to build walls.

Before Donald Trump the politician based a presidential campaign on a simple promise — one he promoted dramatically in a whirlwind trip to Laredo — to build a “big, beautiful wall” on the U.S.-Mexico border, Donald Trump the developer set out in February 2014 to build coastal protection works at Doughmore beach, to protect his golf course here from erosion. Those efforts have morphed into a proposal to build a two-mile, 200,000-ton rock wall.

Though Trump has told the skeptics that building his proposed 1,000-mile border wall will be “easy,” so far his two-mile Irish wall has been anything but. Trump has encountered numerous setbacks, and if the first stone ever gets laid, it will be a long time before it happens.

After first attempting to construct coastal protection works without permission, Trump has gone through several rounds of planning applications. He sought special permission from the Irish national government for the wall in March but was rejected in April. Now, the wall is back before the county council, which prolonged the process yet again on Friday, sending a request for further information that could delay a decision up to 11 months. All sides expect any council decision to be appealed, a process that will last several months more.

In an Irish countryside that has been economically hollowed out since the last global recession, Trump Doonbeg employs over 200 people, and the wall enjoys strong support in the village and its immediate environs. But it has also aroused opposition from environmentalists, recreational beachgoers and a gang of local surfers. If the wall eventually wins approval, which opponents insist it will not, activists are already vowing to prevent its construction through direct action.

Trump’s second-oldest son, who leads the Doonbeg operation, expressed confidence that the wall would be approved and dismissed the opposition. “No matter what you do, if you want to build a fence in the middle of a field, somebody just objects to it,” Eric Trump told POLITICO. “It’s the way the world works.”

The younger Trump also rejects the idea that the family’s Irish experience has any bearing on his father’s central campaign promise. “It’s cute to pull that parallel, but I think the two have nothing to do with each other,” he said.

Indeed, a President Trump would have far more power to construct his border wall than a private businessman has to build a beach wall. At the same time, the border wall is a far bigger undertaking. It’s certain to face even fiercer legal challenges and political opposition.

And the saga of Trump’s Irish wall illustrates what happens when the businessman’s name and distinctive style collide with an ambitious construction project and dearly held views about home and jobs and how to protect them. As it turns out, Trump’s determination to move quickly and his willingness to play hardball aren’t enough to prevent even a small, mildly controversial construction project from turning into a quagmire. In many ways, Trump’s personal touch has only stiffened resistance.

Doughmore (pronounced dug-more) enjoys an embarrassment of riches that happens to make it a difficult place to build. In addition to the world-class golf course behind it, the beach is one of the most scenic and unspoiled in West Clare. It is home to some of the best waves on the country’s Atlantic coast, making it a destination for surfers, who call it “Doughy.” And the beach serves as a habitat for a rare snail, Vertigo angustior, contributing to the beach’s designation as a special area of conservation.

The winter of 2013-14 was an unusually stormy one here. At Doonbeg, the collective toll of winter had ravaged the course, eroding as much as eight meters in some places. The resort’s then-owner, Kiawah Partners, wracked by an internal family feud, lacked the wherewithal to rehabilitate the property, and Trump snapped up the distressed asset for a song — a reported $12 million.

In mid-February, as much of England was inundated with floodwaters and the worst storm in living memory battered County Clare, Eric Trump and his older brother, Don Jr., traveled to Doonbeg to survey the resort his family had purchased there. Their flight was repeatedly diverted between Dublin and Shannon, and when they finally arrived in Clare, the lights had gone out.

Within days, the quiet calm at Doughmore beach was shattered by the noise of dump trucks. The Trumps were already going to work, taking emergency measures to shore up their storm-ravaged course. They began dumping giant stones at the property without notifying the local authorities.

When the Clare County Council caught wind of this act of permission-less renovation, it sent a representative to serve an enforcement notice, warning the Trumps that the council would take out an injunction if they pursued any more unauthorized works.

The next Monday, Eric and Donald Jr., along with the resort’s property manager, Joe Russell, and Trump executive George Sorial, met at Doonbeg with representatives of the Clare County Council and the National Parks and Wildlife Service.

The parks service warned the Trumps that hasty construction could do more harm than good and that the site was not zoned for the dumping of rock armor.

The Trump sons delivered a warning of their own. “If such works could not be undertaken, they stated that the course would need to be closed with the loss of 350 jobs,” according the county council’s notes from the meeting.

The council’s notes report that “it was at all times stressed to the Trumps that all works need to be undertaken in compliance with the law, due process and existing permissions.”

The next day, the Trump patriarch, who had remained in New York, launched a charm offensive in the press. He phoned Peter O’Connell, a local reporter with the Clare Champion, for a call the reporter described as genteel until the subject of a proposed local wind farm came up.

“He went crazy,” recalled O’Connell. “He was absolutely enraged that there was any possibility of a wind farm anywhere in Doonbeg, even if it wasn’t visible from the resort.”

Trump told O’Connell that wind farms in Arizona practically “wiped out” the state’s population of bald eagles. (As a candidate, the businessman continues to exaggerate the threat that wind farms pose to eagles.)

“If the windmills are allowed to go up, it would be very negative to Doonbeg,” O’Connell said Trump told him.

The reporter told Trump he had been unaware of the businessman’s credentials as an environmentalist. “He did kind of see the funny side of it,” O’Connell recalled.

Trump told him that the resort would employ 400 people under his ownership, a claim that became the paper’s lead headline three days later. (In a government filing this May, the resort claimed 201 full-time staff during peak season, up from 87 in the off-season.)

At the time, with the resort’s future up in the air, the purchase was a godsend. “Trump was seen as a hero in West Clare,” O’Connell said.

That week, a lawyer for the Trumps sent the county council a letter informing the body of the family’s intent to repair the course and warning that “any obstruction of these efforts — which are vital to the survival of the business — will force our client to hold you responsible for any resulting damages or lost income.”

Meanwhile, the Trumps began pursuing less drastic measures to remedy the damages to the course, putting up fences, planting beach grass and commissioning a golf course architect for a redesign.

In April, Trump called Tony Lowes, director of Friends of the Irish Environment, to offer an alliance. The nongovernmental organization also opposed the proposed Doonbeg wind farm because of its potential to hurt nearby aquatic habitats.

“He kind of checked our record and said grudgingly that we’d done all right and did we want any help from his organization?” recalled Lowes. Lowes initially agreed to discuss the matter with Trump’s lieutenant, Sorial, before the group decided not to pursue an alliance with the developer.

In May, Trump himself arrived at Shannon airport to great fanfare. A red carpet was rolled out on the tarmac where three women in flowing red dresses, including a harpist, serenaded the businessman and his three adult children with Irish music. Ireland’s minister of finance, Michael Noonan, was on hand to welcome them.

Noonan took flak at home for appearing to kowtow to the American businessman, and one popular Irish website posted a 20-second clip of Trump turning his back on the finance minister. A week later, Noonan and Trump spoke by phone at the businessman’s request, the Irish Times discovered last month. Noonan’s office has said business was not discussed on the call.

Also in May, the Trumps submitted a planning application related to those less drastic measures. At the time, their environmental consultant was Dr. Evelyn Moorkens, who had worked on the site since 1999. She is well-regarded among Irish conservationists, and came recommended to the new owners by the parks service.

In March 2015, the Trumps withdrew that planning application. Far from giving up, they indicated plans to file a new application based on “additional expert modeling.”

In the 11th century, on the other side of the British Isles, Canute the Great ruled an empire that included much of Norway, Denmark and the eastern part of Britain, where it stretched almost as far north as the present site of Trump’s Scottish golf course in Aberdeen. According to legend, King Canute once summoned his courtiers to the shore and had his throne placed there during a rising tide. The king ordered the waters to stop, but the tide kept on rising, and a wet-legged Canute announced to his courtiers the futility of opposing forces beyond human control.

This, of course, is not Trump’s style. The businessman has made clear his intentions to turn back various tides — human, economic, literal — and, last September, Trump International Golf Links returned to the county council with a new, bigger proposal: 200,000 tons of rock piled about 20 feet high across 1¾ miles of beach.

Moorkens had been replaced with an environmental consultant willing to make more controversial proposals. And controversial this was. Environmentalists said the wall would destroy the dune system. Beachgoers said it would spoil the landscape. Surfers said it would obstruct their access and could put them in danger of drowning.

Friends of the Irish Environment, which did not oppose the initial proposal, launched an all-out campaign against this one. Because the businessman is such a lightning rod, the group has gotten extended mileage out of his involvement, adding a “Trump Doonbeg Golf Course” tab to the homepage of its website, in between “Contact us” and “Donate.”

On the countryside’s narrow roads — where the 100 km/h speed limit signs often seem more like dares than attempts at restraint — construction crews would bring a truckload of rock to the beach every five minutes for months.

“It was such a huge jump that it took everybody by surprise,” said Dave Flynn of the West Coast Surf Club, which is based up the coast in rain-soaked Lehinch, an unlikely surfinig mecca. “People were expecting they’d want to do a bit more, but the extent was just bizarre. Nobody saw it coming.”

Flynn, who sports a collared shirt and sweater beneath wavy blond hair, projects a look that might be called “executive surfer.” He works in property development and said his surf club is not anti-development; its members just consider the Trump proposal a monstrosity.

The club — which has no specific address, and instead meets in Lehinch’s pubs as needed — normally files neutral “observations” on proposed developments. But the sheer scale of Trump’s proposal brought it off the sidelines, and they hired their own consultant to bolster the objection they have filed to it.

Before Trump bought the property, surfers obtained a court ruling that secured a right-of-way across the course to use the beach. Despite the occasional glare from the groundskeepers, they continue to use it.

“They make a big deal of allowing us across it, but they really have no choice,” said Flynn, who is worried that if the wall wins approval, the Trumps will eventually find a pretext to block surfers’ access to the beach.

Flynn and other opponents of the wall would like to see the Trumps live with the ebbs and flows of the dunes, redesigning the course from time to time as necessary to adjust to erosion. But that approach would foil the Trumps’ ambition of landing major tournaments, which are played only at courses with static designs, the Trumps’ consultants told Flynn at a November 2015 meeting in Limerick City.

“Trump’s organization is caught because they want to have the Irish Open played out there,” said Lowes, of Friends of the Irish Environment. “They can’t live with nature. They need to control nature.”

The Trumps knew the condition of the course and development restrictions when they bought it, and the surfers feel they should not have to suffer for the developers’ lack of foresight.

In March, the county council suggested that the Trumps appeal directly to the national government to designate the proposed wall a “strategic infrastructure development,” which would pave the way for its construction.

The Trumps did so, wielding carrots and sticks. Failure to implement the wall, they suggested, could lead to the course’s closure. If the wall is completed, they sad, they plan to invest more in the site, opening an events center.

In April, the national planning board rejected the Trump application, and now the wall is again before the county council for approval.

The good news for Trump is that he and his wall remain popular in Doonbeg and the surrounding villages.

“It has to get built,” county councilor Gabriel Keating told POLITICO at a recent council meeting at the county seat in Ennis.

Last fall, Condé Nast named Doonbeg the second-best resort in Europe in its readers’ choice awards, and locals believe the Trump name will put West Clare on the map and contribute to a broader economic revitalization.

The Trumps rallied support from local landowners, and an identical form letter submitted by several of them touts the flood protection they expect to enjoy from the wall. Wall opponents, though, say recent flooding has come from a nearby river, and the wall would not prevent it.

The owner of Tubridy’s, the local pub, was among the dozens who wrote in to support the wall and credit the resort for the health of his business.

At a time when a top candidate to lead the neighboring United Kingdom has declared “the British people are sick of experts,” one wall supporter wrote the council a letter dismissing opposition from a professor in Galway: “Dr. Sheehy-Skeffington, a botanist from [University College Galway] made another point about the sand dunes dying if the rock armour is put in — rubbish!”

The local bridge, football and book clubs have all offered letters of support. “We are also afraid that if the rock armour is not put in place, Donald Trump will lose interest in the resort and not invest further in this venture,” wrote the book club.

But that, and much else, remains in dispute. Trump has often said that he takes aggressive opening positions as a bargaining ploy, and that reputation has preceded him in Clare. “We know it’s his personality to come along and say, ‘What’s the most extreme version?’” said Flynn. So the wall’s opponents are skeptical Trump would actually abandon his investment if he does not get his way, and they say someone else will buy the course if Trump no longer wants it.

The wall’s proponents point out that coastal protection works already fortify nearby golf courses at Ballybunion and Lehinch. Lowes, of the Friends of the Irish Environment countered that those courses are in less environmentally sensitive areas and that the Trump wall dwarfs those other works. “What is proposed is not similar to any existing constructions in Ireland — or anywhere else,” he said.

Even the question of what to call the structure is not settled.

“They claim it’s not a wall,” said O’Connell of the Trumps. “They haven’t quite come up with an alternative name for something that’s not a wall.”

The structure’s proponents call it a “berm” and “coastal protection works,” though in unguarded moments they also call it a “wall.”

In a corner of the world where neighbors’ slights can be remembered for generations, few residents in the immediate vicinity of Doonbeg are willing to oppose the wall vocally.

Some local residents did set up a “Save Doughmore-Doonbeg beach” Facebook group and collected more than 4,000 signatures opposing the wall from people near and far. But the group’s spokesman has declined to identify himself by name, citing both the local popularity of the wall and a desire to avoid Trump’s wrath.

Outside Doonbeg, in the rest of Ireland, Trump and his wall are decidedly less popular, and Trump, just by being Trump, may be standing in the way of achieving his goals.

This spring, when the New York billionaire announced tentative plans to visit Doonbeg during his June trip to the British Isles, Roisin Garvey, a Green Party member from Clare, began planning a protest and encountered overwhelming demand from would-be participants.

“It was the easiest thing I was ever going to organize,” she said at Crotty’s Pub in nearby Kilrush. (The Irish leg of Trump’s trip and the protest were both cancelled.)

Garvey called Trump’s attitude toward the county “patronizing,” citing a local radio interview in which the New York mogul said he had a lot to teach the people of Clare. “He can come and teach us how to be an a--hole,” she cracked.

Having watched his presidential campaign with horror, Garvey said, she is opposed to the wall not just on the merits, but also out of a general opposition to the New York billionaire as a figure.

Garvey said Trump’s wall was starting to affect Clare the same way his candidacy has affected the American public. “I’m worried it will divide the community.”

Sure enough, on the way out the door, Garvey encountered the publican, Kevin Clancy, a member of the golf club who credits the course with driving business to his pub and who supports the wall. His niece works summers at Doonbeg and makes enough money to pay her university tuition, a big deal in an Irish countryside starved of young people. Soon, Clancy and Garvey were in a heated argument about the tradeoffs between the economy and the environment.

From the pub, Garvey returned to the countryside, to an eco-yoga retreat in progress at a campsite by the mouth of the River Shannon, where the idea that Trump would get his wall was considered unthinkable.

There, Fergal Smith, one of Ireland’s top surfers, emerged from the lodge where he had been reciting Hindu chants to say that he thinks the issue will offer an opportunity to politicize Clare’s normally laid-back surfing community and mobilize it against the wall.

Garvey said that if the wall does win approval, activists will continue to resist it, blocking roads and chaining themselves down on the beach. If it ever comes to that, it will not be for a long time.

On Friday, caught between economic imperatives, passionate objections and the law, the Clare County Council kicked the can. It sent the Trumps a request for further information that detailed dozens of shortcomings in their application. The Trumps have six months to respond with the option of a three-month extension. The council will then have eight weeks to make a decision, which will likely be appealed in another months-long process.

O’Connell, the Clare Champion reporter, said the Trumps have been chafing at the roadblocks. “They’re used to getting things done like that,” he said, snapping his fingers. “They’re not used to people saying, ‘Wait a minute.’”

Indeed, for Eric Trump, the process has dragged on long enough.

“As a builder, you always want to get things done,” he said. “And everyday that you’re waiting you’re tempting fate.”