Protesting hurts. The ache begins in the lower back after a couple of hours of standing with a placard aloft, but levity proves an excellent panacea. “Be a good Yank and go home,” the Connemara man’s banner inveigled Donald Trump in Doonbeg last weekend.
“Everyone has the right to protest,” said a young garda, unlikely to catch anything more untoward than pneumonia on a 12-hour shift. The geniality of his colleague from Castlebar was a legend by lunchtime. How fortunate is Ireland to have an unarmed police force, unlike Trump’s United States.
Two garda vans marked Public Order Unit pulled up, kept watch for a while and quickly departed when there was nothing to see. Just a bunch of non-aligned individuals from Moycullen to Mumbai and Michigan worried about Trump world and hoping Shane Lowry would win the trophy on the golf course.
The view from the dissenters’ side of the barrier jarred with some of the public narrative. Media reports of opposition to the protests were exaggerated. Numerous golf-goers being bussed to the Irish Open at the US president’s club waved and gave thumbs up as they passed by in a fleet of dusty, red double-deckers. Motorists in Clare-registered cars wound down their windows and called out “good on ye”. Some came around twice to ensure their support was registered.
There were objectors, but they were a tiny minority. A front-seat passenger flung open her car door and shouted: “We’re living here. You shouldn’t protest. He’s a great man. Go home.” The driver joined her for the chorus. “Go home, go home,” he yelled along, pressing the accelerator and leaving behind a cloud of petrol fumes and bewilderment, for the duo’s accents sounded distinctly Eastern European. Ice hung in their slipstream. That’s the Immigration and Customs Enforcement outfit that incarcerates, deports and has, occasionally, shot dead immigrants and their defenders in Trump’s US.
A man partly hidden in the back seat of one of the buses gave the middle finger. A child on the top deck of another was more generous. He gave two fingers.
That was when the ache reached this heart. The boy was about eight years old and wearing an Ireland football shirt. A little patriot. No doubt the 120 children obliterated by a US attack on their school in Iran on February 28th loved their country too. As would have many of the 64,000 children killed and injured in Gaza since October 2023 and the six more children killed in Lebanon on Monday alone. All mown down by an Israeli army supplied with weapons by Trump’s United States.
Forty-eight hours after returning to Washington from Shannon, Trump approved a new $2.8 billion (€2.4 billion) arms sale to Israel.
One of the wisest slogans in Doonbeg was emblazoned on a woman’s T-shirt. “Protesting against genocide is not a crime,” it said. She was wearing a cardigan, so if anything was written on the back of the T-shirt it was concealed, but it might have said: “Indifference to genocide is incomprehensible.”
Because indifference could be the death of us all someday.
When Trump dismisses experts’ predictions that AI could wipe out humankind as a “hoax”, indifference breathes accelerant. When he dismisses climate destruction as a hoax while hawking US oil and gas, more glaciers melt, more storms gather, more innocents die. Kevin McDonnell, a reader in Berrings, west Cork, who fished in Doonbeg’s river as a child, observed in The Irish Times letters page: “As I watched the news coverage of countless helicopters and motorcades descending on his Doonbeg golf course, I thought of the few fish left in the river Creegh, starved of oxygen from the latest summer drought.”
Our species is facing multiple existential threats and still the Trumpian anti-science and anti-intelligence fomenting them receives a respectful audience. The view from behind the barriers was not encouraging as Eric Trump rebuked the Irish Government from his favourite Sunday newspaper pulpit over high inflation, which, if anyone needs reminding, is being caused by his father’s unprovoked war on Iran. Trump the Younger spent half an hour on RTÉ Radio spewing bilge about “eco-terrorists”, how “America is incredibly united” and that “half the people [behind the barriers] are paid to protest”. I suppose your thinking would be warped too if your father was bribing voters to keep his party in power. We don’t lick our principles off the stones.
That little boy giving two fingers on the bus has been a haunting memory all week. His shirt professed his allegiance to Ireland. His gesture professed his loyalty to Maga. Perhaps he heard Trump gush about how much he loves the Irish, the child being oblivious that the Irish Trump loves are “vicious bastards” in business, the beauty queens and opponents of women’s reproductive rights invited to behold him at the US ambassador’s residence, and the pair of non-tax resident billionaires he reportedly met privately, along with an unrepentant airline boss who calls his business rivals “rapists”. Maybe he mistakes us all for Conor McGregor.
Who are the adult role models who have turned this boy’s rosebud mouth into a sneer of derisive superiority? What divisive hatred is filling his ears? Perhaps, someday when he is older, he can go to secondary school at St Michael’s Community College in Kilmihil and develop a mind of his own.
On Drivetime, Brian O’Connell encountered some transition year students from there. Would he like to meet Trump? the reporter asked a boy.
“No, I’ll let him work away,” he replied with wily tact.
“What would you say to him if you met him?” O’Connell asked a girl.
“Ah, sure,” she said. “I wouldn’t think the best of him.”
Edmund Burke said: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one ...” But the good need support and that support should start in childhood. Logical thinking, media literacy and principles of humanity are urgently needed in the national school curriculum.
Today’s children must learn to question, to separate truth from lies, to not be gullible. For tomorrow, their very survival could depend on it.
