Don’t tell the Trumps how easy we are to buy

Eric Trump has lately been slithering around west Clare, like Draco Malfoy, promising millions of dollars of Daddy’s money in exchange for what he wants.

Specifically he’s promised a €30m investment in Trump International Golf Links if he gets planning permission for his ‘coastal protection works’. If he doesn’t get it, it’s Avada Kedavra for the golf resort.

Of course he’s being much too extravagant. The Trumps must not realise that it doesn’t cost anything like €30m to secure the support of a rural community and its elected representatives. It doesn’t cost even a hundredth of that. All you have to do is, first, say the word ‘jobs’ as often as possible, and second, mention Doonbeg far and wide in dispatches so that more dieselbelching busloads of tourists will come. The Trumps have applied for a much scaled-down version of their original, preposterous plan to deface Doughmore beach with a 2.5km ‘berm’ (rock barrier), and locals have set up a support group in favour of it, even acquiring their own patronus in the shape of Independent TD Michael Harty, who addressed the first meeting.

‘It is very hard to listen to people who want to protect our flora and our fauna but they don’t want to protect the livelihoods of our people,’ he said, sounding for all the world like some sort of mutant middle-class Healy-Rae.

Harty was elected for the first time last year on a ‘No Doctor, No Village’ campaign, which voters presumably understood as a pledge to protect the local health service. Yet since he took his seat, we’ve actually lost out-of-hours GP coverage here in west Clare, where the nearest A&E is 110km away. Still, though, ‘jobs’…. ‘Doonbeg’…. ‘jobs’…