Snails on Defcon 5

Doonbeg is back in the news and Irish Golf Desk files this Pre-Mortem for the snails at Doonbeg:

Less than a year after "blowing up" Doral's Blue Monster to create what a radically different challenge for world's elite in this week's WGC-Cadillac Championship, Donald Trump is considering a complete rebuild of Doonbeg that could put him on another environmental collision course.

A bigger and better Doonbeg sounds fantastic but Trump's master plan could bring him into conflict with environmentalists over the protected dunes and the microscopic snails that stymied the original Greg Norman project and forced the Australian to create a less than satisfactory course routing.

We'll not pass on the chance to poke fun at all involved, but this will remind us of the spectacular dunes-land in play.

The piece refers to our Donald with the charming moniker of "self-confessed billionaire", a confession that we can be quite sure required both water-boarding and truth serum. The Donald being notoriously shy about his relative status in the financial firmament. To briefly review the history here:

A microscopic snail just 2 mm high and 1 mm wide — ‘Vertigo angustior’ — was discovered onsite during the developer’s environmental impact assessment and listed for protection under the European Union’s Habitats Directive.

Back to our leading man:

“Greg Norman did an incredible job considering that he wasn't allowed to work in the dunes and we are using that course and changing it,” he said of the course which suffered an estimated €1 million in erosion damage from the January and February storms that lashed Ireland.

“I have a lot of time and I have a lot of money and the best thing for Ireland is that you allow that great site to have one of the great courses of the world. And I have hired for that purpose, Martin Hawtree, to study it.

We can't help but be saddened for the words of praise for Norman, as the inevitable clash of these two outsized egos was the most hoped-for result of the Doonbeg Trump Golf Links International, Ireland acquisition.

We can tell that Greg is a profession, not even needing the Donald's advice to look at the land.  But did he do it right?

Shackelford also linked to this Kevin Markhart two-part piece posted at Neil Sagebiel's Armchair Golfer blog on whether Trump will be good for Irish golf. I had read it and planned to ignore it, as I'll explain. Kevin is the author of Hooked, and Amateurs Guide to the Golf Courses of Ireland and writes on the same theme at his blog. For some strange reason Neil doesn't see fit to link to his blog, so thank God I've kept my Google subscription current. It's called the Irish Golf Blog and may well merit some time from yours truly.

That said, I was disappointed with Kevin's post, as it shed precious little light on Trump's entry into the Irish golf market. Kevin comes to the proper conclusion on the first few issues he sorts through, which is that the conversion of a premium resort focused on the extreme high end of the market into a Trump-owned premium resort aimed at the extreme high end of the market changes nothing. Agreed, but it did take us some time to get there.

What's missing from Kevin's piece is any explanation of Irish golf for those to whom it is unknown territory. He mentions famed Balybunion and Lahinch, fails to note that these are essentially local clubs organized and run for the benefit of their members. The beauty of the system is that you and I can go play these wonderful links, and because of that demand the average resident of Balybunion, and please remember how poor Ireland is by our standards, can actually afford to belong. 

  

But Doonbeg might as well be in a foreign country as far as a County Clare resident is concerned, though it will of course create some jobs and generate some beneficial economic activity. Resorts such as Doonbeg are the exception in both Ireland and Scotland, with only a very few comparables such as Turnberry.

But then we turn to the "environmental impact," and here Mr. Markham has some stronger things to say:

Trump hasn't a clue what the environment is. For starters, he is a climate change denier. He also proudly boasted that at his Aberdeen resort he had anchored a major dune system, which just happened to be one of the last moving, shape-shifting, natural networks of sand dunes in Europe. And he thought this was a good thing.

What will he do/change at Doonbeg? The tiny snails (Vertigo Angustior) that caused such controversy in the early years and were subsequently protected should be safe… should! So should the right-of-way across the course.

But now that there's a million Euros-worth of storm damage to the coastline, he has an opportunity to make changes repairs that might not otherwise have been possible. The local council, the Department of the Environment and the EU will be hard-pressed to stop him if he sets his mind on a particular change repair.

Is that good for Irish golf?

No. The environment should never be jeopardised for the sake of a golf course.

I was going to ignore this piece to avoid a political rant, not the purpose of this blog.  But the use of the term "Climate Change denier," is particularly odious, meant to demean those with whom one disagrees without the tedious obligation to, you know, make an argument.  Trump is a buffoon and one is necessarily uncomfortable being on the same side of an argument with him, but can we not understand why he objects to the wind turbines next to his quite expensive golf course?  He didn't exactly invent the term NIMBY, did he?

But it's his last sentence that's the crux of the issue.  We can all agree that we should never allow a golf course to create an environmental apocalypse, can't we?  But isn't the world just a little more complicated than that?  The fact is that any project entails risks and one of the things we see is that there's always an environmental apocalypse around the corner.  I don't pretend to know whether the limitations imposed to protect the Vertigo Angustior were well measured or not, but I'm pretty sure neither does Mr. Markham.