Donald Trump lands at Doonbeg as the golfers keep on golfing at Irish Open

The US president touched down in his Marine One helicopter just before 3pm on Saturday

Donald Trump has landed at the Amgen Irish Open, the US president touching down in his Marine One helicopter just before 3pm and sweeping in to the hotel complex he owns 15 minutes later, past a crowd of a few hundred souls.

Thousands more were busy watching actual golf.

It was easy to forget the name on the door, or the impending arrival of the man himself, earlier in the week. Easy to stand on a dune in the glorious sunshine with the Atlantic Ocean as backdrop and watch Shane Lowry stitching another approach to the flag.

That privilege, that wanton ignorance, hasn’t been an option here on Saturday.

The Garda presence has mushroomed with every passing hour. Outposts established as far away as Creegh and Cooraclare and Crossbeg are now manned with members of the force standing in splendid isolation in their high-vis uniforms as the world passes by.

Visibility is everything.

A necklace of officers have fringed the entire 400 acres and more of Trump International Golf Links and Hotel as of early morning, each one able to see the next in line 100m or 200m further up or down the road. An interlocking cordon with eyes everywhere.

Gardai and Army personnel walked lines of the golf course late on Friday evening, sweeping the brush like beaters of old would flush pheasants into the air for their lords and masters to riddle birds full of shotgun pellets.

Uniforms proliferate the course itself, even as play progresses, among them Americans with their trademark chinos, sunglasses and earpieces. All of them looked stern and important.

Gardai stood in clusters at tee boxes, at the entrance to hospitality areas, alongside fairways. More scurried around the roads, some on their way to relieve colleagues stood rooted to their spot for hours on end and with only a cold takeaway cup of coffee for company.

It’s not hard to see how this whole visit is costing €20m.

Donald Trump and his son Eric speak with Brooks Koepka while watching over the eighteenth green. Pic: ©INPHO/Ben Brady

Saturday at a golf tournament is always a trial of anticipation and killing time. The early tees of the first two days have been and gone, the leaders awarded with the morning off before they clock in for the day’s work after a lengthy lunch.

There was a palpable edge here this time, too. Known unknowns. Trump was coming, but when? And what would happen when he did? Where would he go? What would the reaction be? How long would the golf stop for? Would it stop?

Every minute of it was surreal.

Golf halts for a ringing phone, for the threat of lightning, for biblical rain or a badly-timed sneeze. Pressing pause for the arrival of a dignitary has never part of the programme or the etiquette that governs a game notorious as a stickler for rules laid down in black and white.

This isn’t in itself a cause for fury, its only golf after all, but it is an all-too-familiar a story when it comes to a man who thinks nothing of trampling over norms and values – and this is a game that he professes to love like no other.

At one o’clock sharp, and with military-like timing, somewhere between 30 and 40 cars, vans and trucks fronted by ten Garda motorcyclists snaked their way in to a field near the 17th fairway fitted with a specially constructed steel helipad that would cater for Marine One.

At 1.48pm Air Force One whooshed overhead, the president afforded an eagle-eyed view of his property as play progressed and Rory McIlroy searched for a lost ball on the 3rd, before it banked a hard left and made for Shannon Airport just over the horizon to the east.

A bulletproof golf buggy sat parked near the faux-gothic style hotel that awaited his arrival. Gardai lined the road from his landing strip, some ushering people behind barriers and grass mounds, and then back further from those same mounds and barriers.

Mind-numbing pernicketyness, all of it.

It was just before 3pm when a pair of Chinooks appeared and pre-empted his arrival. Golfers kept golfing just a long iron from the landing pad as punters turned their backs on the fairways and greens to espy the underwhelming fuss unfolding across the road.

Shane Lowry stood on a grass bank to sneak a peek.

Then came the motorcade, gleaming and expensive vehicles filing importantly into the courtyard of the hotel that will serve as Trump’s Camelot for the rest of the weekend. What happens next? We still don’t know, but the golfers are still golfing.