I arrived expecting lockdown. Instead I got fish and chips.
My assumption going into the week was that Doonbeg would be sealed tight from day one. It wasn't. The village felt loose and cheerful when I got in, so after dumping my bag at the rental house I wandered down for food and a pint. Waiting on my order at Tubridy's, I looked around the room and clocked Tyrrell Hatton, Padraig Harrington and Sepp Straka, each sitting with their own travelling groups, eating what everyone else was eating.
Players grabbing a drink during tournament week isn't news Wyndham Clark did the same among fans at The Open. But with Gardai, Secret Service and military units all due to descend on this stretch of coastline, I genuinely thought the mood would be stiffer. It wasn't. Doonbeg, normally a sleepy spot, was throwing a party. The village had lined up a three-day event called Fáilte Fest Welcome Fest to run alongside the golf.
Then the divers showed up
The looseness didn't last. You could feel things tighten by the hour.
Volunteer marshals were wound up during Thursday's opening round. I watched more than one snap at spectators who were barely out of position and certainly weren't affecting anyone's shot.
By Friday evening it had escalated. Armed personnel worked their way across every spectator area on the course, climbing those huge dunes to check nothing had been stashed or left behind before the president touched down. Out on the water hazards, a decent-sized team of divers in wetsuits went through the ponds methodically.
One of those ponds had fishing rods propped up on the bank all week, which struck me as a strange sight at a European Tour event. I only saw them actually used once. Jackson Koivun, the PGA Tour's newest name and a serious fishing man, would have loved this place. He missed out.
The entrance nobody could ignore
If you're looking for the single strangest moment of the week, it was the arrival.
A motorcade assembled first, which is the local signal that something is about to happen. Then the noise. Chinooks and Marine One came in low over the sea air with a racket you felt in your chest, landing beside the third tee. Trump was on the ground at 3pm local time.
Hundreds of people possibly a couple of thousand turned their backs on live competitive golf to watch it. Players stopped too. Nobody could help themselves.
There was no real glimpse of him at first. He got out on the far side of the helicopter and went straight into an SUV. But he surfaced soon enough on the balcony of a private viewing area overlooking the 18th, throwing thumbs-up at players walking off the last.
For the rest of his stay he moved around the busiest parts of the course at the pace you'd expect from a man of 80, working the crowd and the press from a distance, clearly enjoying himself.
The departure was handled far more quietly. Gardai and Secret Service shut down every route to the temporary helipad, and he was airborne within minutes of the trophy presentation.
That golf cart
You could not miss it if you tried.
A blacked-out, heavily built golf cart sat on standby all weekend in case the president wanted a lap of his own course. He never took it. What we got instead was the sight of this thing rolling slowly along a gravel path behind Trump and a large entourage as he walked down to the first tee to watch Lowry get his round underway.
It's a strange fit for Doonbeg. Greg Norman laid this course out two decades ago trying to disturb the landscape as little as possible, and the result is one of the prettiest links properties you'll walk. An armoured buggy creeping through it doesn't blend in. But it's his course now, and that's how it goes.
Diplomacy on the 18th green
None of this happened by accident. The Irish government pushed hard for Doonbeg to land this tournament, hoping the goodwill would translate into warmer relations with Washington.
It worked, at least on the day. Standing on the edge of the green in the middle of the crowd, I heard the announcement land: the tariffs on Irish whiskey heading into the US were going. The reaction was immediate and loud.
Whether it filters down to ordinary prices in Ireland is doubtful. The cost of living here has been squeezed by the same global pressures hitting most countries, including the fallout from ongoing conflict in the Middle East. One tariff decision on one product isn't going to change a weekly shop.
But an economic win is an economic win, and the whiskey industry will take it. For a president who rarely gets a warm reception in Ireland, it bought him a genuine one loud, unforced and lasting several minutes.
It was, above everything else, a very good golf tournament with a deserving champion in Lowry. It just happened to be the strangest week I've spent on a golf course.
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