Trump declares income of €13m from Doonbeg

The details are contained in his latest filing to the US Office of Government Ethics, over 200 pages of financial declarations covering everything from his Mar-a-Lago golf club in Florida, to the over $700,000 he made from two speaking engagements last year.
The filings put a value of between $25m and $50m on the Doonbeg resort, and between $1m and $5m on the hotel.
The income declarations are similar to figures supplied by Trump last year, when he was the Republican Party nominee for the presidency. Then, the hotel's income was put at €7.3m, and the overall figure for the resort was €15.2m, over a 16-month period starting in January 2023.
The filings also set out incomes for associated companies, which are lodged in Allied Irish Bank accounts. They include Doonbeg Common Area Management Ltd, where the income amounts is between €100,000 and €1m, a higher amount than in previous entries.
The filings for Links Cottages Area Management Company declares rental income of between $100,000 and $1m. The two management companies look after common areas of the Doonbeg resort, with residents paying an annual property service charge, which is about €12,000 a year.
There is no detail of any income from the sale of houses on the resort. Trump's organisation only owns a small number of the 75 properties in Doonbeg, which change hands up to €1m. Almost all of the cottage are owned by Doonbeg members.
Some are leased back to the hotel which rents them to holiday makers. The filings also show income from a number of people paying rent at the resort, with the amounts varying from €10,000 to €13,000.
The income at Trump's Turnberry golf resort in Scotland is listed as being just over £24m (€28m). The resort is also given a value of in excess of $50m.
The income from his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida is given as $50.1m. The US president also declares royalties from the television show The Apprentice, with the value said to be 'not readily ascertainable', and there is a royalty of between $50,000 and $100,000 coming from his book The Art of the Deal.
A cryptocurrency wallet virtual Ethereum key is also declared, with a value of between $1m and $5m.
Trump bought the Doonbeg resort out of receivership in 2014. The package included the Greg Norman designed golf course, the hotel and seven suites. A subsequent report from the receivers revealed that he had paid about €8.7m. A further €30m has been invested by the Trump organisation.
The resort, which provides employment for about 350 people and is said to be worth about €10m a year to the local economy, has been given a boost by Trump's re-election to the presidency last November. US golfers are said to be joining in record numbers, paying €25,000 each.
The last accounts for Trump International Golf Limited Ireland Enterprises, for 2023, showed that operating profits had more than doubled to €2.06m, in what was a record year for the business. Revenues were up 12pc from €14.36 to €16.12m.

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• Irish Examiner

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And a third that relates to the United States itself, or at least to the idea of the United States, to its possibilities, which are not defined by Trump, by the latest military action, or by Infantino. Most obviously, if you leave the stage you abandon the argument to the other person. Dissent remains a useful commodity. However pointless, ineffective and landlocked the process of pointing out the flaws and contradictions may have become, it is necessary to keep doing so. Qatar 2022 was a dictator show that simply sailed above the criticisms. But someone, however minor, has to make them, to offer at least some kind of counter-view. No-platforming an autocrat's show makes no sense on a basic level. These people would prefer you weren't there in any case. Whereas in reality the people platforming and enabling Trump and Infantino are not journalists trying to give another version of events, but the people who keep voting them into power, friendly dictators, subservient football associations and client media who will be present whatever happens. Fifa and its Saudi-backed broadcast partner Dazn are glossing up an army of in-house influencers and content-wanglers to generate a wall of approving noise. Is it healthy if these are the only voices at the show? Shouting into a void may have little effect. But you still have to shout. Second, football does still have a value that steps outside the normal rules of show and spectacle. This is why it is coveted, courted and used like a weapon. Last week these pages carnied a logical, entirely legitimate wider view, written by two academics from City University New York, which concluded that a boycott was not just an option but 'necessary'. At the same time, the article defined the football World Cup as something that basically has no value, 'spectacles of recreation designed to distract people from their day-to-day lives, cultural and political branding opportunities for their hosts. For authoritarians, they have long been used as a tool to distract from or launder stains of human rights violations and corruption.' Which is definitely true. But it also reads like a vision of sport defined by the most joyless version of AI invented. Under this version of events no World Cup or Olympics would have taken place, because they are essentially worthless, home only to malevolent actors, lacking any notion of colour, human spirt, joy, art, beauty or connection. Who knows, maybe this is accurate now. It is undeniably true that the idea of football as a collective people's game is fairly absurd. Fans of football clubs struggle with this state of cognitive dissonance on a daily basis, the contrast of legacy identity and hard commercial reality. Liverpool are a community club owned by a US hedge fund. Manchester City see themselves as outsiders and underdogs, and are also owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family. Football is the enemy these days. But both sides of this are important, because without that emotional connection, without the act of faith that enables the warm, human part, everything becomes diminished, all our institutions toxic shells. To give up is to abandon sport for ever to the dictators and the sales people, to say, yeah, this just belongs to you now. No-platforming something that still means connection and culture and history. Are we ready for that yet? There will be another version of the present at some point. The final point is about the US, a deeply divided and unhappy place right now, and a much-derided host nation, not least by members of its own populace. What has it been like here? The evidence is that an actual World Cup is going to be very hard to negotiate, spread over vast spaces, with baffling travel times, unreliable infrastructure, and a 24-hour attention industry that is already busy gorging on every other spectacle available to the human race. The US has a reputation for peerless razzmatazz around public events. And while this is undeniably true with cultural spectacles it invented – rock'n'roll, presidential races, galactic shopping malls, enormous food, rural tornadoes, its own continental-scale sports – the US's version of other people's specialities, from cheese to professional football, can seem a little mannered. But the fact remains the actual games have been quite good. There has been a European-flavoured focus on tickets and empty seats. But 25,000 people on a weekday to watch Chelsea in an ill-defined game is decent evidence of willingness to stage this thing and develop the market. The dismay at 3,500 turning up to Mamelodi Sundowns v Ulsan HD in Orlando overlooks the upside, the fact that 3,500 people actually turned up to Mamelodi Sundowns v Ulsan HD in Orlando. Sundowns get 9,000-odd even at home. How many of their South African fans can afford to travel for this? Fifa, which uses its faux-benevolence cleverly, will point out an African team received $2m (£1.7m) for winning that game. Do we want to develop something or not? BUYING IN: Flamengo's Wallace Yan celebrates after scoring during the Club World Cup Group D soccer match between Flamengo and Chelsea in Philadelphia, Friday, June 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Derik Hamilton) A wider point is that football here is a game beloved of immigrant populations. There is a different kind of warmth, often among people without a platform or the means to make it to the matches so far. The waiter who adores Cristiano Ronaldo. The taxi driver who wants to talk for 40 minutes about Chelsea's wastefulness with academy players. The cop who loves the Colombian national team and is desperate for his son to see them in the flesh. As for the US itself, it still feels like false equivalence to state that this is now an actual dictatorship, a lost land, a place that doesn't deserve this show because of its flaws and structural violence. This has always been a pretty brutal nation, human life as a constant pressure wave, mainlining heat and light into your veins, but also always taking a bite. The opening week in Miami captured this feeling, football's most hungrily transactional event staged on a sunken green peninsula, a place where the sea seems to be punching holes in the land, but which is still constantly throbbing with life and warmth and beautiful things. There is a nostalgic attachment to the idea of the US for people of a certain age, 20th-century holdovers, brought up on its flaws and imperialism, but also its culture and brilliance. But for the visitor America does seem in a worse state than it did 20 years ago. There is an unhappiness, a more obvious underclass, a sense of neglected parts and surfaces. All the things that were supposed to be good – cars, plenitude, markets, voting, empowerment, civil rights, cultural unity, all the Cokes being good and all the Cokes being the same – seem to have gone bad. But this is also a democracy with an elected leader, albeit one with a lust for executive power and some sinister tendencies. Mainly the US seems to have a massive self-loathing problem. Perhaps you can say it is correct in this, that Trump is enacting actual harms. But Trump is also a symptom of that alienation and perceived decline. He's an algorithm-driven apparition. Say his name enough times and this cartoon will appear. America remains a great, messy, dangerous, flawed idea of a place. What else is the world currently offering? This is in any case where football will now live for the next year, an unquestioning supplicant in the form of its own autocratic leader. The game is not an indestructible product. It can be stretched thin and ruined by greed, is already at war with itself in many key places. It will at some point be necessary to pay the ferryman, even as the US is packed away a year from now and the sails set at Fifa House for all corners of the globe and then Saudi Arabia. However stormy the prospects, it is not quite the moment to abandon this ship for good. The Guardian

RTÉ News​

5 hours ago

• RTÉ News​

Putin's counter-narratives and stalled talks

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Since returning to the White House in January, Mr Trump has repeatedly said that the conflict is "Biden's war". Mr Trump has also repeatedly claimed that the war would not have started if he had been president. On this hypothetical point, Mr Putin, is now in agreement too. "Indeed, had Trump been the president, perhaps this conflict would not have happened. I fully acknowledge that possibility," said the Russian leader during the same press event on Thursday in St Petersburg. What Mr Putin really means is: the Biden administration opposed Russia's demands to subjugate Ukraine, whereas Mr Trump, had he been the US president in the months leading up to February 2022, would have been more likely to pressure Ukraine to give in to Russia's demands. For his part, Mr Trump blames another former US President, Barack Obama, also a Democrat, for not dealing with Russia a decade ago. At the G7 meeting in the Canadian Rockies earlier this week, he said the war in Ukraine would not have happened if Russia had still been a member of the club, or G8 as it was known. (Russia was kicked out of the G8 in 2014 after its illegal annexation of Crimea). Despite Mr Trump's claims about how he could have averted the war from starting had he been president, he has failed in his promise to end it quickly since returning to the White House in January. It was always an unrealistic pledge. To its credit, the US, aided by Turkey, managed to get both Ukraine and Russia to hold two sets of brief, but direct talks in Istanbul in May, albeit at a low diplomatic level. Getting Ukraine to the table was never an issue. As early as the second week of March, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had said his country was ready to sign up to a US proposal to a 30-day unconditional ceasefire. The barrier to any ceasefire deal has been Russia, which has repeatedly rejected the US and European-backed ceasefire proposal. Those two sets of direct talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations last month in Istanbul have delivered large-scale prisoner exchanges, humanitarian gestures that do just about enough to keep the US engaged in the process. But otherwise, the talks are at a standstill. Russia is talking about a third set of direct talks, but the Ukrainian side say they have heard nothing from Moscow. Yesterday, at the same conference in St Petersburg, Mr Putin said, as he has done previously, that he considers Russians and Ukrainians to be "one people". "In that sense the whole of Ukraine is ours," he said. That statement shows that Russia's position has not changed since it launched the war. It still disregards Ukraine's sovereignty, although Mr Putin also says that Russia is not seeking Ukraine's capitulation. According to Ukraine's first deputy foreign minister Serhii Kyslytsia, during the second meeting in Instanbul, the head of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, described the war as "Russians killing Russians". Mr Medinsky, an ultranationalist historian, has previously questioned the existence of the Ukrainian and Mr Putin's decision to appoint him as the head of the Russian delegation is a clear signal that Moscow has no intention to negotiate. "The talks in Istanbul have demonstrated that Russia has no interest in pursuing peace and is pursuing its maximalist demands," Peter Dickinson, a Kyiv-based editor of the Atlantic Council's Ukraine Alert, told RTÉ News. Instead of pursuing peace, Russia, emboldened by a lack of pressure from the US to end the war, is intensifying its drone and missile assaults on Ukrainian cities. Last Tuesday morning's deadly Russian drone and missile assault on Kyiv – a nine-hour assault and the largest so far this year – killed 30 people and injured more than 170. Twenty-three of the victims, a death toll that included children, were residents of a 9-storey block of flats in the city's western suburb of Solomianskyi. It was struck by a Russian missile. "I think people in Kyiv are very alarmed about the rising number of attacks," said Mr Dickinson. "There's a feeling that people are sitting ducks". This week, Mr Putin also said that he was willing to meet with Mr Zelensky during a final phase of negotiations. However, he quickly followed that statement by questioning the legitimacy of Mr Zelensky's presidency – a long-running Kremlin propaganda narrative that Mr Trump briefly bought into back in March, wrongly labelling the Ukrainian president as "a dictator without elections". Russia argues that Ukraine must hold new presidential elections given that Mr Zelensky's term as president officially ended in May 2024. It was the stuff of more counter-narrative fantasy. Mr Zelensky is a democratically elected leader whereas Russia's elections are rigged like a piece of scripted theatre. While Mr Putin continues his counter-narratives and Russia continues its attacks, Ukraine is still pursuing its strategy of calling for a ceasefire first before there is any talk over territorial issues. Mr Zelensky had arrived in the Canadian Rockies for the G7 meeting on Tuesday - the same day that Russia launched its massive drone and missile on Kyiv - hoping to get some face time with Mr Trump. But his long journey had been in vain. Mr Trump had left early to deal with the escalating situation in the Middle East, according to the White House. And so Mr Zelensky ended up meeting his European partners (plus Canada's new PM Mark Carney), just as he could have done in Europe. Mr Trump's departure may have been a coincidence but, either way, it demonstrated just how low down Ukraine features on the US president's list of priorities. "As of now, no productive talks are possible," said Oleksandr Kraiev, a Ukrainian foreign policy expert at the Ukrainian Prism thinktank in Kyiv. The West, he argues, needs to considering targeting Russia's trading partners in Asia, particularly China, with "proper second-grade sanctions" in order to pressure Moscow to stop the war. "The idea from the Ukrainian side is to find a new format that could change the pressure on Russia," said Mr Kraeiv. That new diplomatic format would need Europe to play more of a role in pressuring Russia to seriously negotiate given the Trump administration's reluctance to introduce new sanctions on Moscow. But more than a month after the leaders of France, Germany, Poland and the UK travelled to Kyiv and gave Russia a 48-hour ultimatum to agree to a ceasefire (or face new sanctions and increased military aid to Kyiv), the steam seems to have run out of European efforts to up the pressure on Russia. Mr Putin had torpedoed that ultimatum by offering direct talks in Istanbul, which Mr Trump approved. 'The Coalition of the Willing', a British and French-led initiative to shore up support for a European peace monitoring force in a post-war scenario, has gone quiet too, perhaps waiting for the outcome of this week's NATO annual summit in The Hague. Crucially, it also lacked US support. "The question now is how do you get Russia to be interested in peace," said Mr Dickinson, who believes it's "futile" to expect the US to make the breakthrough. "Now it's up to Europe to step up and take action but there is still no political will".