Padraig Harrington is not playing a stranger’s golf course this week. He tees off at the Trump International Golf Links in Doonbeg for the 2026 Amgen Irish Open, and with that he will be walking a piece of turf he has a personal history with. Harrington played the ceremonial match for the course in 2022, going up against its designer, Greg Norman. But he has not played it competitively since. Now, 24 years and a full design later, he is back with a clear verdict on how much the place has changed.

Asked directly about the transformation, Harrington did not soften his answer.

“It was interesting, Buddy Darby, Kiowa Island. They are the guys who developed it with Greg. You know, if I designed the golf course, I would have never got another job again because it was so crazy and funky, but it was brilliant for a links golf course,” Harrington said. “It was exactly if you were going to design a links golf course that was never going to host a tournament, but people were going to come and play. It was perfect. It was really quirky, crazy things, crisscrossing holes, bunkers, and greens. You could be on the green and couldn’t see the pin.”

“Obviously, since then, and especially since Trump has taken over the ownership, it’s turned into a tournament golf course. It softened up a lot of things and brought things into being a bit, I suppose you would use another word, fairer, but certainly more standardized and competitive golf. The course that we played in 2002, that was crazy, brilliant crazy, but as I said, it was fun. Somewhere you’d like to go and play with your mates, but you couldn’t have played a championship tournament on it. And certainly this one is very compared to the old one. It’s just completely toned down, softened down, and very pleasant to play.”

Notably, here Harrington is speaking from a rare vintage point. Few players in this week’s field can compare Doonbeg’s two lives because few have played it before the rebuild.

To understand what Harrington means by crazy, it helps to see what actually stood on the land before Trump officials bought it in 2014. Norman’s original Doonbeg, opened in July 2002, was built on a least-disturbance philosophy, barely moving any earth so the course sat directly in century-old dunes, and that produced genuinely wild features. For instance, a doughnut-shaped green on the 12th, with a bunker sitting in the middle of the putting surface.

Moreover, blind approach shots were where players couldn’t see the pin from the fairway. Additionally, tees that hit directly over greens on adjoining holes. Norman himself later admitted the design leaned into drama over practicality, choosing spectacle even when it meant awkward routing, because the site was too good to play it safe.

The turning point came in the winter of 2013-14 during a string of Atlantic storms. Storm Darwin specifically tore the course and damaged 5, 6, 9, 14, and 18 holes, even wiping out the original par-3 14th entirely. After that instance, the Trump Organization bought the property in February 2014 for a reported figure north of £10 million.

The organization brought architect Martin Hawtree to rebuild it, and the project ran roughly two years. He redesigned all eighteen greens, rerouting several holes and removing spots, more polarizing quirks. The donut, 12th green, for instance, disappeared. The fourteenth hole was rebuilt at a different angle, along with the course this time. Even runoff areas replaced Norman’s deep rough around several greens. The aim for those changes was to repair what the storms had destroyed and turn the course, built for holiday golfers, into one that could stand a professional field.

That’s exactly the trade-off Harrington is describing when he calls the new version ‘fairer’ but far less ‘crazy.’

Doonbeg Is Not the First Trump-Owned Course to Go Through a Revamp

Doonbeg follows a pattern Trump has used before. In 2014, he also purchased Turnberry in Scotland, a course that’s hosted four Open Championships in its history. He brought in architect Martin Ebert to overhaul it. The course reopened in 2016 after mounds of work that moved greens and tees closer to the coastline and rebuilt several holes from scratch. The changes were widely praised on their merits. Since then, Turnberry has continued to see fresh rounds of renovations, most recently in 2024 and 2025.

But the architecture was never the real story at Turnberry. In 2021, the R&A removed it from the Open Championship rota entirely, with chief executive Martin Slumbers saying the governing body would not return until it was convinced attention would stay on the championship, the players, and the course itself rather than on Trump. That is the shadow now hanging over Doonbeg as it hosts its first Irish Open. Rory McIlroy has said he has no issue playing the venue, but protests are planned in Dublin and County Clare this week around Trump’s expected visit. Moreover, the course has already been vandalized twice by pro-Palestinian demonstrators in the past 18 months.

For now, how the week goes for the players with the changed tunes remains to be seen.