Everything seemed primed for President Donald Trump to get his ballroom.
No, not that ballroom. His other ballroom.
Across the Atlantic, in the tiny village of Doonbeg, where the Trump International Golf Links & Hotel rises above the dunes of a wind-swept beach, the president and his family had promised to build “the nicest ballroom in Ireland” — a grand edifice that would extend across 12,000 square feet and seat 320 guests at 42 tables.
And unlike in Washington, where Trump’s push to fast-track a grandiose White House ballroom set off a political and legal fight that has now reached the Supreme Court, the population of Doonbeg, which hovers around 300, had lined up behind the project.
In a letter to the local planning commission, a local pub owner said it would halt the village’s decline. Another resident said it would create jobs and bring in offseason tourism. A statement by the Doonbeg Football Club called the golf resort “not just a business … but an integral part of our community.”
Even the snail lobby had been appeased.
Questions over the fate of the threatened Vertigo angustior snail — a microscopic mollusk nestled in Doonbeg’s sandy dunes — had bedeviled the golf property even before the Trump Organization owned it. But in February, the commission approved the ballroom provided the Trumps offer a snail restoration plan.
“The ballroom,” said Rita McInerney, a Doonbeg resident and member of the Clare County council, had become “part of the community’s vision.”
The jubilation, however, was quickly cut short.
Days after the February approval, a lone appeal was lodged by Liam Madden, a hermetic figure notorious for blocking hundreds if not thousands of development projects across Ireland, including a previous expansion plan in Doonbeg. Impervious to shaming or calls for decency, he once stirred such rage that a foe attacked him with a blowtorch.
“Please,” Madden urged the appellate board, “refuse this nonsense.”
Trump’s other ballroom was stalled.
How to torpedo a project
Madden is a tall man with white hair who lives in a historic house behind a thick stone wall in the Irish village of Longford. He owns no cell phone. He has no website. No social media accounts. The only way to find him is either through his malfunctional landline or an email address that identifies him, in Latin, as the “Irish Vitruvius.”
And yet, people across this country know the name Liam Madden.
When confronted by bothersome development projects, the Irish over the years have turned to this quarrelsome and punctilious man for his ability to torpedo plans. He is what many in Ireland call a “serial objector” — someone who makes a living by appealing planning commission decisions. Madden, however, bristles at that classification.
Instead, when he’s feeling reticent, he describes himself as “the most successful appellant in the history of the Irish state.” At other times, including in interviews with the Washington Post, he referred to himself as a “god,” a “hero,” a “celebrity.”
“There simply isn’t anyone better,” he said. “It’s a scientific fact.”
“I’m modest as well,” Madden, 76, added. “That’s one of my failings.”
His profession is an unintended outgrowth of Ireland’s wildly permissive planning appellate system. In most of Europe and the Americas, a person typically needs to legally demonstrate some stake — financial, geographic or otherwise — to gum up a project with an objection. Ireland has taken a different tack.
All anyone has to do to file an appeal — and trigger a monthslong review by An Coimisiún Pleanála, the national appellate planning board — is submit a preliminary “observation” and pay a nominal fee. Appellants don’t have to be Irish. Or even in Ireland.
“There’s no such thing as too much democracy,” reasoned Lorcan Sirr, a housing analyst at Technological University Dublin.
The system increasingly has become a matter of national controversy. Developers complain that it’s an impediment to progress, vulnerable to abuse and fueling a cottage industry of serial objectors, some of whom have used appeals to extract payments from developers. In 2024, lawmakers proposed reforms.
Madden, who’s never been accused of such improprieties, looks at other serial objectors as a lesser form of the species. He said he would never profane his craft with profit-seeking. What motivates him is the pleasure of winning — identifying even the smallest legal violations to bedevil his adversaries.
That, and bald-faced publicity. “I’m perpetually seeking notoriety,” he said.
So in January, while flipping through the papers, he saw what he recalled as a “golden opportunity.” In Doonbeg, roughly three hours from Madden’s house by car, Eric Trump had proclaimed his intent to build the “nicest ballroom in Ireland.”
Madden knew then what he must do.
“If there is a God in heaven,” he declared one July evening, “I will win the planning appeals and capitalize on it for notoriety.”
A village praying for a golf course
Doonbeg was in trouble. As the 1990s drew to a close, the shoreline village, whose history dated to at least the 1500s, was fading.
“We weren’t poor in community,” said Tommy Comerford, a fifth-generation Doonbeg resident. “But we were poor in jobs and opportunities to keep our young people.”
The community pitched the European Regional Development Fund on a golf course — and won financing for it. Designed by famed golfer Greg Norman, the Doonbeg Golf Club opened in 2002, just as the local population fell to 206.
Busloads of golf tourists from the United States and Canada were soon rolling in. Seasonal employment at the club — which quickly added a luxury hotel and events space — grew to 300 people. Residents who’d left were coming back.
“The golf resort is so important to us,” said Seoirse Comerford, 52, who returned to take over the family pub.
But the resort could not turn a profit. By 2011, it had lost a reported $70 million. In January 2014, it was put up for sale, and worry spread through Doonbeg.
“It was like, ‘Oh my God, 300 jobs — gone,’” said Caroline O’Brien, a resident.
A savior, however, quickly arrived: an American buyer named Donald Trump. He touched down at Shannon Airport in May 2014 and immediately declared his plans for the resort.
“One of the main reasons I’m here is siting the ballroom,” Trump said. “A truly great ballroom. I believe people from all over the world will be using this ballroom.”
‘I’ll be a friend to the snail’
Shortly after the sale’s announcement, an Irish environmentalist named Tony Lowes got a call from Trump.
“I’ll be a friend to the snail,” Lowes recalled Trump declaring.
Questions over the threatened Vertigo angustior, a fickle creature with exacting ecological needs, had long troubled the golf course. Even before it was built, Lowes’s Friends of the Irish Environment had filed a lawsuit to protect the snail. A judge ordered that the snail’s lot be “maintained or improved” and a settlement agreement even allowed for the appointment of a snail expert as a sort of steward.
For years, the snail thrived, and Trump promised to sustain its roll.
But Lowes said the Trumps haven’t kept their word, and the snail’s population has plunged. Shortly after they bought the resort, the snail expert was dismissed. (The expert didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Then, in 2016, the Trumps proposed building a 1.7-mile rock barrier wall along Doughmore Bay Beach to forestall shoreline erosion and protect the links from storm damage.
Environmentalists said the plan, even after it was scaled down, would alter the dunes’ delicate alchemy and doom the snail. To block construction, Friends of the Irish Environment filed an appeal with the national planning board. At its side, with his own appeal, was Liam Madden.
The board decided against the Trumps. Madden basked in glory.
Comparing himself to Saint Patrick, Madden at the time said he’d drive Trump “out of Ireland” like a “snake.”
The making of a serial objector
When he graduated from architecture school in 1973, Madden said he wanted only an architect’s life. But the planning system was so integral to his work that he immersed himself in planning law and, upon submitting his first appeals, realized, “I was very good at it.”
During the mid-1990s, as Ireland experienced a building boom, people began seeking out Madden for his unusual acumen. Some wanted him to clear a project’s way. Others wanted the opposite. He became friend and foe to developers.
“He had a nickname among developers: the ‘Condom Man,’” said Irish federal senator Joe Flaherty. “You’d use him once, and then throw him out.”
Most of Madden’s work was done in obscurity. But his name nonetheless often rose to public notice.
First came a political campaign in 2004 against a candidate also named Liam Madden, for nothing more than what Madden called “devilment.” Then he stalled a project by the Gaelic Athletic Association, which is Ireland’s largest sporting organization, until it apologized to him over a decades-old grievance.
In 2013, Madden delayed the reopening of St. Mel’s Cathedral, a massive church that suffered a devastating fire, by objecting to a glass elevator that he alleged would offend the “modesty” of “Scotsmen visiting in their kilts.”
The town was furious.
“It was hugely emotional for the town,” Flaherty said. “It was two middle fingers to the local community.”
The attention only spurred Madden on. He objected to a fast food development. He objected to converting an abandoned factory into a car auction site. He objected to Trump’s barrier wall. And he objected to UFC legend Conor McGregor’s bid to build a boutique hotel, challenging him to a “bare-knuckle fight.”
Louis Herterich, a longtime client, said most people simply didn’t get Madden. “He’s just different,” Herterich said. “His god is being right and getting it right and winning.”
Flaherty added: “Nobody in their right mind would want to be Liam Madden — the criticism, the open contempt — but he relishes it.”
In a way, the two men said, they almost felt sorry for Trump.
“Even if he loses,” Flaherty said, “he’ll just find something else and keep going at it.”
A fatal error?
To Madden, there is no way he’ll lose — not this one.
“I’ve caught them with their pants down,” he said while beaming one July evening.
He returned to the snail — this time focused on helicopters. The Trump Organization, a promotional video indicated, allows guests to be ferried in and out by helicopter. In materials published online, an aviation company, Executive Helicopters, said it has two “heli landings” at the resort, one by the hotel and one on the golf course.
To Madden, this was a “fatal error”: The Trump Organization neither mentioned the helicopters nor sought to measure their ecological impact. The ballroom proposal thus was “tainted at law and beyond remedy,” he wrote.
Plus, Madden wrote, “Would our poor little Vertigo Angustior survive?”
The Trump organization didn’t respond to a request for comment. Golf course manager Joe Russel declined to comment. Executive Helicopters didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Geraint Ellis, an expert on Irish planning law who reviewed the appeal at The Post’s request, said Madden’s objection wasn’t frivolous. “Mr. Madden seems to have found some issues that are worthy of further scrutiny,” Ellis said.
As word spread of the objection, Doonbeg residents reacted with outrage. The golf resort had nothing to do with Trump, resident Rita McInerney said. Doonbeg started the resort, and will rise or fall with its fortune. How could a single outsider with nothing at stake kick up such trouble?
“Ludicrous,” she said.
“Disgraceful,” agreed Seoirse Comerford.
“Totally unfair,” added Tommy Comerford.
In Washington, the White House ballroom is well underway. Foundational construction has started. The $900 million, 90,000-square-foot structure is coming into focus, including new details like gold-colored presidential seals. The Supreme Court is expected to rule this week, potentially giving it a green light.
But in Ireland, where the national appellate board is expected to rule by year’s end, Liam Madden insists the other ballroom will never be approved.
“Joe Biden beat Donald Trump once,” he said. “I’ve beaten him twice.”
