On the eve of Donald Trump’s visit to Ireland, gardaí are planning a complex security operation, protesters are drawing up their placards and Government Ministers are practising their best rictus grins.

The US president will be here for the Irish Open, hosted this year by the resort he owns at Doonbeg, Co Clare. He will be welcomed in the village, where, as we reported last week, many residents are willing to forgive – or mentally put aside – his more egregious acts and policies if it means the local economy can continue to thrive. Many more, including columnist Justine McCarthy, will be demonstrating against the presence of a man who remains singularly unpopular in Ireland. When we polled people earlier this year on whether they approved of inviting Trump to Ireland for the Irish Open, a clear majority of 61 per cent said No.

Dan Mulhall, a former Irish ambassador to Washington, reminds us of the coping strategies that different countries have chosen when hosting Trump. Nato’s Mark Rutte called him “Daddy”. Qatar gave him a jet. Friedrich Merz presented him with his German-born grandfather’s birth certificate.

The welcome extended by Taoiseach Micheál Martin and his Ministers will reflect their general diplomatic approach to the Trump presidency: do nothing to jeopardise American investment in Ireland but say nothing that would imply approval for his politics or his personal morality. Martin was widely adjudged to have struck this balance at the Oval Office for St Patrick’s Day, when he cheerfully fact-checked Trump in front of the cameras. Mulhall, a career insider, neatly summarises the official thinking. “Most countries aspire to a quiet life with him,” Mulhall writes, “hoping to sit out these years with their interests intact.”

Perhaps the most closely-watched encounter of Trump’s visit will be his meeting with President Catherine Connolly at Áras an Uachtaráin. It’s the subject of Pat Leahy’s analysis. Connolly, a left-wing former TD, has had a lot to say about Trump, none of it complimentary. The US president is known to have mentioned Connolly only once, when a reporter asked him about critical comments by Connolly on his war in the Middle East. “Look, he’s lucky I exist,” Trump replied, appearing not to know the first thing about Connolly.

“If Connolly does want to confront Trump, she will have enough opportunity to do so,” writes Leahy. “How the famously mercurial Trump would respond is anyone’s guess.”

One of Connolly’s rivals in last year’s presidential election, Heather Humphreys, has written a thought-provoking piece on the sectarian abuse she received during that campaign and what it tells us about the prospect of reconciliation on the island. Humphreys, a Presbyterian from the Border region, believes her identity was weaponised against her, exposing “an undercurrent of something we can’t ignore”.

“My family have been in this country for hundreds of years – longer than the United States has existed – yet I was depicted as a lesser Irish person because of my cultural background and religion. My Irishness and commitment to this country were questioned because of my background. Even though we are all Irish citizens and hold Irish passports, I was left with painful questions about whether there is a hierarchy of Irishness.”

Elsewhere in Opinion, Cliff Taylor shows that there is no cost-of-living crisis for Ireland’s quietly prosperous class; Emma Howard regrets that the Government’s regressive investment scheme will be of no benefit to the least well-off; and Mark O’Connell salutes one of the great postmodernists, Enoch Burke.

Data centres – the subject of Fintan O’Toole’s column this week – have become a contentious political issue in the United States. Ireland hosts 10 times the European per capita average of data centres, but until now public opposition has been comparatively muted. As we can see from Órla Ryan’s report of a public meeting in Naas, however, there are rumblings of local revolt.

More than 200 people showed up to a public meeting in the Co Kildare town on Thursday night to oppose plans to build large data centres in the area. “There was a collective gasp in the room when a map on a projector showed the size of the area in Naas that might experience an audible hum if a planned data centre campus is built in the Co Kildare town,” she writes. “‘Jesus,’ one man muttered.”

Katie Taylor brought her remarkable boxing career to an end last night when she defeated the French woman Flora Pili in front of 80,000 people in Croke Park. Malachy Clerkin has an overnight report worthy of the moment.

“This crowd was all Ireland,” he writes. “You had families and couples and gangs of girls and bands of boys, all drawn here like pilgrims. You had Saturday night girlos in Saturday night hair, tottering down Jones’s Road.

“Fellas in Yupbro tracksuits, dudes in chinos with jumpers knotted about their shoulders. Travellers and poshos, grannies and grandkids, Gah heads, rugby heads, soccer heads, all faiths and none. All here for Katie.”

This week, the United States will mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11 – what became the unofficial dividing line between the 20th and 21st centuries. Keith Duggan has a powerful account, told in the words of witnesses and survivors, of the day the twin towers fell from the Manhattan skyline. Some of the stories are haunting, some heartening.

Also in the World section, I’d recommend Derek Scally’s report on today’s election in Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD could become the first radical right party to run a German state since the war.

Finally, take some time this weekend over some of our longer reads, including a selection of Irish women’s birth stories by Shauna Bowers; Karl McDonald’s essay on why Irish people don’t eat fish; this obituary of our former colleague Frank McDonald; and Martin Doyle’s in-depth interview with the novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry.

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