Irish Government Says Trump's Ireland Visit Has Been Canceled

A planned November trip to Ireland that President Donald Trump was scheduled to take has been canceled, an Irish government official told HuffPost on Tuesday, but the White House said it’s still a possibility.

“I can confirm that the proposed visit of the US President is postponed,” wrote Laura Durkan, a press officer with the Irish prime minister’s office. “The US side has cited scheduling reasons.”

But White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters on Tuesday that no final decision had been made. 

“The president will travel to Paris in November as previously announced,” she said. “We are still finalizing whether Ireland will be a stop on that trip. As details are confirmed, we will let you know.”

The visit to Ireland, announced by the White House  in early September, was scheduled to be combined with Trump’s trip to Paris to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the ending of World War I.

Several Irish political parties vowed to protest  Trump’s visit by staging massive demonstrations similar to the fierce display from tens of thousands of people in the United Kingdom that greeted him in July.

“Donald Trump ’s administration champions policies that are destroying our planet, destabilising international order, and reaching new political depths by appealing to racism, misogyny, xenophobia and hatred,” Irish Green Party leader Eamon Ryan wrote  in a statement urging people to reject Trump’s visit. “These policies do not reflect the Irish people’s values we need to show him and the world that this is not normal.”

In addition to visiting the Irish capital of Dublin, Trump was expected to travel to a golf course he bought in County Clare in 2014. Irish officials gave Trump the go-ahead in 2016 to build a wall around the golf course to protect it from increasingly dangerous storms and rising sea levels. Scientists say those threats are the consequence of something for which Trump has firmly rejected government planning: climate change.