Trump Vows to Scrap Irish Whiskey Tariff as He Wraps Up Ireland Visit

Since Trump landed in Dublin Saturday morning, September 12, for a two-day visit that mixed diplomacy with a stop at his own golf course, the trip closed Sunday with a tariff giveaway and a fresh round of controversy over his comments on Irish unification.

Trump made the whiskey announcement at his Trump International Golf Links resort in Doonbeg, County Clare, while handing the Irish Open trophy to winner Shane Lowry. "Everybody's been bugging me," Trump said, according to the BBC, Daily Wire, CNN and Fox News, all of whom captured nearly identical quotes from the ceremony. "They're saying, would you do me a favor? It's so unfair what's going on. Could you possibly take the tariffs off of Irish whiskey?" He said he agreed "on behalf of the United States of America." The crowd cheered loud enough to drown him out, according to the Daily Wire.

The reporting reveals a discrepancy over the current tariff rate. The Daily Wire and Epoch Times both put it at 15%. CNN and a Reuters report carried by Global Banking and Finance put it at 10%. The discrepancy traces to how the EU-US trade framework actually works. Wine and spirits exports were folded into a 15% tariff under last year's EU-US deal, according to Global Banking and Finance's Reuters reporting, but new tariffs Trump imposed on 60 trading partners in July brought the effective rate down to 10% after the Supreme Court struck down his original tariff structure. Either way, the tariff is going away, according to Trump. No one—not the White House, not the US Trade Representative's office—has confirmed exactly when. CNN said it reached out to USTR for details and got nothing back by publication.

The stakes for Ireland are real. Irish whiskey exports to the US were worth roughly €450 million last year, according to Crypto Briefing, making America the industry's single biggest market. Irish distillers have also sunk an estimated €80 million into US whiskey casks. Irish Whiskey Association director Eoin Ó Catháin welcomed the news in a statement carried by Global Banking and Finance, calling Irish whiskey a cornerstone of the US-Ireland trade relationship and saying the group wants a full return to zero-for-zero tariffs on all drinks exports, not just whiskey.

This follows the same playbook Trump used in April, when he lifted tariffs on all UK-made whiskey, including Scotch and spirits from Northern Ireland, after a state visit from King Charles III and Queen Camilla. That zero-tariff policy on Scotch took effect July 24, according to the Daily Wire. BBC News NI's John Campbell noted a complication: because so many Northern Ireland distillers rely on the Great Northern Distillery in County Louth, in the Republic, to bottle whiskey while their own product matures, some Northern Ireland brands got classified as EU producers instead of UK ones and missed out on the earlier tariff break entirely. Sunday's move fixes that gap for good.

The tariff news landed a day after Trump generated a much rockier headline. Meeting Taoiseach Micheál Martin in Dublin on Saturday, Trump said a united Ireland would be "fantastic" and called merging Northern Ireland with the Republic "one of the naturals of all time." That drew immediate pushback. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said a unity referendum remains off the table, and Democratic Unionist Party leader Gavin Robinson posted on X that unionists have no interest in "the destruction of our country by joining with the Irish Republic," according to Breitbart. The US has traditionally stayed neutral on the question, and any referendum requires the UK government to first determine a Northern Ireland majority favors reunification, per the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

Trump made the tariff announcement standing on a golf course his own family has owned since 2014. CNN noted he became the first sitting president to attend the Irish Open, with Martin himself praising the Trump family's investment in Doonbeg during the same ceremony. No ethics complaint or formal review has been announced over the arrangement, and Trump's defenders would note presidents routinely travel to allied countries and mix statecraft with personal itineraries without it constituting wrongdoing.

Breitbart also reported that protests broke out in Dublin, Doonbeg and Shannon over the weekend, and that Irish authorities mobilized roughly 4,000 police and security personnel for the visit at a reported cost of about €20 million. Trump spent most of the trip inside his own resort, greeted by members chanting "U-S-A" Saturday night.

What happens next is an open question. No source has confirmed when the tariff formally lifts, whether it covers all Irish spirits or whiskey specifically, or how Brussels—which negotiates trade policy for all EU member states, including Ireland—factors into implementation.