Colin Sheridan: Irish golf is having a moment, we must preserve it so that everyone can enjoy it
Shane Lowry during the pro-am on Wednesday ahead of the Amgen Irish Open Golf Championship 2026 at Trump International Golf Links in Doonbeg, Clare. The camera loves Irish links golf. Photo: Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile
From spring until well into autumn, they emerge from the transatlantic flights: groups of American golfers shepherding enormous travel bags through arrivals before disappearing into equally enormous coaches waiting outside.
The windows are often tinted, the itinerary usually punishing. Lahinch today, Ballybunion tomorrow, perhaps Tralee, Waterville, Doonbeg, Carne or Enniscrone after that.
For several months, the west coast of Ireland operates one of the world's great golfing pilgrimages. And right now, Irish golf is having quite a moment.
Last weekend, 8,000 spectators a day crowded into Lahinch as the Walker Cup produced a finish bordering on sporting theatre. Great Britain and Ireland, three points down entering Sunday's singles, somehow overturned the United States to win 13½-12½, the contest decided on the final green of the final match.
But the golf was only part of it.
Lahinch itself was central to the spectacle: a town of little more than 1,000 people wrapped around one of the world's great links courses, spectators following players through wind and rain, the fairways running towards the town and the Atlantic beyond.
This weekend, the circus has moved down the Clare coast.
The Irish Open is at Doonbeg, bringing another international audience to another spectacular stretch of Atlantic linksland. Donald Trump bought the resort in 2014; his expected arrival as US president brings a quite different dynamic to proceedings.
But Doonbeg existed before Trump, and Irish links golf will endure long after this weekend's motorcades have gone home. Because Ireland possesses an almost absurd concentration of extraordinary golf courses.
Royal County Down, Portrush, Ballybunion, Lahinch, Portmarnock, Waterville, Old Head, Carne, Enniscrone, Tralee and the remarkable St Patrick's Links at Rosapenna form a sort of diamond-encrusted crown around the island.
There are magnificent parkland courses too, but links golf is the thing that sets us apart.
Golf writer Tom Coyne understood the obsession earlier than most. For his book , the Philadelphia-based writer walked around the Irish coastline playing every seaside course he encountered.
The book became something approaching a bible for American golfers contemplating the same pilgrimage, albeit usually by luxury coach rather than on foot.
Years later, after playing his way across his own country for , Coyne was asked by the how the two golfing landscapes compared.
There was still “no American equivalent to the dunes of Carne”, he said, nor to Lahinch, “where such extraordinary golf flows into the heart of a town”.
That phrase feels particularly resonant after last weekend, because the course and the place are not really separable.
Coyne is hardly alone. One of the more interesting developments in golf over the past decade has been the emergence of an entire online travel culture around the game. YouTube films and podcasts now send golfers around the world in search not simply of famous courses, but golfing experiences worth travelling for.
Few places have benefited quite like Ireland. No Laying Up, the influential American golf media platform, devoted an entire season of its Tourist Sauce travel series to this country. Its crew travelled through Doonbeg, Lahinch, Ballybunion, Dooks, Waterville and Tralee before heading north to Carne, County Sligo and Enniscrone.
They even began with Doolin Pitch & Putt. Chris “Soly” Solomon, one of No Laying Up's founders, has subsequently described his first proper exposure to Irish links golf as something approaching a conversion.
Portmarnock left him “completely flabbergasted and blown away”. But it was a later trip through the West with his father that seems to have lodged deepest.
He recalled the one-lane roads, farms and fields, houses and little towns and the sensation of moving further from the ordered golfing world he knew at home. It felt like travelling to “the ends of the earth to play golf”.
They walked. They played shots along the ground. The sun occasionally appeared. They met people and drank Guinness afterwards. Solomon couldn't remember what he scored. The golf was unforgettable. The score? Who cares.
Golf tourism once relied upon the mythology of Ballybunion and Waterville being passed between generations of golfers. Today that mythology is transmitted in 4K.
And the camera loves Irish links golf. It loves the scale of the dunes at Carne, the Atlantic suddenly appearing beyond a fairway, a ball disappearing over a ridge whose other side the golfer cannot see. It loves horizontal rain and golfers laughing at the absurdity of calculating a club into an Atlantic gale.
At Carne, Solomon settled on the word “raw”. It felt, in the old golfing ideal, more discovered than designed. That is difficult for a golf resort to manufacture because, in Ireland, much of it was never manufactured in the first place.
The road there matters. The village matters. The clubhouse and caddie matter. The pub afterwards matters.
There is, however, an uncomfortable qualification to all this. Increasingly, you can play Ireland's greatest courses — if you can afford them.
The explosion in international golf tourism has transformed the economics of the country's elite courses. Portmarnock Golf Club's standard visitor fee this year is €475. At Rosapenna in Donegal, St Patrick's Links costs €350 for a standard visitor, while substantially cheaper rates are available to qualifying Irish golfers.
has described an “almost insatiable wanderlust” among overseas golfers for Ireland, driven particularly by affluent North Americans. There is an obvious economic logic to accommodating it.
More than 220,000 international golfers visit Ireland annually and golf tourism is estimated to be worth more than €300 million. North Americans are particularly valuable visitors, staying longer and spending heavily.
A golf tourist typically spends around three times as much as an ordinary leisure visitor, much of it outside the golf course on accommodation, transport, food and drink.
Those buses outside Shannon Airport matter. They mean drivers, caddies, hotel rooms, restaurant tables and jobs in parts of rural Ireland where economic opportunities cannot be taken for granted.
Nor is price necessarily the same thing as value. Ireland's greatest courses have arguably spent years charging considerably less than comparable elite destinations elsewhere.
Perhaps Irish golf has simply realised what the rest of the world believes it is worth. The danger would be misunderstanding what those visitors believe they are paying for.
They are not crossing the Atlantic because Ireland has succeeded in recreating American golf beside the Atlantic Ocean. They come because we haven't.
The greatest Irish links remain gloriously peculiar. The wind matters. The rain matters. The dunes matter. The awkward bounce matters. Walking matters. The town outside the gate matters.
So does finishing a round and finding a pub rather than another wing of a resort. That authenticity has become an extraordinarily valuable commodity.
The more valuable Irish golf becomes internationally, however, the stronger the argument that some of that dividend should be measured in access: affordable domestic rates, protected tee times, junior programmes and pathways into a sport that should never retreat behind gates marked exclusively for those able to pay.
Golf in America can become as much status symbol and real-estate proposition as sport. Ireland should be wary of following it there.
Because the great achievement of Irish golf isn't simply that Americans have discovered how good our courses are. It is that some of the finest courses on earth still belong, geographically and emotionally, to the places around them.
Lahinch demonstrated that beautifully last weekend. Doonbeg is demonstrating another version of it this weekend.
The world has fallen in love with Irish golf.
The challenge now is making sure that, in accommodating that love affair, Irish golf doesn't become something the rest of us can only afford to admire.
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