Toad-lovers and rip-off merchants risk putting Irish golf in the rough
Although touring professionals are usually too busy to play a course just for the sake of it, many top golfers have made private visits to play Ballybunion.
Watson first asked for permission to play the course in the 1970s. It happened that he asked to play on one of the days of the open week, so the committee cancelled the day’s competitions.
He arrived to find hundreds waiting to watch him play.
Thereafter a visit to Ballybunion became an annual ritual for Watson before the British Open, which he won three times in the 1980s. Commentators depicted his preparations in Ballybunion as part of the secret of his success.
A host of major winners gradually followed, including Jack Nicklaus, Lee Travino, Ben Crenshaw, Nick Faldo, Ian Woosnam and Larry Mize.
They would normally be paid $50,000 or more to play an exhibition round, but they were turning up just to play the links, which is similar to links courses on which the British Open is always played.
American courses, by contrast, tend to be so heavily watered and fertilised that the ball reacts differently when it hits the ground.
One does not normally see the extraordinary amounts of backspin frequently witnessed on American courses.
In 1998, Tiger Woods, already ranked No 1 in the world, arrived in Ballybunion with US Masters champion Mark O’Meara and former US Open winner, the late Payne Stewart. While they were on the course Jim Furyk set out in a fourball with his parents and tour caddy.
Later the same day, Ernie Els, then ranked No 2 in the world, played with his father and two friends.
Between shots Els chatted affably with people and posed repeatedly with the wives and children of camera-carrying spectators. He came because, he said, Tom Watson had told him so much about the course.
By American standards, Ballybunion is a very short course, at 6,593 yards, but it has its own way of biting back. That is what makes it such a challenge for top golfers.
At the 16th — a par 5 measuring 499 yards — Tiger Woods reached the green with a drive and a sand wedge.
He tried to drive the next hole, 385 yards that dog-legs around a big hill. He cleared the hill but went out of bounds on the other side.
Woods went for the hole again at the 379-yard 18th, where the green is on a high plateau. With the wind behind him he drove the plateau, but his ball kicked into a mound short of the green. Locals said it would have made the green if he had the line right.
Those are the kind of shots that people would normally love to see, but top players rarely try to play them in a tournament.
At this year’s British Open, for instance, Woods gave a masterful display of winning with the safe percentage game. Far from taming Ballybunion on that day in 1998, he failed to break par.
Payne Stewart did have a hole-in-one at the 220- yard third, but the difficulty of that hole was underlined when Woods and Els each had a double-bogey five.
There was a lot of talk about Ballybunion among the commentators during the ensuing British Open at Royal Birkdale, especially when Mark O’Meara won, with Woods just a shot behind and Furyk a further shot back.
Indeed, there was so much talk about Irish links courses that they could not accommodate the number of Americans coming to play here.
In order to cut down on the number of visitors to provide playing time for members, some links raised their green fees to levels most Irish golfers consider prohibitive.
From a tourist perspective the logical remedy should have been to increase the number of links courses. But the trendy naturalists stifled the development of such competition.
Arthur Spring, elder brother of former Labour leader Dick Spring, gave up his practice as a doctor to go into golf course design. He designed a nine-hole course in Stradbally, near Castlegregory, Co Kerry, but the club ran into trouble when it tried to expand to 18 holes.
An Taisce waged a campaign on the spurious grounds that the new course would interfere with the breeding of the natterjack toad, which was introduced to this country in sand brought as ballast by ships in the early 19th century.
It can be found now in 17 countries in Europe, as well as in at least eight sites in Co Kerry.
IN a report commissioned by the Council of Europe, Dr TJC Beebee of the University of Surrey wrote that all three ponds and the drainage channels developed on the golf course “have been heavily used by natterjack and all contained between hundreds and tens of thousands of well-grown tadpoles at the time of our visit”.
Assuming there had been no surveys of the natterjack in the area prior to the building of the golf course, he confidently concluded the area had been an important breeding ground which “must have supported a large local toad population”.
Dr Maria Gibbons of UCG had actually studied the natterjack in the areas during six previous breeding seasons.
“There were no toad breeding sites” in the land on which the golf course was built, she explained. “Now, of course, the toads are breeding in the ponds and drains on the course”.
Toads had only foraged in the area before the ponds were built on the golf course, but those ponds had become “significant toad breeding sites in the context of their overall numbers in Co. Kerry”, according to Dr Gibbons.
“Evidently Dr Gibbons has more extensive knowledge of the Castlegregory area than I do”, Dr Beebee acknowledged.
The natterjack issue highlighted the irresponsibility of those who waged that spurious campaign. They were not protecting a breeding area of the natterjack; they were actually frustrating the introduction of new breeding grounds.
Arthur Spring has tried to design a course in the sand hills near Inch, Co Kerry, but he has been running into the same kind of spurious objections since 2003. The golf course would supposedly interfere with the breeding of the natterjack, Atlantic salmon and the plant Petalworth, “which has not been seen on Inch since 1774”, according to ecologist Tom O’Byrne.
No natterjacks breed in the area earmarked for the golf course, as there are no ponds.
Is anyone so gullible as to believe a golf course could interfere with Atlantic salmon when there are no rivers on the sandspit and no plans to do anything with the shoreline?
These objectors have no regard for local people trying to develop their tourist potential or create local employment.
While our trendy naturalists have been frustrating the development of links on sand dunes that are frequently damaged by grazing animals, the Americans have been building ‘Irish links’ around the Great Lakes.
Playing the Ryder Cup here next week will boost Irish golf provided the rip-off merchants do not cause irreparable harm to our tourist industry by taking everyone for a ride.
The Americans will give us the finger and play their own Irish courses instead.
Another goose that laid proverbial golden eggs looks like being plucked and stuffed through greed and stupidity.
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