Golfer’s home tees off on the market

ADA O’SULLIVAN, one of Ireland’s leading golfers, is leaving Ballintemple and she’s devastated - because she’ll miss her neighbours.

They’re great, she says, and are all very close, keeping each others keys during holidays and swapping combinations to alarms.

But despite that, the signs are up on number 6, Temple Hill Lawn and the captain of the Curtis team is moving closer to her real home - Monkstown Golf Club.

Recognised as one of the most successful amateur golfers ever produced in Ireland, Ada is just back from a recce at Bandon Dunes, Oregon for next year’s Curtis Cup game.

The Curtis Cup is the amateur women’s version of the Walker Cup and Ms O’Sullivan is one of the few women ever accorded the honour of captaining the team for a second time.

She also captained the Great Britain & Ireland team to victory in the Vagliano Trophy match against the Continent of Europe at County Louth in 2003 - their first win in the series since 1993.

Last July when she captained the team to their second successive Vagliano.

Ada represented Ireland at junior level from 1980 and at senior level was part of the team that won the European Masters championship in 1994. Now, she’s going to be much closer to her home club at Monkstown, of whom 300 members turned out in Paris this year to give her team support.

Moving closer to the seas and the greens will be nice, she says, but leaving her quiet cul-de-sac will also be a wrench.

A director of Phil O’Sullivan Electrical, a business started by her parents on Barrack Street, but now on the South Gate Bridge, she works full-time in the business and manages to play three times a week in summer, but that may go up now that she’s relocated. In the meantime, there have been ‘drive-by viewings, as she calls them, since the boards went up.

Selling agent, Jeremy Murphy of ERA Downey McCarthy Murphy already has an offer of €388,000 on the asking of €380,000, for this five-bedroomed home, but that’s just for starters as the size and location of the property will make it very desirable. Overhauled completely in May this year, with the help of an interior designer, number 6 has all the attributes of a ready-to-go, fine family home. And then, of course, there’s the nice neighbours.