Recovery now begins for links along the wild West

The world famous golf links clubs dotted along the western seaboard are counting the cost of the Atlantic storms that lashed the country over the weekend.

A few, like Ballybunion and Waterville in Kerry, escaped relatively unscathed while those in Clare and up the coast in Galway and Sligo are facing major tasks to return to normality

Noel Cronin and Vari McGreevy, the respective general managers at Waterville and Ballybunion, stressed that the money spent on rock walls and gabions (cages or boxes filled with rocks) over recent years had paid off handsomely and apart from major cleaning-up operations, believed their courses stood up remarkably well to the appalling weather barrage.