A Breakdown of the Full Irish
Where are we going? Everywhere. (OK, not really...)
As detailed in this space earlier, next August I and some friends will be heading over to the Emerald Isle to play a LOT of golf. Only two of us will be tackling the FULL Irish, but anyone joining us is playing a lot of tremendous golf.
When one looks at an Ireland golf trip, the natural thing is to try and determine what part of the country you want to tackle.
There is Northern Ireland with some of the very best courses on earth - Royal County Down, Royal Portrush, Portstewart and some absolute gems like Castlerock and Ardglass.
There is Southwest Ireland, from the middle of the West Coast down through the Ring of Kerry, that provides absolute bangers like Lahinch, Ballybunion, Tralee, Waterville and Dooks, with Old Head nearby in Cork.
There’s the less visited Northwest area, which has places like Ballyliffin, Rosapenna, Narin & Portnoo, County Sligo, Enniscrone and Carne.
And back in Dublin, there are amazing courses as well, not the least of which are Portmarnock and The Island.
You may have already figured this out but … yeah, we’re playing all of them. Or, at least, my man AC and I are. My boys Miles, Thunder and Robby D are joining for Portmarnock and Northern Ireland. Dean will join us for Northwest, Southwest Ireland and The Island, with Robby C joining for a good part of that Southwest Ireland jaunt. We may even have a few others join in for a course or three.
I am pretty excited about this trip, so I yap about it quite a bit. And folks have asked me what course(s) I’m most excited about. As the person who put this madness together, the answer is harder to get to than one might think. But there are a few easy answers.
Of course, Royal County Down - it’s ranked as the best golf course in the world.
Of course, I’m excited to get fully ejected at Royal Portrush and relive the Open that was recently hosted there … but after RCD, I think the two courses I’m most excited about are Lahinch and Carne. Neither of these are necessarily name brands, though Lahinch certainly is to avid golfers and hosted the Irish Open back in 2019. Carne is tucked way up in Northwest Ireland in County Mayo, and gets a lot less traffic. But seeing it featured on No Laying Up’s Tourist Sauce, reading about it in Tom Coyne’s A Course Called Ireland … this hooked me. And Lahinch and Carne have one thing in common - huge dunes that look like nowhere else on earth.
There’s nothing quite like playing a hole unlike any other you’ve played and knowing in your heart it couldn’t be built today. No designer builds dunes like this creating blind shots into the greens. (And of course, nature built these, not a golf course architect. Still, nobody could get away with a routing like this in todays' golf world.)
These holes may feel gimmicky, but they’re also fantastic holes by all accounts, and a triumph of the routing that was originally done and refined through the years. What’s more, the rest of the course - with other blind shots, but many more ‘straightforward’ holes - is championship quality. I wish we could play it twice, but I’m so eager to play it even once that we are retracing our steps to fit it in as the course is closed to visitors for the first few weeks of August when we’ll be there.
The other course, Carne Golf Links, is far less traveled though that’s changing due to some of the publicity mentioned above.
There are other courses in Ireland with huge dunes but this is something else - it’s so raw (mostly because there was no budget or inclination to move a ton of earth) it feels like this was just carved out of the ground - and it was. The course recently added an additional nine holes on the interior of the land you see in the first picture above, and we’ll be playing all 27. I simply can’t wait.
I’m going to try and call out some other courses along the way, mostly out of anticipation, but these three are the ones that I cannot wait to view in person. Only ten months to wait…
No Bushfoot??