Golf Holidays Ireland

The European Club

Par 71, 7355 yds
Opened in 1992 as a major worldscale golf links on the Irish Sea. The European Club is ranked in the World's Top 100 golf courses by Golf Magazine USA and in the Top 25 in Britain and Ireland by Golf World among others.

The Links was built and designed by Pat Ruddy who owns and operates it with the help of his family. Ruddy is a golf-writer as well as golf course designer responsible for 36 courses including many championship venues such as Montreal Island in Canada and Druids Glen in Ireland.

The Links occupies some 200-acres of tumbling dunesland running for over a mile along the beach and it challenges and thrills the player with holes running through deep valleys, along the beach and onto the edge of a cliff on Mizen Head.

The deep bunkers walled with railway sleepers (ties) are a major feature on the links and no place else on earth presents this menacing challenge.

A game here is combined adventure and sporting challenge and is designed to give a person an opportunity to get back in communion with the inner self as there are no housing developments or other intrusions to distract from a primeval landscape.

This is not a golf resort. It is a golf links designed and built by Pat Ruddy for his own use but he welcomes a controlled volume of paying guests daily.

The European Club attracts many renowned visitors including Tiger Woods who has used it as a warm-up for his forays to the British Open and who holds the course record at 67.

Location
45 minutes drive south of Dublin city centre.