To be very clear, Ballybunion is great. And so is Lahinch. And so is St. Patrick’s Links. And so is Portmarnock. All are among this website’s list of the world’s best courses. All are beloved.
All are in Ireland. Golf in the Emerald Isle is as robust as the Guinness there. Padraig Harrington knows. He’s Irish. He’s a three-time major winner. And when asked to name the one Irish course he would play if he could play only one, he talked for a while.
“There couldn’t be a simple answer to that for me, could there,” Harrington said ahead of this week’s Amgen Irish Open, played at the K Club, another gem. “I think if I tell my wife I’m going playing golf, she would kind of nod and say, yeah, whatever. If I say to my wife I’m going and playing golf on Adare, she says, I’m coming. To be allowed to play golf every day for the rest of my life, it would be at Adare because that’s as nice as it gets.
“Outside of that, there’s so many good golf courses — I love playing them all. The links golf courses are rugged and tough and they’re a joy to play. Portmarnock, Portrush, Ballybunion, Lahinch — I start naming them, I can’t stop naming them. They’re all fantastic. …
“This one is a really — if I want to become a better golfer, I’d play this course or Adare all the time. If I want to go out and enjoy the vagaries of golf and how golf is meant to be, we have all the links golf courses to keep you entertained and frustrated for pretty much eternity. We’ve got some good ones here and a good run of things, for sure. There’s something for everybody.”
A baggage security officer on a Sunday morning at Dublin Airport would agree. He had another thought, though. My backpack had triggered a sensor, so he needed to inspect it. Out came a few items. Toiletries. A T-shirt. He stopped.
At a yardage book.
“Now that’s where you should play golf,” he said.
I told him I had. He told me I was wise.
“I don’t know why all these tourists pay 400, 500, when they can play Corballis for almost nothing.”
I smiled. In my head, I thanked him for writing the introduction to my story. I told my wife about the friendly confrontation. She smiled. She’d been the reason why we found the course. As part of our first-ever trip to Dublin, we planned to play golf, only there’s a lot of courses, and many great ones, but my wife doesn’t play much, so we wanted something digestible, so to say. Or put another way, while we hoped to eat an Irish breakfast, we didn’t want a links beast to eat us for dinner. And, earlier this year, I explained that all to a Dublin lad who, by happenstance, I was grouped with at a course here in the States.
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He pointed me toward Corballis, and if you’re counting, that’s two Irishmen votes for the course.
Here are the basics. It’s located in Donabate, North County Dublin, which is about a half-hour north of Dublin’s Brazen Head pub, which is also a fine place and where we went afterward. It cost 115 euros (133 American dollars) for the two of us, not including newer TaylorMade rental clubs — and, from a look on Thursday afternoon, the price has appeared to drop since our visit; it’s now 27.50 euros during the week, and 35 euros during the weekend. Our playing partners were memorable, too. We were paired with a Switzerland couple who had spent two weeks playing all over the island. The husband laughed when he started talking about his work. He’d founded a programming company, and now he just plays golf after selling it. I shook his hand.
Corballis wasn’t hard, nor was it easy. It’s shorter — they are seven par-3s and one par-5 across the par-66 course, and I hit driver only a couple of times. But the par-4s are tight, the rough is bushy, and a few of the tee shots are blind. (The yardage book has a lovely map, though.) If you’re interested in how I played, I shot 11-over, and my handicap is somewhere around 14, though we caught Corballis on a windless day. A drawback is that the fairway grass was somewhat thin, which is strange.
Because good lord, it’s picturesque. The ups and downs. The mixture of greens, yellows, whites and blues. Blue? That’s from the sky on a good day. And from the water of the nearby Irish Sea everyday. It’s adjacent on five of the first six holes, along with two on the homeward nine. You’ll take photos. We did, which you can view below.
In four hours, we were done, though I wouldn’t have minded being there longer. Our new Swiss friends headed to the airport. We Uber’d back. A day earlier, we actually drove past Lahinch, one of the gems mentioned in this story’s first paragraph, on our way back from the Cliffs of Moher. Even from the windows of a tourist bus called the Paddy Wagon, it looked like it fit in the top 100.
Of course, the security officer thought we’d done well.
As did a friend of mine who also played with the Dublin fella noted earlier. After playing Corballis, I texted him a picture of my wife teeing off with the water to her left.
“We just played the course the Dublin lad recommended when we played with him. It’s RIGHT on the Irish Sea!”
The text bubble immediately popped up and then appeared one word:
“WHOA”
An editor’s note: For more information on Corballis Links Golf Club, please visit its website here, or its Instagram page here.
A second editor’s note: Should you be interested, below are the answers Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry gave to the question asked of Harrington.
Said McIlroy: “If I could play one course, it would probably be Royal County Down for me. I personally think it’s the best course on the entire island. I obviously played well — I played Walker Cup there and played well last year and had a good chance. Again, like I — we had a pretty good weather week last time at RCD, and it’s always nice when the weather is better.
“Yeah, it’s funny, like I — growing up, it was on my doorstep, and I don’t think I appreciated how good all the courses are here. I think because I traveled around and played in boys tournaments and youth tournaments and going over to Rosses Point for the west and Baltray for the east, I took for granted how good the courses were.
“Then you travel elsewhere and you come back and play these courses, and we start to realize we’re pretty lucky with all the great golf we do have here.”
Said Lowry: “If I could play one course in Ireland for the rest of my life — that’s such a hard question. We have so many great golf courses. Obviously I’m biased to Portrush. Even after the Open this year, I thought Portrush was unbelievable. I played Portmarnock yesterday in the nicest weather you could play it in. Probably Portmarnock, to be honest.”
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