McIlroy to take time off after ‘toughest’ dayBallyliffin hosts Amateur

After a hugely successful hosting of the DP World Tour’s Irish Open in 2018, Donegal club Ballyliffin will aim to provide further evidence that it should be in the conversation as a possible future Open Championship venue when it stages the Amateur Championship next week.

The prospect of The Open taking place outside the UK for the first time was mooted last October when the R&A said it would “investigate the possibility” of Portmarnock staging The Open or Women’s Open.

For the moment, the Dublin links remains the only Republic of Ireland course being considered as a possible Open venue but that hasn’t deterred Ballyliffin’s ambitions to one day host golf’s oldest championship.

Ballyliffin’s rise to become a world-class links venue has been one of the stories in Irish golf over the past three decades.

I declare an interest having played Ballyliffin’s original Old Links for the first time as a nine-year-old in 1978 when much time was spent sticking my short arms down the rabbit holes which infested the fairways in the often fruitless search for your golf ball.

While new curses were invested amid the injustice of it, even a golfing cub could appreciate the untapped potential of the rolling Inishowen links land.

But in those bleak days of the 1970s as the Northern Ireland Troubles raged little more than 25 miles away, it seemed inconceivable this remote and neglected corner of north Donegal would emerge from the wilderness.

Some 46 years on, Ballyliffin is transformed. Pull into the club’s car park from any day from late Spring to October and you will hear north American voices who have arrived to sample the Old Links and Glashedy courses that reside less than 15 miles from Ireland’s most northerly point of Malin Head.

Many pinpoint the moment Ballyliffin changed forever as when then Open Champion Nick Faldo took a helicopter ride to the venue in June 1993 and described the Old Links “as the most natural golf course I’ve ever seen”.

By that stage, plans to the sculpt the second Glashedy course out of the Ballyliffin dunes were already well under way.

The Pat Ruddy and Tom Craddock designed masterpiece opened to rave reviews in 1995 and in truth, Ballyliffin has never really looked back.

Faldo even made an attempt to buy Ballyliffin a couple of years later which was gently rebuffed by the club’s members and the six-time major winner returned to the club in 2007 to officially unveil his redesign of the original