How Ireland conquered the Open after decades in the wilderness

Times

13-07-2025

Amid the dreamy flow of drone shots drifting over a dozen of Ireland's most beautiful golf courses, the most striking scene from 'This Is Open Country', Ross Whitaker's gorgeous film broadcast this week on Sky charting the blossoming of an extraordinary relationship between Irish golfers and the Open, was how the landscape for Irish golfers looked before this generation reshaped everything.
In the 18 years since Padraig Harrington's first Open title at Carnoustie in 2007, four Irish golfers have shared five Open championships between them; only the United States has a better strike rate in the same period. In 2007, 60 years had passed since Fred Daly's victory at Hoylake. The championships in-between were speckled with Irish golfers occasionally making the top 10. Between Daly's victory and Harrington only Christy O'Connor senior got that close, finishing second in 1965.
The idea of winning? O'Connor aside, that was other people's business. All Harrington had as evidence that an Irish golfer could access that sort of success was the childhood memory of the trials and triumphs endured by O'Connor's nephew Christy Jnr around Royal St George's at the 1985 Open.
O'Connor started that weekend shooting 64 in the first round to obliterate Henry Cotton's course record. That evening, as O'Connor detailed the glories of his round in the press tent, a voice piped up from the back of the room.
'Not a bad score for 17 holes, young man,' he said.
'Thank you so much Mr Cotton,' O'Connor replied.
The rest of his weekend was a mix of everything. 'The second day, I had the best 76 I probably ever had in my life, in a hurricane,' he said in 2015. He was still in contention by Sunday and hit 17 greens in regulation but took 37 putts and slipped back to third.
That was the best of it for decades. Ireland's relationship with the Open seemed tied forever to Harry Bradshaw finding his ball wedged in a broken bottle during his final round at the 1949 Open with the title within reach. That evening he recreated the whole scene for the photographers who missed the original snafu, a sporting calamity kindly re-enacted as an Irish joke.
'There was a certain attitude [that] maybe you couldn't win, coming from Ireland in that sense,' says Harrington in Whitaker's film.
O'Connor getting close in 1985 was a beginning no one saw. Four years later O'Connor was the lowest ranked player by a distance at the Ryder Cup and left among the tournament's immortals, his two-iron into the 18th green setting up the putt that beat Fred Couples forever stitched into Ryder Cup showreels.
Ronan Rafferty also won the European Tour's Order of Merit that year. Irish teams featuring Rafferty, Des Smyth, Eamonn Darcy, David Feherty and Philip Walton won two Dunhill Cups either side of 1989 when those team tournaments mattered.
These were the pioneers setting out ahead of Darren Clarke and Harrington in particular, Harrington's first Open title as a self-made golfer eternally tinkering and reassembling his game for maximum effect eventually inspiring the ones with more natural magic in their fingertips.
As all of them teased out their own stories in Whitaker's film, the impact of Harrington making that breakthrough becomes even more pronounced. In the five years that followed Harrington first won back-to-back Opens and a US PGA championship in 2008, followed by four more major wins shared between Rory McIlroy (2011 US Open and 2012 US PGA), Graeme McDowell (2010 US Open) and Clarke (2011 Open).
That surge didn't merely lift the most incredibly talented ones, either. Since 2007, 17 Irish golfers have shared 85 tournament victories in Europe and America. In the 61 years before that, reaching back to Daly's victory at the 1946 Irish Open, Irish golfers had won 110 tour titles between them.
Once the Irish golfers started winning, the values instilled by their upbringings on links courses with nothing easily earned on the courses or in life itself developed the shot-making imagination and resilience that opened up opportunities at various Open championships years later. 'You've got to be comfortable being uncomfortable,' said Clarke.
If the golf courses bred character, so did their backgrounds. Nothing ever came easy, even for the greatest of them. McIlroy's father was a bar manager. Harrington's father was a Garda. Clarke's mother worked as a rep for a textile company and his father was an officer manager. McDowell's father was an accountant in Portrush where his son was reared on golf at Rathmore.
'The 'haves' played at Royal Portrush,' said McDowell in 2015. 'The 'have-nots' played at Rathmore. But the golf ball didn't know that.'
Lowry's father Brendan was an All-Ireland football medal winner with Offaly who worked for the ESB. His son started out with a pencil-thin golf bag, carrying maybe a half-dozen clubs. 'I maybe didn't believe I was as good as I was when I was a kid,' says Lowry in Whitaker's film, 'which maybe made me go at it a lot harder than other people and want it a bit more.'
That attitude eventually yielded historic success but the Open often put manners on them all over the last 17 years. The year after his second Open title in 2008 Harrington finished 65th and missed the next three cuts. When Harrington was winning in 2007, Clarke and McDowell were missing the cut.
Before winning at Portrush in 2019 Lowry had missed the cut at the four previous Opens. Clarke and McIlroy both missed the cut that year at one of the most significant tournaments of their lives.
'I'd been dreaming of this tournament a long time,' McIlroy told Whitaker. 'All these different emotions that I had in my head for three or four years leading up. I just didn't expect on that first tee on Thursday how nervous I would be. I put that tee in the ground and my name was called. I had no idea how I was going to feel.'
Even victory sometimes brought them to the depths. Before Harrington's nerveless dismissal of Sergio Garcia in the play-off that won the 2007 Open, he suffered the sight of two shots on dropping into the burns of Carnoustie on the 18th and his carefully collated lead disappearing beneath the water. 'That was the first time I've ever been on a golf course where I wanted to give up,' Harrington says.
But he persevered. They all did.
Available to watch on Sky Sports Golf and NOW