Royal Dublin Golf Club

Royal Dublin Golf Club is located on Bull Island, in Dublin Bay. The island was formed following the building of a sea wall in the early 1800s. The result is a perfect sandy island, superb terrain for a golf course and an excellent home for flora and fauna. Bull Island is the only UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in a capital city.

The Dublin Golf Club, as it was originally called, was founded in 1885. The club moved twice before the course finally came to rest on Bull Island, in 1889. Two years later, Queen Victoria granted the club royal patronage. The course was severely damaged during the First World War and was rebuilt by Harry Colt in 1920.

This is a classic traditional “Scottish” out and back links, relatively unusual for an Irish links! It is highly rated by the pros, and one pro in particular has fallen in love with Royal Dublin. Christy O’Connor became the club professional in 1959 and his association with the club lasted more than half a century, until he passed away in 2016.

The course is fairly flat and narrow with long stretches of out of bounds, calling for accurate drives, and the wind tends to swirl around Dublin Bay, generally making the back nine tougher The greens are outstanding and there are some brutally deep greenside bunkers here too; the ones on the fairway aren’t much easier. “There are some fine, towering hills at Dollymount,” wrote Darwin in his book, The Golf Courses of the British Isles, “but it is not these that make the player’s knees to knock together; it is the little pots of innocuous aspect that most emphatically decline to be ignored.”

Royal Dublin has seen its fair share of professional tournaments and has hosted numerous Irish Opens, Ballesteros and Langer amongst the winners. But surely Royal Dublin’s favourite champion was Christy O’Connor, who won the Irish Open here in 1966.

Martin Hawtree oversaw a major renovation project at the club in the early years of the new millennium before Clayton, DeVries and Pont completed a bunker renovation project in 2023, returning sand hazards to a style more in keeping with Harry Colt’s work on the course in the 1920s.

Aerial photography from before World War II confirmed bunkers were originally bigger, there were fewer of them, and they were more irregular in shape. DAR Golf Construction (who had worked on the earlier Hawtree renovation) carried out the construction effort, with Frant Pont and Hendrick Hilgert supervising.