As anyone who’s been on-site at one will tell you, the worst place to be for a Ryder Cup is to be at a Ryder Cup. The spectator experience is always terrible, there are way too many people watching too little golf and the easiest way to keep up with the state of play is to open the app on your phone, which kind of defeats the purpose of being there in the first place. You are always, always better off watching it from the couch.
Well, thanks to the reporting of Muireann Duffy in these pages, we now know the second-worst place to be for a Ryder Cup. It’s waking up in Gort, Co Galway, at 4am on Friday, September 17th, 2027, having just dropped €99,000 for the pleasure of your week’s stay and saying: “Hang on, the course is how far away?”
Fear not, because the advert on RyderCupTravelServices.com will let you know the score on that one. “Lough Cutra Castle is situated an hours drive (76km) from Adare manor…” its grammatically challenged blurb declares, proving that you can charge 100 grand to rent out your gaff for a week, but still not pay enough to have somebody proofread your ad. Also, it’s an hour’s drive on a quiet Tuesday in 2026. Good luck to you making it in double that time during Adare’s biggest ever week.
Ryder Cup Travel Services is basically the conduit here for people and businesses who want to rent out their accommodation for the week of weeks. They provide homeowners and castle-handlers with a pricing calculator for guidance as to what kind of numbers might be fetchable – and they have plenty more where that came from.
You could be waking up in Kinvara, Co Galway (111km from Adare, Co Limerick), having dropped €88k for the pleasure. Or, if you’re a cheapskate and you only want to pony up a shade over €67k, you’ll be heading out each morning from Navan, Co Meath. Distance to the course: a mere 258km. The ad says that helicopter transport is available. At a competitive rate, no doubt.
Yes, indeed. Operation Fleece The Yanks is well under way. The Ryder Cup is a celebration of everything good about sport in Ireland: tough competition, ancient rivalries and absolutely rinsing any outsiders who feel they might like to have a piece of it.
In Ireland, we like to buy each other a pint when it’s all over. Little piece of advice, all the same. If you’re aiming to have that pint in Omagh, Co Tyrone, where Ryder Cup Travel Services are offering you a week’s stay for €19,000, maybe try to get out before play ends for the day. It’s a 400km-drive from the course and the pubs close at 11pm up north, even on the weekend.
Luke Donald, Team Europe captain, with the Ryder Cup Trophy at Adare Manor. Photograph: Richard Heathcote/Getty
It’s all very appropriate, of course. No better way to mark the Ryder Cup in its centenary year than to turbocharge the prices and reduce everything down to the bottom line of how much you can winkle out of people who want to be a part of it.
The tickets have long sold out, allowing the secondary market to get under way – packages are available on some of the ticket resale sites online, advertising Monday tickets for as little as €823. Irish people can’t buy them, although you’d hope we’d have more wit than to try.
There’s going to be months of this before we even see a ball in the air. Nothing like US money – and US golf money, at that – to turn us into grasping hopefuls with our hands out looking for alms. Green fees in Ireland have gone through the roof since Covid, with several of the most high-profile courses on track to breach the €500 per round barrier for visitors in 2027.
[ Ireland’s soaring green fees: Some golf courses doubled prices since 2022Opens in new window ]
To which most people’s reaction will naturally be: “So what?” And right enough, it’s difficult to get anyone to man the barricades to defend the rights of all the Chips, Chads and Bretts who, if they’re coming to Ireland to play Royal County Down and The Old Head of Kinsale, aren’t likely to be quibbling over the price.
Ryder Cup 2027 branding at King John’s Castle, Limerick. Photograph: Seb Daly/Getty
But everything is everything, to quote Lauryn Hill. Irish golf is one of the last places on the map where the sport isn’t the preserve of the mega-wealthy. At least not quite yet. Where your club is made up of normal people from around the community and isn’t confined to the gilded, golden classes who can afford it. Where the best of the best are the sons of barmen (Rory McIlroy), gardaí (Pádraig Harrington), teachers (Leona Maguire) and intercounty corner forwards (Shane Lowry).
The Ryder Cup was always going to be an outlier. It would have been naive to think or even hope otherwise. It has grown beyond all recognition over the past 30 years, steaming loose of golf’s moorings to become one of the few sports events that connects with the public outside its own bubble. Once that happened, there was nothing surer than it would become a honeypot for every kind of quick buck merchant imaginable.
On that score at least, we in Ireland have long since proven ourselves to be world leaders.