Irish links golf courses and the Wall Street connection

Pat Ruddy, the renowned golf course architect, has put the European Club at Brittas Bay on the market for €35 million. According to Golf Digest, Ruddy has designed nine of the top 40 courses in Ireland and the European Club regularly features in world’s top 100 list.
The Co Wicklow track, where Tiger Woods holds the course record of 67 strokes, has just over 80 members. “This gives a new owner the choice of remaining private, going ultra-private or maximising commercial golf traffic through world visitor play and an enlarged membership,” Sotheby’s, the selling agent, says in its brochure. According to Irishgolfdesk.com, Ruddy’s wish is for a new wealthy owner to treat his life’s dream as “a work of art”.
The 79-year-old Mayo man, who says he now plans to retire, may get his wish. Seaside links courses are the Fabergé eggs of golf. Rare and beautiful, they make up just 5 per cent of all tracks globally and located in eco-sensitive areas, fewer and fewer are likely to be built.
The connection between wealth and Irish links golf goes back to the 1960s. The Waterford-born industrialist Jack Mulcahy emigrated to America during the civil war in 1923 and became a big shareholder in Pfizer. Famed for turning Ashford Castle into a hotel, he developed the Waterville links in Co Kerry to attract high-end American tourists. In 1987, he sold Waterville to its current owners, a group of Americans including John Meriwether, founder of Long Term Capital Management, the hedge fund bailed out in a deal brokered by the Federal Reserve in early 1990s. Meriwether is the original proponent of Liar’s Poker, where bond traders bet on the serial numbers of dollar bills. He still sits on the board of Waterville which made profits of €2.7 million in 2022, taking in €4 million in green fees.
Jack Mulcahy prompted John O’Connor, another Irish-born American businessman, to buy land at the Old Head of Kinsale in Co Cork from a local farmer in 1989. The land cost £300,000, but property developer O’Connor, a Kerryman, would call the decision to build a course there “a £19 million rush of blood to the head”. Spats with locals and environmentalists over access led him to describe the project as “a labour of torment”. Now majority owned by his daughter Lhara, the course is on a headland, with its own lighthouse. It is the ultimate in luxury links golf, costing €450 to play a round there in the peak season. Its profits in 2022 were €3.7 million on turnover of €12.8 million. Wealthy Americans to play there include Bill Clinton, the former US president, and Will Ferrell, the actor.
It’s not called links golf for nothing. John O’Connor was a client of Alvarez & Marsal, the Wall Street consultants who guided Lehman Brothers through Chapter 11. At the height of the financial crisis, O’Connor, who died in 2013, tipped Bryan Marsal off about almost 200 acres near Waterville that Bank of Ireland had repossessed. Alvarez & Marsal went on to spend close to €80 million on the Hogs Head golf club, whose tagline is “built by friends, for friends, for fun”. Marsal and Tony Alvarez each started with 25 friends, or Hog Captains, who then brought five friends each into the club. The 250 members were given one additional invitation each. The club has a membership of 550, with 20 per cent of tee times allocated to visitors. A&M now has a dedicated golf business, a second club in New Mexico and plans to build a course at St Andrews in Scotland on land bought for £7 million from Mark Ogren, owner of Dundee United Football Club. A bidder for the European?
In the property bust, the vulture fund Cerberus ended up owning two links golf courses after the acquisition of loan books from Ulster Bank and AIB. It sold the security on Narin & Portnoo in Co Donegal to Liam McDevitt, a Donegal-born developer based in Connecticut, and his business partner, Larry Foley, an Irish-American fund manager. Foley also owns a one-third share in the Genesis Links consortium that bought Seapoint golf course in Co Louth. Carr Golf, an Irish company that runs golf clubs and tours, and another Irish-American, Kevin Given, a founder of Quail Valley golf club in Florida, made up the bidding party. Genesis acquired the Seapoint debt from Cerberus for €1.4 million, a 60 per cent writedown. McDevitt acquired Narin’s €1.7 million debt at a fraction of its par value.