Galwayman spearheads the drive for golf tourists

The game of golf is often derided by those who have never played it while there is an element of pomposity among many of those who do – but at the same time it is one of the biggest sporting industries in the world.

And despite Mark Twain describing it as a good walk ruined, it attracts thousands of visitors to the West of Ireland on an annual basis while boosting tourism revenue in the process.

The legendary American golfer Jimmy Demaret once said: “Golf and sex are the only things you can enjoy without being good at them” and while that may be true, the game provides this region with millions of euro in revenue on an annual basis. It’s a big business.

And a Moycullen-based company is largely responsible for the huge overseas income derived from golf in this part of the country, having marketed the sport in the west and northwest for more than two decades.

The company markets 12 links courses from Connemara right up to Portrush and has succeeded in attracting tens of thousands of golfing tourists over the past 20 years.

“It is impossible to quantify how many golfers have come to the region over that period, but it has been considerable”, admits John McLaughlin, the General Manager of North and West Coast Links Golf, which specialises in the promotion of a select and highly regarded group of links courses in the country.

The golf courses that John represents have a turnover of around €6 million between them annually and a large percentage of this income is generated by the overseas promotional work of the hugely-successful Moycullen marketing company.

The success of the company is fully dependent on how they market their 12 courses to tour operators and to the ordinary golfer in countries like America, Canada and Great Britain while they have also achieved considerable success in Scandinavia.

John McLaughlin tells a story about how he accompanied a group of American golfers who were playing a number of the courses along the west and northwest that his company were marketing.

After they played the links in Carne, Belmullet, the group retired to the bar where they had a drink and something to eat.

John noticed a group of Swedish golfers present and asked them how they had come to be there. They informed him that they had come across one of his presentations at a golf trade show a couple of years earlier.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.