I sincerely hope you are all keeping well and staying safe in these strange and difficult times. I would urge those of you who are in the ‘cocooning’ category to hold out and stick to the HSE guidelines, and hopefully the restrictions will be eased sooner rather than later.  I would also like to remind you all that this society is built around friendship and if there is anyone in need of assistance, or aware of any member in need of assistance, please be sure to ask.  There are plenty of members who would be delighted to help out if called upon.  Such requests could be routed through any committee member.

Unfortunately, as I am sure you are already aware, our next outing due to be played at The European Club on 17th April has also been cancelled.  Following that, we are due to play Baltray on 15th May and we can only see how things develop between now and then and will advise in due course.  Beyond that, we will deal with this on an outing by outing basis.

Some of you will have noticed that the matchplay draws are now available to view on the website.  Needless to say, since matches cannot be played at this time, the due dates for each round will be under serious pressure.  We will advise further on how we will proceed with the matchplays as soon as possible.

On a lighter note, our long time member and friend Brendan Fagan has come across something that may be of interest to us golf fans.  Following words by Brendan:

Roddy Carr sent me an audio recording of an informal chat between Shane O’Donoghue and Peter Alliss done in their respective homes, Clontarf and Surrey.  In April 2008 when the Society played Royal Birkdale, Sean Guirke arranged for Peter to mention in his BBC ‘The Open‘ Broadcast, that The Clontarf Castle Golf Society from Dublin, had played the course in April.

Needless to say, Sean was ‘chuffed’, as the broadcast went out to over 200m people throughout the world. Peter is an iconic figure in the world of golf.  He is in his 90th year, and was inducted into The World Golf Hall of Fame in 2012 for his services to Golf.  To put things in perspective, only 160 people have been inducted into the WGHofF. That is not a lot, considering 50m currently play golf in the world today, and since people started playing  golf, they reckon that over 1b people have played since the mid 1860’s.

Incidentally, in 2007 Joe Carr was inducted into the WGHofF by Jack Nicklaus. I was invited by the Carr family to attend. A memorable experience!!

Christy O’Connor Snr was inducted in 2009. Joe and Christy are the only 2 Irish people inducted.

The recording is 1 hr and 9 mins.

Roddy and Shane are working on a few other ‘informal broadcasts’.

The late John O’Leary’s  life is their next piece, sometime in the coming week. Roddy has a lot of stories on John’s life as they were both Tournament Pros in the early 70’s.  Here is the link:

https://soundcloud.com/user-151975488/shane-o-on-the-radio-ep-2

Thanks for that Brendan!

Stay safe everyone!