This world-class course is closed for 2026 – will it be the best links in Ireland when it re-opens?

The European Club closed its doors at the end of 2025 to begin an 18-month Kyle Phillips renovation, which includes a name change.

The County Wicklow venue opened in 1993, having been designed, constructed and owned by Pat Ruddy, the noted Irish golf writer who became the country’s foremost contemporary golf course architect.

Packed with idiosyncrasies, it is the only venue on our NCG Top 100s course ranking lists to offer 20 holes, as Ruddy thought it was a good idea to have a couple of spares that could also be played purely for the fun of it.

Now under new ownership, The European Club will remain closed throughout 2026, with work already underway to create a brand-new course.

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What is the plan for The European Club over the next 18 months?

The venue will no longer be named known as The European Club. It is renamed as Brittas Bay, named after the bay which is to the north of the venue.

The new owners are father and son Raymond and Nicky Conlan, who bought the property from Pat Ruddy ahead of this monumental overhaul.

Nicky spoke to Neil White and Ian Woods on The Golf Pilgrim Top 100s podcast to give his thoughts on the original course at The European.

“I had played it before on a few occasions and was always very impressed. I thought it was a magnificent site, a very good golf course. I always thought it deserved the recognition it got as one of the best golf courses in Ireland,” Conlan said.

“My father was less than impressed with the difficulty of it. He was very impressed with the site, and the way it is intrinsically linked to the sea and that it is a proper links course. Like a lot of people who had played it, a lot of people had the same opinion that it was a great golf course but just too difficult.

“When you take ownership of something, you start looking at different things through different lenses. You see where in its current format, there is room for improvement.

“Not everyone might see it as necessary to make changes to the course or the routing that we intend to do, but I think if we want to maximise the investment that we have outlayed, we need the golf course to cater to everyone and that they want to come back and play it again.”

There are wholescale changes coming to the course, with every tee box and every green being rebuilt. A new irrigation system will also be implemented under the turf.

The new course will also have a much different feel in terms of the scorecard. Instead of the old par 71 with just a pair of par 5s, the new Brittas Bay Club will feature four par 5s and four par 3s in a par 72 routing, including a driveable par 4, which the original course did not feature.

There will also be fewer hazards, and the railway sleepers will be removed from the bunkers, while the routing will also take players down to the coastline much earlier in the round.

“It is all part of the rebrand and the relaunch of what we’re doing,” Conlan said about the railway sleepers. “We’re obviously changing the name of the golf course, the logo and we’re making changes to the golf course.”

“We have hired Kyle Phillips as our golf course architect to oversee the changes. Ultimately, these decisions lay with him. If you hire someone of that calibre, you allow them to make the decisions that are necessary to improve the golf course.”

In drafting in Phillips, who designed the likes of the The Grove and Kingsbarns, the Brittas Bay Club is in the hands of one of the world’s best golf course designers.

As a team, they will draw inspiration from several of Phillips’ former designs to make the most out of the land where the Brittas Bay Club will be formed.

“When you go through this process you learn that no two golf clubs are identical. Kingsbarns is an incredible golf club and they have done extremely well over the years, so it is something that we would definitely try to emulate over to a certain degree, but there’s no copy and paste,” Conlan said.

“We’re looking at all these different golf clubs, and trying to pick the brains of people in the industry to figure out the best route forward.”

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What about the architect himself? What does Kyle Philips think of the site?

The American also made an appearance on the Golf Pilgrim Top 100s podcast, speaking to Neil and Ian about his involvement and the amount of work to be done.

“When we started, we were just talking about doing some renovations and smaller bits and bobs. The irrigation system was at an age that needed to be really redone,” Phillips explained.

“When you have a sandy links site like this, and you need turf grass and you need a new irrigation system, you start saying, other than that, we’re pushing sand about. By the time we met face to face, they had come to that conclusion, the right conclusion. There is a lot of opportunities out of that”

Phillips admitted that he thought the original course was too tough for us “mere mortals”, as he described.

“I thought that the fairways must be a little wider and the landing areas needed to be a little different. They really are very tight in places.

“Two objectives that the ownership has expressed would be that this is somewhere that people want to come back and play over and over again, while finding it challenging and enjoyable, while also bringing Rory [McIlroy] or Tiger [Woods] and they would also be challenged and also have good memories.

“Everybody knows that you can have a big tournament for a week, but what happens for the other 51 weeks in a year? It is a different level in play,” said Phillips.

One of the most distinctive elements of the original course at The European was the 12th green, which was more than 125 yards in length.

“It will be reimagined. Right now, the way it works out is in a similar location, there is a possibility for a double green, and that is something we have been talking about. The new 17th would play into that particular greenside from a totally different angle.

“It was not part of the agenda, but it is kind of ironic the way that it has worked out with this 127-yard green. It is a really incredible green as well!”

So what is the selling point of the new Brittas Bay Club? Phillips believe that it will be the new layout’s playability, and how different it could be from one day to the next.

“I think people appreciate the variety of holes, the different types of shots you play through the golf course, the firm, fast conditions that you expect from links courses ans so forth.

“There are things you can do, like a big waterfall behind the 18th, or like the old bunkers. Really, when you get down to it, it is about the different kinds of shots you play and what is expected of you.

“The ability to move pins around based on the wind, along the coast, on certain days it will make par very difficult to achieve. Then on benign days, you’ll be looking for different pin positions that might have a bit more of a challenge.

“I also think people really appreciate is the connectivity to the sea from the time you arrive. Being visually connected to the sea as you walk through the golf course, and the sequence of the holes – par 5s, 4s, 3s – that all play differently.”

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Now have your say

Have you played at The European Club in its four-decade history? What do you make of the proposed changes? Do you think they are needed? Let us know your thoughts with a post on X, formerly Twitter!