Voices
As I drive out to meet Mark Kennelly at Golf Ireland’s headquarters at Carton House, I put on the Malcolm Gladwell podcast, Revisionist History, and listen to the episode ‘A Good Walk Spoiled’.
Gladwell is not a fan of golf. Many of his issues may relate specifically to the US, but there are certain elements that ring true anywhere if you are a golf sceptic.
It’s hard to share that scepticism as I arrive at Carton House. On a bright spring morning, golfers are happily making their way around the course. It is a vision of serenity, solitude and tranquility but then I remember Gladwell who points out one downside to that tranquility and solitude.
“Typically a good private course can handle no more than 72 golfers at once,” he says. “That’s one golfer per 120,833 square feet. Can you imagine if basketball had the same population density as golf? If basketball was played according to the geographical requirements of golf, a basketball court would be 30 acres.”
The figures may differ slightly in Ireland but golf courses require space and that can be hard to justify in certain places. When I raise it later with Kennelly, he rejects the idea.
“I wouldn’t accept that golf takes up too much space, the irony is in golf in Ireland started on links courses and it’s because links land was considered useless. The term is the link between the good land and the sea which is where the word originated. That was effectively in the 1800s and early 1900s, it was considered waste ground, good for nothing, you couldn’t grow crops on it, you couldn’t graze animals on it. That’s how golf ended up being developed on these link facilities…I take your point, but I just respectfully wouldn’t agree with it.”
He points to the economic benefits golf brings and few could argue with the tourism the game brings to the country.
Golf, unlike other sports, will always be limited by capacity. Golf courses take up space (and time) but the way golf is played is changing, Kennelly says.
People are playing nine holes more often and, despite the image and the sense that it is not attracting young people, Golf Ireland say that one third of adult golfers who tried the game during the pandemic were under 25.
Golf Ireland, a new body which came into existence in January 2021 with the merging of The Irish Ladies Golf Union and the Golfing Union of Ireland as well as the Confederation of Golf in Ireland, has just launched its strategic plan for 2022-2026.
The buzz words in these kind of documents make it hard to achieve any originality. In launching the FAI’s strategic plan last week, their CEO talked about football being “stronger together” and those words also appear in the Golf Ireland document.
The reason we’re talking about the space golf takes up is because the title of Golf Ireland’s plan is ‘Golf For Everyone’. In Ireland, the game may not be elitist the way it is in the US or England but it still retains that perception among some.
Many would say that perception is unfair and Ireland can point to the adoration of its top golfers as a compelling counter argument to any charges of elitism.
It is also a game, thanks to the presence of more than 300 clubs across the country, that Kennelly says, gives it a presence in every community in the country. But he wants to do more.
“It means being more open to people in the community, feeling more welcoming. It means cooperating with other sports in the community, which we do to an extent, but we could do more of it. It involves creating partnership schools, which other sports have been very good at, but we haven’t been very good at in golf. I think there’s massive potential there.”
This is one of the many positives of the game and, Kennelly believes, there are many more to anticipate in the future.
It was only last year when Portmarnock Golf Club voted to end its men-only membership policy, but Kennelly wants to look forward and build on the change.
“We can’t change what happened in the past. I mean, there are far too many examples in Irish society of where women weren’t treated equally, it’s not exclusive to golf.
“Unfortunately, we’ve had a whole litany of areas where that has been quite stark in the past. I think the important thing is that people move in the right direction here and I think it’s never too late to make the right decision. And now we’re in a position where in the vast vast majority of golf clubs, women are treated equally to men. And I think that is something that is actually embraced in Irish golf. The reality is nobody can change the past or what Irish society looked like in the past. We can’t change the past, but we can change it for the future. And I think it is changing.”
As Kennelly speaks, the Irish rugby team are training on a pitch he can see from his office window. Rugby’s growth and increased popularity has been driven by the players succeeding on an international stage and golf has the same advantage with players like Shane Lowry and Leona Maguire doing more than any strategic plan could to draw people to the game.
“We have tremendous role models I think that people in Irish golf can identify with, Leona Maguire. Shane Lowry, I could list them all off. People who come from pretty ordinary backgrounds like the rest of us. People can see them going on and having success. We have a very high participation rate here relative to other countries nearby, we have quite high membership numbers in every community.
“There will always be some clubs that are perceived to be a bit exclusive, but I think for the vast majority of clubs, we’re in a position now where, in every town in Ireland, people of all backgrounds are part of golf, and that’s proven in the numbers and the growth in golf over the last two years in particular. I’m not saying we have reached the point we need to get to but I think we are closer to it.”
Golf Ireland want to build on that and the ambitions for the game are big. The challenge of uniting the former unions and growing the game that attracted him to the role as CEO following his time in politics.
Kennelly’s father Colm was a county engineer who played Gaelic football for Kerry and was from an accomplished family of eight siblings brought up in Ballylongford. A number of books by his uncle Brendan sit inside the door of Kennelly’s office.
Colm Kennelly studied at Trinity alongside Kevin Heffernan, but he needed a dispensation from Archbishop McQuaid to attend. Kennelly has kept the letter sent from McQuaid’s secretary to the parish priest in Ballylongford giving permission but also attaching conditions which included observance of his religious duties, not playing foreign sports and the final one “please remind Mr Kennelly of the importance of habitually consorting with Catholic companions”.
After studying at Trinity, his father went to work as an engineer in British Guyana and then returned to Killarney.
Politics had not been Mark Kennelly’s ambition as he studied for a Public Administration degree and then went to Brussels but he began working for the former Alliance leader John Cushnahan who ran for a European parliament seat in Munster and from there he fulfilled many roles until those tough years of austerity when issues like water charges led to huge public anger.
“Nobody was under any illusions as to how tough it would be,” he says about his final years in politics, working as Enda Kenny’s Chief of Staff from 2011 to 2017.
“I’m not in politics anymore. I don’t want to be making big political noise. I don’t really want the interview to be about my political views. Water charges are almost certainly going to be a feature in the future. In retrospect was the timing right? In retrospect, I’d say it’s an issue that affected a much wider cohort of people than many of the other measures that were taken to correct the public finances. There was a huge level of public anger. It was happening at a time when other tough measures are being implemented. And, you know ultimately there was a political decision, you know, to park it and that was what happened.”
That government, new as most of them were to ministerial office, were attuned to the public anger, he says, and the large majority they held allowed them to take the decisions they felt were necessary.
“This is nobody’s fault but inevitably when people are in government for a long, long time, it’s harder because they’re so busy and they’re operating at a different level. We were very conscious to have our ears to the ground as much as you can do. But there was a lot of anger out there. But I think there was also a lot of resilience out there. And I think there was a lot of realism, in a sense of people acknowledging like, we’re in a hole here, and unless action was taken, we’re not going to get out of it and if we just keep doing the same things this hole is going to get deeper.”
It’s not an area he’s particularly keen to get into and he rejects a description quoted to him from a profile that he was “the gravedigger: he is the man who digs the secret political graves for Enda Kenny”.
“I don’t know who wrote that but I don’t think that’s a fair comment at all. That wouldn’t be an accurate reflection of my role. In my time in government it was to support the Taoiseach, to be part of a team of people who supported him, in terms of policy, press, communications. My job was managing the team and making sure we provided the best service to him. It wasn’t at all about what you read out there.”
He was ready for it to end when it did, he didn’t pine for the phone that no longer rang.
“Are there moments where something is going on and I’d say ‘God, it’d be interesting to be involved?’ But I never felt, certainly during the pandemic, I’d love to be in there. I really felt for the people who are in there, because, at least in our crisis, we had some control over the handling of it. There were big judgment calls to be made on some of the moves we made on banking, in particular. But you at least had the opportunity to say, this is one way something can play out, here are the other ways and you can consider all of those things.
“There are controllables, whereas in the pandemic, there were none. Then there was the sheer duration of it, which for the people involved must have been physically and mentally draining.”
The uncontrollable force of Brexit which happened during that time was something the Irish government was arguably better prepared for than the UK government.
“There was a feeling probably bolstered by the general election result the previous year [The 2015 UK election] that any question can be boiled down to an economic question. As we’ve seen in this country, when it comes to referendums that’s not the case, emotive arguments can take hold in a referendum campaign and that’s what happened.”
What has happened in Britain since hasn’t surprised him either.
“There were a lot of very ambitious scenarios painted in Britain as to what it would mean for Britain and isolation wasn’t really one of them so I’m not surprised that it’s still all very uncertain.”
His former political life and his golf life might have intersected when Golfgate materialised but he doesn’t see it as an issue for the game.
“Our view has been that this incident, whatever happened, was a dinner in a hotel, it was not a golf event in a golf club. And the organisation that organised it, you know, are not and have never been a registered golf society with the golfing union.”
“It was given that tagline [Golfgate], for whatever reason, what I would actually say is, all through the various stages of the pandemic, what we have really seen in is golf is extremely responsible, good behaviour from the golf community. Golf is part of the community, even if some people don’t perceive that as strongly as we would like them to.”
As they translated government guidelines into rules for golf, Kennelly said there were a lot of factors that demonstrated the strong community element to golf in Ireland.
Golf is a game played by all ages and as such, he says, there was an awareness in the game about protecting the most vulnerable during the pandemic.
“We got tremendous cooperation on that because I think the golf community – maybe it’s partly because we’re a lifelong sport – there was a kind of a recognition that we have to keep ourselves and our community safe. So to compare that to an event where there was a lot of controversy, I don’t recognise that in golf at all.”
Golf seems to polarise precisely because it means so much to so many people. Ireland has a different relationship with the game to other countries and that is something Kennelly wants to develop.
“There is still a perception among some people, which is an outdated perception, in my opinion, about golf being somehow exclusive. That might have been the case in the past, but that has changing and it’s changed rapidly. Some people still have that perception. But it is not matched with the reality that I see. In the two years I’ve been here, I see a very welcoming community. And as I said, during the pandemic, a community that was very, very keen to do the responsible and right thing.”
