Rory McIlroy is relishing the test of Royal County Down as he targets a second Amgen Irish Open title in Northern Ireland this week.
The World Number Three won the island of Ireland’s national open at The K Club in 2016, and he is hoping to double his tally as the event returns to Newcastle for the first time since 2015.
Four-time Major Champion McIlroy grew up in Holywood, less than an hour from the prestigious Royal County Down, and he returns to the County where he honed his skills as a junior and where he represented Great Britain & Ireland at the 2007 Walker Cup.
The 35-year-old currently leads the Race to Dubai Rankings in Partnership with Rolex, largely thanks to his Rolex Series victory at the Hero Dubai Desert Classic in January and his second placed finish in June’s U.S. Open, and he has set his sights on a fifth Race to Dubai title.
McIlroy joins home favourites Shane Lowry, Pádraig Harrington, Tom McKibbin and Séamus Power as a star-studded field assembles in Northern Ireland for the event which assumes a key position on the DP World Tour’s 2024 Global Schedule as part of the ‘Back 9’.
Lowry will also bid to win his national open for the second time as he tees it up in Northern Ireland for the first time since his Open Championship triumph in 2019. The six-time DP World Tour winner claimed a memorable victory 15 years ago as an amateur on home soil at Baltray, and to date he is still the most recent amateur winner on Tour.
Three-time Major winner Harrington will make his 29th consecutive appearance in the Irish Open, and the Irishman will be hoping to repeat his success of 2007 where he defeated Welshman Bradley Dredge in a play-off at Adare Manor.
Sweden’s Vincent Norrman will defend his title in County Down having claimed his second DP World Tour victory at The K Club last year, while Denmark’s Søren Kjeldsen will also tee it up having won the event the last time it was played here in 2015.
Breakout Danish star Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen arrives in Northern Ireland with a spring in his step after securing automatic promotion to the DP World Tour following his third Challenge Tour victory of the season at the Big Green Egg German Challenge powered by VcG.
Amgen, who acquired Horizon Therapeutics in October 2023 and therefore took on the title partnership of the Irish Open up to and including the 2027 edition, have once again partnered with the DP World Tour for the Birdies for Wishes campaign.
Amgen and the DP World Tour will donate £400 combined to Make a Wish Ireland for every birdie carded by the field on the first hole during the four tournament rounds. The three Amgen ambassadors – Harrington, Lowry and Power – have also committed to the fundraising effort, pledging to donate £400 for every birdie they card during the week.
Player Quotes:
Rory McIlroy: Good to be home in Northern Ireland. It’s been a while to be back. Nice to refamiliarise myself with the place a bit. Playing the Irish Open on arguably one of, if not the best golf course in the world in my eyes is a real treat.
We don’t get to play this calibre of golf course on tour, so to be able to play somewhere like this is amazing.
If you look at this golf course, you can hit numerous different clubs off tees. You can hit numerous different clubs around the greens in terms of bump-and-runs or chips or landing it on the green, not landing it on the green.
I think the best golf courses I’ve sort of decided are the ones that provide you as many options as possible. And as I said at the start, I think there’s a lot of golf courses that we play on tour I don’t think really do that. I think you have to play quite a one-dimensional game.
To have a golf course like this that provides so many options is a real treat.
Pádraig Harrington: I didn’t realise it was my 29th Irish Open in a row. This must be the one that I’ve played the most. I love coming back and it’s feeling a little tougher this year. I don’t know if I’m older or what it is but I think we’re all feeling that in the couple of practice rounds we’ve played.
I do enjoy it. I enjoy the fact that I grew up with the Irish Open being one of the premiere events on the Tour, and I know we’ve got a tough course here but the players are buzzing about it. They feel that it is the biggest event this week in golf. It’s nice. It’s a nice atmosphere. It’s a nice feel and it’s great as an Irish player that you can be proud of the event, the Amgen Irish Open.
It is feeling difficult at the moment but obviously a lot depends on the weather that we get and then some depends on the setup we get. It’s always better to have a difficult golf course that could be set up easy than to have an easy golf course that they have to trick up to make difficult.
You would expect some middle of green pin positions, just nice pins, because if you hit any green out there in these conditions, you’re playing well.
Shane Lowry: Based on the nine holes I just played, it’s hard. I forgot how hard it was. It’s going to be an unbelievable test. The course is firm and fast for some reason because it has not stop raining in Ireland all summer. I don’t know what they are doing up here.
It’s going to be a really tough test and I think it could be one of the highest-winning scores ever in a the European Tour event this week. Way take level par and sit here and wait? Possibly.
That’s how tough it’s going to be. But we have played in probably just the toughest conditions. Saturday was not great but next two days look okay. See how it goes.
I got off to a great start in the last Ryder Cup race; the first week I won. It would be nice to do the same and I obviously really, really want to be on that team. That, for me, is one of the main reasons I practise and get up every morning is to do stuff like that. I would say it’s probably the main driving point of my career right now.
