The familiar names carried the pro game for the Irish in 2025. Are the rising stars now stepping into the spotlight?
Ask any professional or elite amateur golfer, and they’ll tell you that winning is hard. Hell, ask any weekend warrior that question and they’ll give you the same answer, even if they’re getting a couple of dozen shots to play with.
Apart from Rory McIlroy’s successes on the PGA and DP World Tours, and of course, his major victory at Augusta National, and Pádraig Harrington and Darren Clarke’s victories on the Champions Tour, 2025 was a fairly barren year for the nation’s pro golfers competing across the wide array of circuits.
Don’t get me wrong; McIlroy’s Masters win, and the roles he and Shane Lowry played in a first European away victory in the Ryder Cup – in the most hostile of environments, it must be added – made it a banner year regardless, but it was very much top-heavy with little stability in the foundations.
That doesn’t mean that there weren’t successful seasons had. Lauren Walsh finished in the top 10 on the LET’s Order of Merit, earning her a place at LPGA Q-Series Final Stage from which she earned a full LPGA Tour card for 2026. She may not have won on tour, but earning her LPGA Tour stripes was right at the top of her list of goals, so that was job done.
Likewise, Ronan Mullarney and James Sugrue didn’t win on the Alps or Clutch Pro Tours in which they primarily competed, but their consistent play throughout the season, combined with strong performances when it mattered most in the final few events, earned them promotion to the HotelPlanner Tour. Again, primary goals were achieved, and the lack of a tournament victory mattered not.
Tom McKibbin didn’t win on LIV, but he did win the Hong Kong Open – part of the Asian Tour’s International Series – and earned a first Masters invite and a guaranteed path back to the Open Championship at Royal Birkdale, plus, he more than doubled his career earnings over the year, so we can comfortably chalk that down as a success.
Mark Power was something of a golfing nomad in 2025, playing early on the Clutch Tour, then on the HotelPlanner Tour when he was able to get into the field, and even made an appearance at the Amgen Irish Open, before returning to play in the Clutch’s two season-ending events. He won the Tour Championship, then progressed to the final stage of DP World Tour Q-School and, though he came up short overall, did earn improved Category status for the HotelPlanner Tour for this year.
A successful season? Yeah, his best to date, for sure.
There were many other success stories, such as Anna Foster and Sara Byrne keeping their LET cards after rookie seasons, Liam Nolan making the most of his early-season HotelPlanner invites to earn full status and make it all the way to the 45-man Rolex Grand Final, and Max Kennedy consolidating his status on the same tour in his first year as a pro.
But actual tournament wins were hard to come by. McIlroy had four – the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, the Players Championship, The Masters, and the Amgen Irish Open – Harrington had two – and they were two big ones in the U.S. Senior Open and The Senior Open Championship – and Darren Clarke had one alongside Thomas Bjørn in the paired American Family Insurance Championship – and McKibbin and Power had one each.
That’s nine in total. Yeah, one of them was the most-talked about tournament victory since Tiger Woods incredible Masters win in 2019, and McIlroy’s other three were big-deal wins as well, but his success only served to highlight how good we had it at the top, and how starved we were for success elsewhere.
To put it in context, on the Alps Tour alone in 2025, Spaniards won 10 times, and Italians six, while Scottish, Chinese, and French golfers all won multiple times on the DP World Tour, Belgian, Czech and Welsh golfers all won on the LET, and Norwegians and Austrians claimed victories on the HotelPlanner Tour, without taking in other international powerhouse nations.
It’s never quite an apples-to-apples comparison, and while most are more heavily represented on tour, none of these nations have experienced the kind of sustained major championship success that Irish golfers have in the past two decades. And this only highlights the lack of wins elsewhere.
Well, we’re only a few weeks into the 2026 season, and we’ve already got a fresh tournament winner to be proud of. Sam Murphy’s win the Alps Tour’s season-opening event in Egypt was the perfect way to introduce himself as a professional golfer. Not only has he proven that he has what it takes to play the game for a living, he can now immediately set his sights on earning promotion to the HotelPlanner Tour, safe in the knowledge that, if the worst comes to the worst, he’s guaranteed to have playing rights on the Alps Tour again in 2027.
But at the time of writing, he’s back at the top of an Alps Tour leaderboard again, albeit through 18 of the 54 holes at the New Giza Open in the same country where he claimed his first win. There’s a long way to go – and his lead is a slender one – but were he to tick off another win this week, he’d be just one short of earning a ‘battlefield promotion’ and jumping straight onto the HotelPlanner Tour with his status the following year already locked in.
In fact, at the time of writing, we have two more Irish names atop leaderboards on pro tours.
Áine Donegan, making her LET debut as a pro, holds a two-stroke lead at the halfway mark of the LET’s Women’s NSW Open in Australia, and Alex Maguire is tied at the top of the MENA Tour’s Al Houara Classic in Morocco, with Mark Power among the chasers on his tail two shots back.
There are no guarantees that we’ll have another Irish winner to toast by the time the weekend is done, but as 2025 taught us, wins are extremely hard to come by so to have four Irish golfers in with excellent chances is worth celebrating.
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