KEVIN MCCALLUM: McIlroy makes Holywood proud with success on the big stage

One the road from Newtownards to Belfast in Northern Ireland, you will see two signs directing you to the village of Holywood on the shore of the Belfast Lough. You can take a sharp left and then right on to the Whinney Hill road to Holywood or travel a little down the B170 and take a sho’t left on Church Road. 

On your left on Church Road, just as you enter Holywood, you will see the Holywood Golf Club where it all began for Rory McIlroy as a youngster. As a kid growing up in Northern Ireland, I would travel from Newtownards, where we lived, past the signs to Holywood once every few weeks. My mum worked as a nurse at the Ulster Hospital in Belfast. I was born in Belfast and lived there with my parents as a baby.

My mum, Mary, was Catholic, as were both sides of the family, the McCallums and the Dohertys. Ian Paisley most certainly was not. He was, according to the sober writing in Brittanica.com, “a militant Protestant leader in the factional conflict that divided Northern Ireland from the 1960s ... his ideological message combined militant anti-Catholicism with militant unionism”.

My mum was assigned to be one of his nurses when he came to the Ulster. Her supervisor suggested she take off her name badge so Paisley did not twig she was catholic. I think Paisley would have met his match in Mary McCallum, but we will never know. This was peak Northern Ireland in the late ’60s and early ’70s. People could tell what religion you were just from your accent, the spelling of your name and the newspaper you read. 

Belfast was where you went to visit the “big shops”. During the Troubles, when the conflict was at its worst, the ends of the high streets were barricaded and guarded by British soldiers. You walked through a turnstile and were searched by soldiers. I can remember being frisked by men in uniform at the age of seven for bombs and guns.

My parents shielded me from most of the religious hatred. We lived in what was a vaguely “nonsectarian” area, a new estate called Rosehill, on a street called Valencia Way North. I had little notion of what was a Catholic or a Protestant and had few cares in the world save for riding my Raleigh Chopper at high speed down the descent of Korona Park Road. Sheer, innocent joy.

On Sunday night and Monday morning, I watched McIlroy take all of Northern Ireland and every single Irish person around the world from expectation to agony to ecstasy. It was, summed up by the Times in one perfect headline, “Ludicrously, relentlessly riveting”. 

The big papers swamped Holywood and the golf club this week for reactions. “Ian Carson, 50, a Holywood decorator, said the golfer transcended the region’s sectarian divide. ‘He covers all the angles. It doesn’t matter what religion you are’,” reported the Guardian.

And, so, for the first time in the years I have watched McIlroy play, I googled his religion. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know. Barry McGuigan, the former featherweight world champion, was surprised when told what it was in 2011.

Is he Catholic? Really? McGuigan told Niall Stanage in an article for the New York Times. “I didn’t know that. I thought he was a Protestant young guy.” McGuigan was a precursor of a kind to McIlroy ... a Roman Catholic born and raised in a small town just over the border in the Republic of Ireland, he threaded his way through the political and cultural minefield of the time to become beloved by almost everyone.”

Stanage grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. “At that time, in that place, everyone I knew could identify in an instant the religious affiliation of even the most apolitical people who had propelled themselves from Northern Ireland onto a bigger stage. Van Morrison was Protestant. Liam Neeson was Catholic. George Best, perhaps the finest soccer player of his generation: Protestant. Dennis Taylor, a snooker world champion: Catholic. And on and on. McIlroy isn’t like that. The only reason I was able to inform McGuigan of the golfer’s religion was because I had made a deliberate effort to discover it.”

McIlroy is a son of the post-Troubles generation, an Irishman of the North and the Republic. Stanage quoted James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “When the soul of a man is born in this country, there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.”

“No individual, least of all a 22-year-old golfer, can dissolve those nets single-handedly,” wrote Stanage 14 years ago. “But Rory McIlroy and his generation are making them looser and less suffocating than ever before. It’s no mean feat, and for many of us, it’s good enough for now.”