How a links course got a president
Ballybunion Golf & Clinton
Ballybunion Golf Club opened in 1893. The Old Course — the one everyone means when they say Ballybunion — sits on a stretch of dunes above the Atlantic that links architects spent a century arguing they couldn't have designed better themselves. Tom Watson said as much in print. Bill Clinton played it in September 1998 with the world's press in tow, and the town commissioned a bronze statue of him mid-swing on Main Street. He came back. The statue stayed. It is now the most-photographed thing in the village, and locals walk past it without looking up.
Same family, since 1900
Collins' Seaweed Baths
Collins' Seaweed Baths opened in 1900 and have been run by the same family ever since. The drill has not changed. They cut serrated wrack off the rocks at low tide, fill a wooden tub with hot seawater, drop the seaweed in, and you get an hour. The seaweed slips, the water is the colour of weak tea, and your skin afterwards does the thing the brochures promise. There used to be a dozen bath houses on this coast doing it. There is one left. It is the original one.
A Geraldine ruin and two beaches
Castle Green
Ballybunion Castle is a 16th-century Fitzmaurice tower house perched on the cliff between the two town beaches. The Fitzmaurices were a Geraldine sept — Norman Irish, in the long way of these things — and the castle was burned during the Desmond Rebellion in 1583. What's left has been a protected national monument since the 1920s. The headland it stands on is called Castle Green; the beach to the north is the Ladies' Beach, the beach to the south is the Men's Beach. The names are from segregated-bathing days. Nobody felt the need to change them.