A quarter before midday on Thursday 5 August 1976, two men walked into the pro shop at Balmoral golf club in south Belfast, one carrying a package in a plastic shopping bag, the other a gun. Fred Daly, the 1947 Open Champion, was the head pro at Balmoral, and his wife, Jean, was working in the shop that day, which was usually run by their son, Robin. She had her 13-year-old grandson there with her too. One man asked her for money, and when she told him they did not have any, the other put his bag down on the floor and said: “That’s a bomb.” Then they both ran back out the door.

Jean Daly paused for a second. “I thought it was real because they sped off so quickly,” she said later. “The shop is my son Rob’s livelihood, I was thinking of him and I had to do it,” she said, “it was a spur of the moment thing.” So she bent over and picked it up. “It felt like just like a heavy bag of shopping.” She carried it back out the door. “I was going to carry it out to the carpark but a man who saw me told me to drop it because it might go off so I set it down by the hedge.” Word had spread, and the course had been evacuated. It exploded 15 minutes later.

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“Oh, golf clubs were always being bombed,” says Deric Henderson, who spent 25 years working as the Ireland editor for the Press Association during the Troubles. He is a member at Royal Portrush, where Daly used to work as a caddie. “There’s hardly a golf club in Northern Ireland that wasn’t hit at some stage, and no sooner were they rebuilt than they were bombed again, because they were such easy targets. But they always left the tees and the greens alone, because that would have caused us more grief than losing the clubhouse. You can get by without a clubhouse. We’d just put up a temporary structure and carry on playing.”

“The game sits above a lot of what goes on in Ireland, it always has,” says Henderson. Golf has always been an all-Ireland sport. There are no borders in the Golfing Union of Ireland. But more than that, Henderson adds, it is that: “If I go ask somebody to discuss their politics or religion they’ll tell me it’s none of my business, but if I go ask them about their golf, you can’t get them to shut up, they’ll go on about the greatest course they ever played, the best club they’ve ever used, the finest shot they ever hit. People will argue about the amount of money that’s changing hands, but not religion, not politics.”

You hear a lot of that talk. David Feherty, the old pro from County Down who has become such a talented writer and commentator, used to work at Balmoral. In a short documentary NBC made about the history of the sport in Ireland, Feherty explained that the fence around the course had two holes in it, “one for Roman Catholics and one for Protestants, but once you’d snuck on to the golf course you were neither, just another golfer”. Feherty says it was “his refuge”, and in the film, old Balmoral members describe the course as “an oasis”, “a haven”, and “an island away”.

Prof Alan Bairner, who co-authored the book Sport, Sectarianism, and Society, is not so sure. “So many people involved with sport in Northern Ireland in those days were very quick to talk about how it offered escape from the Troubles. I’d say there was some truth in that when it came to golf, but on the other hand I certainly used to hear people talking about there being certain clubs where only people with certain religious beliefs were wanted or accepted. So I think there was a certain amount of discriminatory behaviour, but because it was largely a middle-class sport, there was always the sense it was discreet bigotry of the middle classes.”

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The bombings have stopped, “but that kind of quiet bigotry, you still hear it in conversations, and you think, well, do things really change?” says Bairner. “Of course the message from the golfers this week, Darren Clarke and the others, has been about how remarkable this all is, that we live in a peaceful wee country where there are no issues. Well, yeah it’s a peaceful wee country where the two main parties can’t even get together in the assembly building to talk to each other, so there’s something not quite right.”

Henderson would not disagree with that. “Yes there’s been a new start, and this is a better place, but just think where we could be if we had a functioning executive in place,” he says. It is just that for him, the golf is his chance to get away from all that. “This week everyone’s taking time out to enjoy what’s happening.” Similarly Feherty has said: “It’s not like it’s not there, we still have problems here. You might see the rival flags on houses, or the sound of a drum beating in the background on Saturday.” Only “We won’t be talking about it,” he added. “This is about the golf.” Out on the links, it is out of sight, if not always out of mind.