the irish rovers tour dates

The Irish Rovers

Latest setlist, the irish rovers on march 11, 2023.

Burlington Performing Arts Centre, Burlington, Ontario

The Irish Rovers end 50 years of touring with one last worldwide trip

Famed irish folk band the irish rovers will bring their half a century touring schedule to an end..

Famed Irish folk band The Irish Rovers will bring their half a century touring schedule to an end at the conclude of their current 50th anniversary world tour.

Although not completely retiring from the music business or hanging up their performing boots for good, the group will play at various special events without undertaking any more ambitious touring plans.

The veteran folk band, formed by Irish and Scottish emigrants in Toronto, Canada, in 1963, have previously toured through Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada and as part of their farewell tour stopped off at the CelticFest in Vancouver from March 10 through to March 17.

Visiting all of the cities they’ve enjoyed playing over the years, the band will say their goodbyes to many of their concert-loving fans, as they decide they’re close to reaching the end of the road.

“The years creep up on us,” founding member George Millar told TheProvince.com.

“The bones get tired, the back is sore. We’re only doing six weeks. As you know, rock and roll is a young man’s game.”

“The band has never played better, never sounded better. It’s the actual touring we’re not doing. Not too many bands can say that they still like each other. You have to respect each other, you have to enjoy what you’re doing.”

“This year is ideal for us to finally say one last goodbye to everyone,” Millar continued.

“Nice to be able to share our 50th Anniversary with our old friends. Believe me, there were times I didn’t think we’d make it to 50, so I’ll be damned if we don’t make the most of it.”

Rising to fame with thanks to their self-named weekly Canadian TV show, The Irish Rovers once drew in such massive numbers that they beat out hockey nights in Canada!

But it was always performing live for their fans that the group loved the most, working hard to bring back fans to their concerts who they’d lost to the comfort of their TV screens.

“It took years and years,” Millar said.

“All you want to do is perform; you don’t want to deal with the business. It takes a lot of time; you have to be patient. But there are things you can do.”

And they certainly have a lot to show for all their patience, returning to the small screen for two more TV series and specials with a little more experience behind them, producing over 40 albums in North America, establishing their own record label in 1993 to distribute their records and market their DVDs, and opening the Unicorn pub, named after 1960s hit which started it all off for the group of musicians.

Beginning with the meeting of 16-year old George Millar and 23-year old Jim Ferguson, both recent immigrants, at an Irish function in Toronto in 1963, the group began to tour and released their first album. It was a little song for children, “The Unicorn,” on their second album, however, that would capture the imagination of the Canadian audience and by 1968 The Irish Rovers were named Canada's “Folk Group of the Year.”

Such was their success that Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau (Snr) himself asked them to become Canadian citizens so they could represent the country, despite the fact that much of their original music focuses on the themes of Ireland and immigration.

The folk group would go on to represent Canada at five world Expos - Montreal (1967), Osaka, Japan (1970), Okinawa, Japan (1976), Vancouver (1986), and Brisbane, Australia (1988).

After several shake-ups over the years, the current Rovers - Wilcil McDowell from Larne, Co. Antrim; Sean O’Driscoll from Cork; cousins Ian and George Millar from Ballymena, Co. Antrim; Geoffrey Kelly from Dumfries, Scotland; Fred Graham from Belfast; Morris Crum from Carnlough, Co. Antrim, and Gerry O’Connor from Dundalk, Co. Louth - are not finding it easy to leave it all behind and are still booked right up until 2020 despite their lack of touring.

“This retirement could take a long time,” Millar said. “We’re going to be like Cher: she’s on her fourth farewell tour, this is only our first.”

The Irish Rovers Farewell Tour concluded in British Columbia on March 20. You can find more info on their remaining Canadian dates here.

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The Irish Rovers Concert Setlists & Tour Dates

The irish rovers at burlington performing arts centre, burlington, on, canada.

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• The Irish Rover
• The Boys of The Emerald Isle
• ’Tis of My Rambles
• Gracehill Fair
• What Wid Ye Do
• No End in Sight
• She Led Me On
• Lewis Bridal (Mairi's Wedding)
• Some of Ireland’s Lovely Sights North South East and West and Also a Love Song
• Hey Boys Sing Us a Song
• The Dublin Pub Crawl

The Irish Rovers at Casino Rama, Orillia, ON, Canada

The irish rovers at the playhouse, fredericton, nb, canada, the irish rovers at barbara b. mann performing arts hall, fort myers, fl, usa, the irish rovers at buskirk-chumley theatre, bloomington, in, usa, the irish rovers at the o'shaughnessy, st. paul, mn, usa.

• St. Brendan's Fair Isle
• The Ireland Boys Hurrah
• Bridget Flynn
• Irish Wedding Song
• The Wind That Shakes the Corn
• The Continuing Story of the Unicorn
• Whiskey in the Jar

The Irish Rovers at Edmonds Center for the Arts, Edmonds, WA, USA

The irish rovers at vogue theatre, vancouver, bc, canada.

• The Rattlin' Bog

The Irish Rovers at Century Casino, Edmonton, AB, Canada

• All On St. Patrick's Day
• She Never Had Eyes For Me
• Patsy Fagan
• An Irishman In Paris
• Lily the Pink

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• What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor? ( 5 )

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Irish Rovers No End In Sight 2023 Tour

$56.00 + taxes and fees

The legendary Irish Rovers return to the stage at the Empire!

They began last year by hitting Spotify’s VIRAL TOP 50 in both the US and the UK/ Ireland, and ended it with recording the new album, No End In Sight! These Kings of Celtic have been honoured as one of Ireland’s greatest exports by EPIC Ireland Museum in Dublin as well as back in their hometown of Ballymena. The new No End In Sight has had a great response from the public with a new video release “Hey Boys Sing Us A Song”. The previous “Saints And Sinners” CD, reflects the history of the band and their roots in Ireland.

Fans should fasten their seat belts for a rollicking night of the hits, Rovers latest, and hilarious stories from their years on the road.

Check out the new video release “Hey Boys Sing Us A Song” which was written because of the pandemic and our need for some “Happiness back in our lives!”

*Please Note:  *ALL SALES ARE FINAL – Refunds and Exchanges are not permitted.

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Noise Annoys: ‘My songwriting is 90 per cent failure’ - Conor O’Brien on crafting new Villagers album That Golden Time and upcoming Irish tour dates

Y eah, we’ve just done about 10 days of full band rehearsals. The last day was actually more for promo stuff, as we’re going to do an hour-long RTÉ Arena special thing, but one of the guys isn’t available. So we’ve been rehearsing-in another guy, which meant lots of returning to the same songs over and over again. It’s been a lot of fun.

I think most of them are actually going to be as a two-piece with my keyboard player, Kev, but I think a couple of them are solo for sure - like the one in Bangor [at Bending Sounds on May 18].

But I’ve sort of gotten used to that in the last little while with promo stuff. It’s been nice to strip the songs back to their skeletal origins. They’re going to be a lot of fun.

It was done at 7.30am in the morning, so I was quite glad I even had a voice, to be honest. The food was really nice, though it’s a bit weird when you’re eating on live TV. I kept catching little glimpses of myself [in the studio monitors] shoving a crumpet into my mouth, so that made me a bit self-conscious.

But it was fun. Vicky McClure [from Line of Duty and This Is England] was cool, and I was really excited to be sitting right beside Felicity Montagu, who played Lynn on I’m Alan Partridge. I was quite starstruck, because I was kind of obsessed with that show, and especially her character. It was amazing.

I do, actually. I mean, in a funny way, I’m sort of appreciating it more than I used to, because when I was doing it first time round I was a little bit wet behind the ears. I was kind of hanging on for dear life, because I’m quite naturally introverted, I guess. So I was just getting used to putting on a different kind of face when I was presenting it to people.

Whereas, after doing it six times or whatever, you get a bit older and stop caring so much about the things that were causing you anxiety. Now, I’m just really kind of living in the moment with it all, which, in a strange way makes it even more exciting.

I guess also used to self-medicate a lot more. I was drinking lots and all that kind of stuff, which was numbing. So it feels good to just be fresher with it all and centre the work a lot more.

I’m really excited about it. I’m really quietly confident, to be honest: it feels like a really cohesive piece of work, if I do say so myself.

And I actually quite like the idea of people trying to figure out what it’s about. That’s one of my favourite things about art and music, that kind of slightly enigmatic thing where you [as the listener] do half the work. It’s quite an active thing, listening to good songs, I think - at least for me.

So I really worked hard at making sure [these songs] weren’t prescriptive or didactic. They’re almost like little kind of vignettes of ideas that I’ve kind of been obsessed with, or feelings or emotions. There’s just a lot going on in them at the same time.

I think as a listener, hopefully, you can kind of apply your own life experiences to them and sort of feel them in your own way.

I’m actually gonna bring out a book later in the year of all the Villagers lyrics since the beginning. A lot of it is scribbles from my notebooks - drawings, lyrics and the like.

There’s actually a lot of leftover lyrics from these songs that were just a bit too simplistically kind of sociopolitical and just a bit crap, really.

There’s lots of failure in there, basically - that’s the main part of the whole creative thing for me. What you actually get to hear is only, like, 10 per cent of the process.

Yeah, transcendence is the main kind of theme of the record, I think. There’s so much bulls*** these days, so many malevolent forces online that are trying to bend you to their will, so many marketplace forces vying for your attention. As soon as you log on to your little machine that was made by child slave labour, you’re complicit.

But we’re in this kind of post-religion, secular, technocratic world where everyone thinks we’re the most enlightened we’ve ever been. So everyone is kind of screaming at each other from a place of moral purity - and it’s just complete bulls***.

I actually became obsessed with the Christian doctrine of original sin while I was writing the record. As much as it’s flawed and has the potential to cause damage, it’s kind of beautiful, because it’s sort of the antithesis of this moral purity that everyone seems to have gotten onto recently, this kind of internet age sense of ‘my tribe is correct and yours isn’t’.

CS Lewis called it chronological snobbery, where the latest civilization always believes it’s the most enlightened: we don’t even look contextually to the past about where we’ve been.

Perhaps we can learn something from people before everyone was thinking in ones and zeros, you know?

Things to Do in Rostov, Russia - Rostov Attractions

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1. State Museum Preserve Rostov Kremlin

2. Yakovlevsky Savior Monastery

3. Trinity-Sergius Varnitsky Monastery

4. Deer-symbol of Rostov the Great

5. Assumption Cathedral

6. Church of St. John the Evangelist

7. Rostov Finifti Museum

9. Museum of the Frog Princess

10. Dom Remyosel

11. Khors Art Gallery

12. Lukova Sloboda

13. The Church of St Isidore

14. Gate-Church of St John Divine

15. Monastery of St Avraam

16. Church of the Virgin Hodegetria

17. The Museum of Rostov Merchants

18. Church of the Resurrection of Christ

19. Water Tower

20. Mitropolichiy Garden

21. Nero Lake

22. Church of the Saviour on Anteroom

23. Museum Rostovskoye Podvorye

24. Memorial Cross

25. Zvonnitsa Uspenskogo Sobora

26. Museum of Church Antiquities

27. Church of St. Gregory the Theologian

28. Museum Bells and Small Bells

29. Zhar Ptitsa forge

30. Gingerbread House of Merchants Smyslovykh Rostov Gingerbread

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Passion, booze, madness and comradeship: Bruce Springsteen’s special relationship with Ireland

A new chapter in that friendship opens as the boss returns for an all-ireland tour with dates in belfast, kilkenny, cork and dublin.

Bruce Springsteen on stage with the E Street Band. Photograph: Rob DeMartin

The closing notes of Thunder Road echoed over Slane Castle like the rumble of gathering storm clouds. As the music faded, Bruce Springsteen walked offstage for a scheduled intermission. He wasn’t sure he wanted to come back.

“I thought somebody was going to get killed, and it’d be my fault,” Springsteen recalled in Born to Run, his biography from 2016. “The crowd closest [to the front] were deeply into their Guinness and dangerously swaying from left to right. They were opening up gaping holes among themselves as audience members by the dozens fell to the muddy ground, vanishing for unbearable seconds ’til righted once again by their neighbours.”

It was June 1st, 1985, and Springsteen and the E Street Band were kicking off their largest-ever European tour in front of a crowd of more than 65,000 in Co Meath. To those who were there, the gig would be remembered as an epoch-defining rite of passage – a rare bright point amid the downpour of misery that was 1980s Ireland. Yet, for Springsteen, a break midway through the performance – between Thunder Road and Cover Me – couldn’t arrive soon enough.

[  Foo Fighters, Oasis, U2, the Rolling Stones and more: Slane’s 15 greatest acts – in reverse order  ]

He feared someone might die, if not at Slane then later, during his sell-out run of dates across Europe. He had always been a hugely driven performer since emerging from the comparative backwater of suburban New Jersey in the late 1960s. But never had it occurred to him that success could lead to this: looking out at a sea of people, wondering if someone at the front might stumble, fall and not get back up.

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“I could not face what was happening in front of the stage at Slane on a nightly basis,” he wrote. “It was irresponsible and violated the protective instinct for my audience I prided myself on.”

Backstage, he went into a huddle with his manager Jon Landau, the former Rolling Stone journalist who, in 1974, had proclaimed, “I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.”

Springsteen wanted to pull the plug. Not just on Slane but on the entire European tour. It was, of course, unthinkable that he could quit in such a fashion halfway through a concert. Who knew what might happen? Springsteen ultimately emerged for the second portion of the set. He relaxed as the sun went down, watched by an attendance that included Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend and Elvis Costello.

Bruce Springsteen on stage in New York. Photograph: Mike Coppola/Getty

“The crowd settled during the second half of the Slane show and I observed there was a sketchy but ritual orderliness to what appeared from the stage to be pure chaos. The crowd protected one another,” he recalled. “If you fell, the nearest person to your left or right reached down, grabbed an arm and pulled you upright.”

Passion, booze, madness and comradeship: so began Springsteen’s special relationship with Ireland. A new chapter in that friendship opens this month as he returns for an all-Ireland tour that will feature dates in Kilkenny, Cork and Dublin after starting in Belfast on Thursday. Springsteen, who is 74, won’t be on the road forever, and this latest Irish run might be among the few remaining chances to see a rock icon in the flesh.

“Slane was my Bruce awakening,” says Jon Jones, bassist with the Springsteen tribute band The Human Touch, who play the Springnuts Bruce Springsteen festival on Tory Island, in Co Donegal, this weekend.

His memories of Slane are less dramatic than the recollections of the singer himself. “Standing in an open field with 100,000 people” – estimates of the attendance vary wildly – “is not something your brain can comprehend. People forget how big he was for those few years in the 1980s. Bruce Springsteen was a household name. It was Bruce, Madonna, Michael Jackson and Queen.”

[  Springsteen on camera: ‘Bruce would scream and yell at people. It was all respectful. It was just frustration’  ]

Jones isn’t the only one for whom Slane burns brightly – not as a fond musical memory but as a life milestone. “My boyfriend – five years older – had tickets. I was definitely not allowed to go. At school, none of my friends were allowed to go,” recalls Sheila Burton, an artist based in Wexford, who was 17 at the time. She is a lifelong Springsteen devotee who will be up front in Belfast when Springsteen takes to the stage at Boucher Road.

“Did that stop me? Of course not. He was my hero; he understood me, his songs were about my life, and he was completely gorgeous. Threatening to leave home if my parents didn’t change their minds, I boarded a bus bound for Slane on a sunny Saturday in June with my hopes and dreams and my 22-year-old boyfriend.”

Her memories have faded slightly with time, but the emotions “remain vivid, as if the experience happened just yesterday”. She talks about the sun blazing down and the huge crowd surging forward. “I stood near the stage, the firemen spraying us with water, and then he appeared, Born in the USA blasting.”

Bruce Springsteen, Steven Van Zandt and the E Street Band at the RDS Arena in Dublin in 2023. Photograph: Tom Honan

Four decades later Springsteen is still one of rock’s most potent forces. He played to a combined European audience of more than 1.6 million last year, while his latest tour has grossed $379 million so far, behind only Taylor Swift and Beyoncé (and ahead of Coldplay) in the past 12 months.

“The reason that his music has such an emotional impact on his fans is that they see themselves in him. His persona has always been that of the regular guy. You always get the feeling that he is enjoying the performance as much as the fans are. He is, himself, first and foremost a fan,” says Nigel Brothers, The Human Touch’s singer. “His music is a combination of everything that went before him, from Elvis Presley to Bob Dylan, from Chuck Berry to James Brown, from Buddy Holly to The Beatles, and from Roy Orbison to the Stones and The Animals. It’s music for the heart, the soul, the mind and the feet.”

Springsteen has a rich legacy of recorded work: the blood and thunder of Born to Run, the big-sky melancholy of Nebraska and the blue-jean pop-rock of Born in the USA, the LP that finally brought him to Ireland. But the singer’s music takes on a new dimension under the spotlight, as anyone who witnessed his extraordinary shows at the RDS in Dublin in May 2023 will testify.

[  Bruce Springsteen at the RDS: A masterful and poignant performance, with a jarring final note  ]

“I’m really lucky to have seen Bruce up to 50 times in various countries across the world, and it never, ever gets boring,” says Hannah Summers of Hungry Heart, the Springsteen club night that is holding an after-party following the singer’s gig at Croke Park. “That’s partly from his performance style but also the changing set lists. There’s a sort of safe unpredictability from being at his concerts – the thrill of not knowing what you’re going to get next, but that guarantee that you’ll be happy with it.”

His upbringing in New Jersey perhaps makes his music especially resonant with Irish audiences: Springsteen, who during his time here last year visited Rathangan , in Co Kildare, where his great-great-great-grandfather grew up before emigrating to New Jersey, in 1853, sings about wanting to escape the stifling boredom of small-town life and head off into the great unknown.

“If you think back to Ireland in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was very little hope of a future for the youth at that time. Between the Troubles and high unemployment, emigration was the order of the day,” says Brothers. “So you could see how relatable songs like … Born to Run and Thunder Road” – his two great anthems of escape – “could be. Bruce was from an Irish-Italian background [though his father was of Dutch heritage] and he was raised a Catholic, and that played a big part in his writing through his career. The religious imagery, morality and struggle were ever present in his work. There is no doubt in my mind that this subconsciously resonated with his Irish fans.”

[  Where’s Bruce? Springsteen born to run all over town  ]

Springsteen approaches touring with near-spiritual fervour, though he has also been upfront about the challenges of putting on a knockout show every night.

“Performing is like sprinting while screaming for three, four minutes,” he told the New Yorker in 2012. “And then you do it again. And then you do it again. And then you walk a little, shouting the whole time. And so on. Your adrenaline quickly overwhelms your conditioning.”

He had perfect clarity, however, about why he continues to give everything to his audience. Rock’n’roll for Springsteen is a kind of freedom.

“For an adult, the world is constantly trying to clamp down on itself,” he said. “Routine, responsibility, decay of institutions, corruption: this is all the world closing in. Music, when it’s really great, pries that shit back open and lets people back in, it lets light in, and air in, and energy in, and sends people home with that and sends me back to the hotel with it. People carry that with them sometimes for a very long period of time.”

The objective has always been the same: to play until everyone was ready to drop – not the musicians but the audience.

Bruce Springsteen at Giants Stadium in New Jersey in 1985. Photograph: Gary Gershoff/Getty

“We had a saying,” Springsteen’s saxophone player Clarence Clemons told Rolling Stone in 1986 as the E Street Band looked back on Slane. (Clemons died in 2011, his place in the E Street Band taken by his nephew Jake.) “Are they still on their feet? Yeah, let’s go back and get ’em. Can they still raise their hands? If they can, we haven’t done our job.’ When we finally saw the guys in the front row falling, lying over each other, then we said, ‘Okay, they’ve had enough. Let’s go home.’”

Springsteen was full of life at the RDS last year. Yet the shadow of mortality hung over the evening, too. In one moving anecdote he talked about the band he had formed as a teenager in New Jersey and noted that he was the only member still alive. The performance finished with I’ll See You in My Dreams, a meditation on growing older and what comes next. “Death is not the end,” Springsteen sang with gut-punching poignancy. Then the lights went out.

“He’s had close friends pass away much younger than they should have, but ... perhaps he’s at the point where he’s considering how long he may have left,” says Hannah Summers. “I think becoming a grandparent, which he was fairly recently, must put that into sharp focus too.”

“The shows have been extremely emotional,” agrees Brothers, who says this latest Irish tour is sure to become a cherished memory for Springsteen fans – much like Slane in 1985. “Every time I get to see him – 28 times and counting – I always fear that it might be the last. Someday I will be right. So let’s enjoy it while we still can.”

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band play Boucher Road, Belfast, on Thursday, May 9th; Nowlan Park, Kilkenny, on Sunday, May 12th; Páirc Uí Chaoimh, Cork, on Thursday, May 16th; and Croke Park, Dublin, on Sunday, May 19th

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Irish eyes smile upon Rory McIlroy, Shane Lowry in Zurich Classic of New Orleans triumph

Duo outlasts chad ramey/martin trainer in playoff at tpc louisiana.

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When Martin Trainer missed his par-saving, playoff-extending putt late Sunday at TPC Louisiana, the Irish lads – you couldn’t really call them anything else, could you? – looked at each other and hugged. Shane Lowry and Rory McIlroy had won the Zurich Classic of New Orleans.

Lowry lifted McIlroy up in a colossal embrace, and the celebration was on.

The duo – friends for a quarter century, nearby homeowners in South Florida and weekly playdate pals with their young kids – turned things around Sunday after a tough start and walked away PGA TOUR winners, again.

“We went out there, we had loads of fun, and we won the tournament. You couldn’t ask for a better week,” Lowry said.

“To win any PGA TOUR event is very cool, but to do it with one of your closest friends … Think about where we met and where we've come from, to be on this stage and do this together – just awesome to be able to do it alongside this guy,” McIlroy added.

For McIlroy, it was his 25th TOUR title, his third in a tournament debut. He now has at least one win in seven consecutive PGA TOUR seasons. Lowry won for the first time on TOUR since the 2019 Open Championship, his third TOUR win overall.

Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry news conference after winning Zurich Classic

McIlroy and Lowry were the expected champions, given the lack of proven winners around them on the leaderboard heading into Sunday. But no one could have predicted Trainer and Chad Ramey zipping 25 spots up the leaderboard in the final round after a format-tying 9-under 63. They were waiting around for upwards of three hours before finding out they would be in a playoff.

And even though McIlroy and Lowry were the favorites, that doesn’t mean the win was guaranteed.

Lowry said at breakfast Sunday they noticed how much the trees were whipping and yet, Ramey and Trainer shot “an unbelievable score.” Lowry and McIlroy were 1-over through six holes and needed to make something happen quickly – and that’s exactly what they did.

“To play the last 12 holes in 5-under I think was very, very good," Lowry said. "It showed a lot about our character and how much we wanted to win this thing,”

Lowry is about two years older than McIlroy; the duo first represented Ireland at the 2007 European Amateur Team Championship. They were European Ryder Cup teammates in both Wisconsin and Rome. And they played together at the Olympics in 2021, something they’re hoping to do again this summer in Paris.

“I know to go back to Ireland with an Olympic medal would be like a dream,” Lowry said.

“I was in a seven-way playoff in Tokyo for a bronze medal, and I’ve never tried so hard to finish third in my life,” added McIlroy.

This was McIlroy’s fourth straight week of TOUR competition, and Lowry’s third straight. There were no signs of fatigue from either man late Sunday at TPC Louisiana, with McIlroy knocking his drive on the par-5 18th in regulation upwards of 350 yards. Lowry, with a laugh, said he wasn’t sure what to do from the position his partner had left him in.

Rory McIlroy’s clutch 72nd hole chip yields tying birdie at Zurich Classic

This wouldn’t be considered a breakthrough victory for either player, given their long-standing pedigree and solid starts to 2024 (Lowry had two top-five finishes in Florida, while McIlroy won on the DP World Tour earlier this year and finished third at the Valero Texas Open earlier this month), but their easy chemistry in Louisiana could be a harbinger of good things to come.

The fans in New Orleans, too, seemed to buoy the boys. There were chants of "Rory, Rory," and there was a story relayed on the CBS broadcast of Lowry and McIlroy getting a standing ovation when they left dinner on Saturday night at Arnaud’s, a jazzy, 100-year-old fine-dining spot in New Orleans' French Quarter.

“It's not lost on me how cool that is. Every time I get to play in front of thousands of people, the little boy in me just thinks it's so cool and so exciting,” McIlroy said. “The crowd really made the weekend.”

“Rory brings a crowd, and people love him. We've got a lot of love this week in New Orleans, and we've had just the best week,” added Lowry.

What now, though? It was a big week and a big win for some of the TOUR’s most affable players. For Lowry, he’s earned his way into the rest of the Signature Events on the 2024 schedule, and it’s “freed him up,” he said. For McIlroy, he had exited big events like THE PLAYERS and the Masters with a few more questions about his game and its overall direction. This week, though, McIlroy reflected on why he and Lowry, all those years ago back home, started playing golf – because it was fun.

“I think sort of reinjecting a little bit of that fun back into it in a week like this week – it can always help,” McIlroy said.

“Hopefully we can both kick on now,” Lowry said of good things to come. “It was great fun all week, everything about it was just brilliant.”

When Irish eyes are smiling, it leads to a PGA TOUR victory.

Ipswich Town celebrate remarkable promotion to Premier League

Ipswich fans storm the pitch after their 2-0 win over Huddersfield confirmed their promotion to the Premier League. (1:42)

IPSWICH, England -- Manager Kieran McKenna could walk on the River Orwell that flows past the Ipswich Town ground tonight, and no one would blink twice. Miracle man McKenna has guided the club to back-to-back promotions, with their 2-0 win ( stream a replay on ESPN+, U.S. only ) over Huddersfield Town on Saturday securing second in the Championship and their place back in the Premier League after a 22-year absence.

A couple of hours after full time, McKenna was reflecting on the last week. "We've all lived a monk-like existence," he said. They'd left nothing to chance, not even booking a restaurant for a potential celebratory dinner just in case it'd tempt fate.

They headed in Saturday's lunchtime kick-off needing a point to secure a return to the top flight, but this group wasn't ever going to be timid. It's not the approach McKenna has instilled at Portman Road, and not the DNA that has guided the club from midtable League One obscurity when he took over in December 2021 back to the promised land in just 30 months.

As afternoons go, few could have dreamt this. It was as perfect a performance and occasion as an Ipswich fan could have wished for. Whenever you have these types of matches, with a finishing line in sight but still the gut-wrenching uncertainty and scars of previous heartbreak tempering optimism, there's a tendency to expect the worst-case scenario.

Huddersfield still had an unlikely chance of avoiding relegation -- they required a 15-goal swing on Plymouth Argyle -- while Ipswich, given a 98% chance of promotion, needed not to concede to secure the runners-up spot behind champions Leicester City .

But the team played without nerves, attacking from the off and camping in and around Huddersfield's penalty area. When referee Simon Hooper sounded the final notes of this season and confirmed Ipswich's passage to the promised land, the players were engulfed by thousands of fans who streamed onto the pitch. Somewhere in the middle of all of it was McKenna as the stadium announcer pleaded with the fans to leave the pitch so they could get a trophy presentation together. It was a thankless task.

Over in Miami, Ipswich fan Ed Sheeran -- on tour and unable to be at the game -- FaceTimed attacking midfielder Conor Chaplin and the club's chairman, Mike O'Leary, saying how much he'd wished he was there .

"It hasn't hit home," McKenna said. "I've been so disciplined, and then staff and players have, at not getting carried away. Look, 96 points in the Championship as a newly promoted team with so many of the same group we had two years ago, the way we've done it and the style we've done it, it's an incredible achievement."

They've been dreaming of this day since May 11, 2002, when a 5-0 defeat to Liverpool relegated them to the second tier, just one season after they had finished within three points of making the Champions League under George Burley. A year on and they were filing for administration; the collapse of the ITV digital television channel and poor recruitment saw them teeter on the brink of extinction. But still they battled. They reached the playoffs three times, but instead of heading back to the top table, they plummeted further in 2019 when they were relegated to League One, a far cry from the club's days under those immortal managers like Sir Alf Ramsey and Sir Bobby Robson who are honoured with statues outside the ground.

The club's proud history is detailed on the wall of the West Stand. From the club's birth to the Sir Alf Ramsey era, their league title in 1962, Ray Crawford's club-record 227 goals, winning the FA Cup in 1978 under Sir Bobby Robson to John Wark's heroics in 1981 to steer them to the UEFA Cup. "Burley's Bar" breaks up the wall of fame, as it continues with their story through to the Premier League, their European run in 2000-01 and the recognition of Kevin Beattie as the "best Blue ever" in 2008. They have two free panels at the end of the stand. While a statue of McKenna is still a little premature, surely he will be immortalised on the wall for this historic pair of promotions.

The Tractor Boys' Northern Irish manager is now an honorary son of Suffolk. When McKenna took over, they'd just lost in the FA Cup second round to non-league Barrow, prompting ex-Ipswich legend Terry Butcher to say: "We're not a big club anymore. We're a small club, really, when you think about how far we've sunk." Burley said this week the club was "not bringing players through the academy and doing away with the community projects, not looking after the ground and fans [were] not enjoying the football."

Paul Cook was sacked by owners Gamechanger 20 -- who took on the club in April 2021 -- after the defeat to Barrow, and they turned to McKenna, who was Jose Mourinho's assistant manager at Manchester United and then part of the coaching team under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Ralf Rangnick. Ipswich was his first senior managerial job, realising the potential of taking a sleeping giant back up to the top flight, the owners' vision selling him a dream.

Both he and CEO Mark Ashton have worked to reintegrate the club with the community. On Friday, Ashton visited Gusford Primary School; he was greeted by a hall full of children wearing Ipswich shirts, chanting "Blue Army." Relations mended, just a few years after they'd lost their way to the extent Norwich City -- their arch-rivals -- were running school sessions in Ipswich.

"Just outside of Ipswich, I've seen it go through really difficult times and I know that being in the Premier League is going to be bringing not just real excitement to the football club, but also real excitement and joy to the town and lift it up, which is really important," Sheeran told ESPN's Nate Saunders in Miami.

Behind the scenes, their recruitment has been well-judged, with the starting XI for Saturday's game costing in the region of £4.5m. The January business reinforced the squad with Kieffer Moore , an astute loan signing from AFC Bournemouth to cover an injury to George Hirst , and Jeremy Sarmiento -- on a temporary move from Brighton & Hove Albion -- bolstered their options on the wing. Lewis Travis added depth to the defence from Blackburn Rovers .

But it all comes back to McKenna. "He's worked wonders," one supporter said before the game, who's also part of the pitch team. He talked with just as much animation about their £2.5m hybrid surface they installed last summer as he does the calmness of McKenna. "The only time we've really seen him get angry was against Hull City when he smacked the side of the bench," he says. "He's been brilliant."

The fans have loved their unapologetic attacking approach. Ashton calls it their "hunter mentality" -- resolutely restarting each time with a short ball from the goalkeeper, looking to press unrelentingly and keeping possession before executing rapidly in the final third. And all that on a budget far inferior to those of their promotion rivals -- Leicester, Southampton and Leeds United were all relegated last season from the Premier League and armed with the cushion of parachute payments.

They'd been preparing for this all week in the town centre. The team behind Ipswich Central -- charged with improving the town's business prospects -- issued a rallying call to local businesses asking them to deck their stores or cafés out in royal blue. The "Green Room" café on St. Margaret's Green was renamed the "Blue Room," local opticians had blue bobble hats on their glasses models, a locksmith decked out the mascot in a blue Ipswich shirt.

Ipswich supporters the world over made their pilgrimage back to their footballing home. Garin Hubbard bought a one-way ticket from Sydney back to Suffolk just in case they ended up in the playoffs. He didn't have a match ticket but needed to be there, just like others who'd come from places like the U.S. and the Middle East. On the other side of the Irish Sea, McKenna's family's Manor House Country Hotel on the shores of Lough Erne in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, was decked out in blue, offering a free pint to anyone wearing an Ipswich shirt.

The fan group Blue Action called on supporters to meet on the corner of Sir Alf Ramsey Way and Constantine Road to welcome the coach at 11 a.m. They were there in full voice from 9 a.m., a group of 100 or so already singing songs honouring Sarmiento. A local fireworks shop put on its Facebook group: "By the amount of blue and white smoke bombs we have sold it is going to be an epic day." They weren't wrong. There were fans asking for any spare tickets -- more in hope than expectation.

Some fans were nervous -- preempting disappointment as self-preservation. A father and son talked about how they were going to put £60 on the unlikely scenario of Leeds getting promoted at 16/1 (at the expense of Ipswich), so that if things somehow went off the rails against Huddersfield, they'd wake up with an extra £1,000 to soften the blow.

By 11 a.m., the fan zone hugging the stadium was packed, and outside it was pandemonium. Thousands of fans greeted the coach, the sky a wall of dense blue smoke of eye-pinching intensity blowing down Sir Alf Ramsey Way; the drums relentless, the chants continuous, as the coach snaked through. But away from there, some preferred to spend a moment reflecting. By the time the coach had edged through the crowd, a little further away on the other side of the stadium, a couple sat by the club's memorial garden, remembering a friend and lifelong Ipswich fan who'd passed away in the week. It was an experience both personal and collective.

Ipswich came into the match with perfect symmetry -- a record of 191 goals and 191 points over the past two seasons. They added their 192nd in the 28th minute. The party had already tentatively started in the stands with Leeds losing, leading the Ipswich fans to sing about their fellow promotion hopefuls "falling apart, again." But it was Burns' goal that triggered sheer elation. The West Stand shook under the weight of celebrations. "We are going up," they sang into the early afternoon sky after Burns slotted home first-time from a neat Chaplin pass.

Any lasted nervousness was gone just three minutes into the second half as Chelsea loanee Omari Hutchinson danced through flailing Huddersfield lunges on the edge of the box to score. The chants of "We are going up" got louder, now boosted by unwavering belief rather than expectation, with "Stand up if you're going up" soon following.

As the match ticked on, still they pressed and prodded, looking for a third. A banner was unveiled in the Sir Bobby Robson Stand, reading: "We've got super Kieran McKenna -- Mind the gap." And in the 89th minute, they replaced goalkeeper Vaclav Hladky with last season's No. 1, Christian Walton , for his first Championship minutes of the season.

Referee Hooper was halfway toward the changing room when he blew for full time. And in an instant, the pitch was covered with Ipswich fans, the sky coated in blue smoke, and players held aloft, popping up on shoulders among the throng. It was sheer, unbridled joy.

This group will be immortalised in Ipswich history. Their captain, Sam Morsy , has been brilliant across both promotions, along with central defender Luke Woolfenden and the brilliant Leif Davis -- an outstanding full-back and one of the best players in the Championship. Chaplin has been superb as a No. 10, just like he was in League 1, while Hirst led the line in the first half of the season until injury hit. Yet this was always about the collective. Davis will not be short of suitors, however, having chipped in a remarkable 18 assists.

"We're all buzzing but it hasn't sunk in yet. [McKenna's] taken my game on a massive, massive amount," Davis said. "I hope he stays and we get to work with him for years to come. I had a Newcastle season ticket when I was younger and I can't wait to play at St James' Park."

McKenna will enjoy the celebrations over the coming days, but you imagine he'll already have turned attention to next season. They have some of their summer plans in place, looking to renovate their Playford Road training ground, while they'll also have to keep envious eyes away from McKenna. He is under contract through to 2027, but he has already been linked with several Premier League jobs, most recently Brighton.

"I couldn't have dreamt this," McKenna said. "It was a long road, a lot of work to be done. We had the goal of promotion but everybody has that.

"To achieve that has taken an incredible amount of work. It's been one of the toughest Championships, and this will bring challenges, there'll be challenges ahead but that's not for now. Now is the time to revel in this."

You also feel there'll be no reckless recruitment; they've built sturdier foundations than that. Ipswich will build, spend astutely and look to the long-term.

"What's brilliant about football is it is very unpredictable, and you never know what's going to happen," Sheeran told ESPN. "We've seen the top six teams in England fall from grace before and you've seen people like Leicester win the league. You never know, if we avoid relegation next season that's the biggest success for me, but you never know what's going to happen."

But today and across the rest of this Bank Holiday weekend, and likely the entire summer, they'll be celebrating this remarkable feat.

At the start of the season, they were targeting midtable, maybe an unlikely playoff push, but not this. The pubs in Ipswich had already stocked up -- learning from last year's promotion party to over-buy beer -- and though this club will always now be associated with Sheeran, they'll be bouncing to their own version of Shakira's "Waka Waka": "Morsy and McKenna's men, we're going up again."

Additional reporting: ESPN's Nate Saunders, in Miami.