Tim, I've played Murvagh recently and I think you'll find that it still feels much the same after Pat Ruddy's work. It can withstand a fair bit more tinkering than, say, the old Portsalon could. Though I hope they stop now for a decade or two or three.
I have only had the chance for a fairly quick look at the new nine at Connemara - just as it was about to open - and I must give way to Lloyd, who has clearly played it (what a great club to be a member of!). For what it's worth, my impression was that it looked like a hell of a lot of fun, though as Lloyd indicates it is inevitably very unlike the original 18 in character, as the terrain is very different. I would try to play it if I were you (and report back!).
I would also say that while Eddie Hackett may have been frail when he designed the new nine at Connemara, he was certainly not "decrepit".... He knew exactly what he was doing. I hope I am not breaking any club rules by quoting a passage from our book:
"It is a numbingly cold November morning, and we are stumbling our way through a rough field along the seawall near the tiny village of Ballyconneely on the west coast of Ireland. I cannot recall when I have ventured out of doors on a nastier day. It is no more than forty-five degrees and I am being thrashed by rain whipping off the ocean. The wind is deafening and the raindrops feel like ice pellets on my cheek.
We have reached a sturdy barbed-wire fence, and my companion, a frail eighty-five-year-old man in rubber boots and a heap of black rain gear, has taken it into his head that we need to roll underneath it. The bottom wire can't be more than a foot from the ground. But Eddie Hackett is already on his hands and knees before I have a chance to suggest an alternative course of action.
"Jack Nicklaus wouldn't do this, would he?" shouts the dean of Irish golf architects, as he lays flat on his back and begins to squirm his way under the dangerous-looking wire. There is a gleam in his eye and just a hint of mischief in his lilting Irish voice. "Maybe he would design the course from an aer-o-plane."
.....
"I find that nature is the best architect!" shouts Hackett as he trudges through knee-high grass, pacing the width of a fairway that at this point exists only in his mind. "I just try to dress up what the Good Lord provides. Of course He gave us a lot in this place."
On this most miserable of mornings, Hackett is designing an additional nine holes for the Connemara Golf Club. He laid out the original course in 1970 for a local community group that thought a golf course might spur economic development in a region devastated by unemployment and emigration. The golf course weaves through a stark landscape of exposed slabs of rock, and on a fair day it is hauntingly beautiful, swallowed up by the natural elements.
"They had no money, you know," Hackett continues. "I told them if you're that keen on golf, I'll go down and I'll put a stone in for a tee and a pin in for a green, and you can pay me when you can."