Playing for LauraLynn
Most fundraising asks you to give something up. This one asks you to pick three golfers and pay attention to the Atlantic coast for four days in September, which is not much of an imposition.
Golf150 is running its Amgen Irish Open competition in aid of LauraLynn, Ireland's Children's Hospice. Entry is €10 with great prizes to be won. Proceeds from the competition will go to Laura Lynn and will be spent to help children with life-limiting illnesses and their families, to make the most of the little moments togeth.
Who LauraLynn are
LauraLynn is the only children's hospice on the island of Ireland. It opened in 2011 in Leopardstown, on the southern edge of Dublin, and since then it has cared for more than 500 children and their families. Around 340 families are using its services right now.
The word "hospice" does a poor job of describing what actually happens there. LauraLynn provides specialist palliative care for children with life-limiting conditions — symptom management, crisis care, end-of-life care — but a great deal of what it does is aimed at the family standing around the bed rather than the child in it. Music and play therapy. Psychological support. Sibling camps, because the brothers and sisters of a seriously ill child tend to spend several years being the ones nobody asks about. Short breaks, so that parents who have not slept properly in months can sleep. And bereavement support afterwards, for as long as it is needed, which is often longer than anyone expects.
None of it costs the families a penny. That is the part worth sitting with.
Why they need the money
LauraLynn receives some core statutory funding, but the great majority of its running costs are raised from the public. In 2024 it raised €9.4 million — up seven per cent on the year before — and every euro of that had to come from somewhere: coffee mornings, sponsored walks, corporate partnerships, standing orders, and a very large number of small individual gifts.
There is no version of this where the money simply arrives. A children's hospice in Ireland stays open because people keep deciding, over and over, to keep it open.
Why we are doing it this way
Golf150 exists to make fundraising less like fundraising. The usual club fundraiser involves a spreadsheet, an envelope of cash, somebody's spare evening and a raffle prize nobody wants. Our format replaces all of that with a competition people actually want to enter: pick three golfers from the field with combined odds of 150/1 or greater, watch the leaderboard all week, and hope all three survive the cut.
It works because it is genuinely a contest. They enter because they think they can read the field better than the person beside them at the bar, and then they spend four days finding out.
Pointed at the Irish Open and at LauraLynn, that engine can do a serious amount of good. A field containing Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm, Shane Lowry and Pádraig Harrington, playing a links most of the country has never seen a tournament on, is about as much attention as Irish golf gets in a calendar year. Ten euro a head, across enough of it, adds up.
How to take part
Entries are not open yet — we are finalising the field and the entry details, and we will announce the date shortly. If you want to be told the moment it goes live, register your interest and we will let you know.
If you run a golf club and would like to put the competition in front of your members, we would very much like to hear from you. LauraLynn have given the fundraiser their formal support, and clubs across Ireland and Northern Ireland are welcome to get behind it. Get in touch and we will set you up.
And if you would rather skip the competition entirely and simply give LauraLynn money, that is an entirely reasonable position and you can do it at lauralynn.ie.