The last time I was up in Down, armed soldiers were lepping out from behind ditches in front of southern-registered cars, many of which were part of the racing circus en route to Down Royal or Downpatrick, with Newry our drizzly cross-border Tijuana full of porn and prophylactics. Time maybe then for a fresh look at the Mourne county and a first look at its most famous son.

Rory McIlroy wasn’t even big enough to chip a ball into a washing machine back then. But the young man’s stature in golf today is such that no one doubts this week’s Irish Open revolves around him. Dubai Duty Free may sponsor but it is being ‘hosted’ by McIlroy’s charitable foundation. Even if he doesn’t win, it is still his show.

Possessing a foundation is a sure sign of breathing rarefied air. This is Federer stuff, Beckham too: McIlroy’s only needs a first name. Sceptics might point admonishing tax-efficiency fingers at some of these enterprises but McIlroy’s involvement is widely lauded and appears to be sincere.

But charity is not the primary reason for contemplating a trip to Royal County Down. Watching excellence is rarely a bad reason for going to watch sport. Greatness, though, surely demands it. And when it’s only up the road, then it’s time to park your prejudices and go a-looking, maybe. Except that’s the thing with golf: it rarely fails to live down to your prejudices.

At Wentworth last week, McIlroy hit a bad shot and ‘flung’ his club to the ground. Later he ‘hurled’ a ball into a lake after missing a putt. He faced the prospect of a fine and, even more discomforting, volleys of tut-tutting comment about his on-course deportment. For this supposed rock’n’roll excess, he was even asked if he might require a course in anger-management.

Sanctimony

Only in golf can such sanctimony be proclaimed with such solemnity, the continuing process of a straightforward pursuit as hitting a small ball over a big field being mummified in vast swathes of regulatory rigmarole designed to keep a clubhouse membership busy doing something they actually enjoy – keeping people in their place.

McIlroy’s tricky, though, because what’s a suitable place for such a singularly soaring talent?

This is widely acknowledged as a golden era for golf in Ireland with a trio of other Major winners representing a standard of excellence unmatched by any place of similar size and population. But McIlroy is on another level again and you wonder sometimes if we’ve fully cottoned on in this country just how rare a talent he is.

This wet outcrop of rock has produced the undisputed best in the world, possessed already of a record that guarantees him a spot in the annals of the game, yet potentially still only at the foothills of a career that could wind up redrawing the boundaries of what constitutes golfing success.

McIlroy has just turned 26: it is hardly fanciful if Jack Nicklaus thinks he can win 20 Majors for the rest of us to believe the same, and all of this is on a scale unprecedented on most any sporting stage, never mind Ireland's.

So it’s hard to resist an urge to buy into the whole proprietary ‘I-saw-McIlroy’ bit, even if it might mean darkening the door of a golf club. Someone who knows the game extremely well – actually knows it as distinct from bluffing through blizzards of bulls*** – assures me McIlroy’s talent is such that seeing him now could mean being able to simultaneously use ‘I saw’ and ‘in the early days’ – if not quite the Beatles in the Cavern, then it’s at least the Adelphi. He insists the game is at his mercy for as long as he wants it to be.

Even for golfing sceptics, this is heady stuff and the signs are encouraging that McIlroy will want it for a long time yet. What’s especially intriguing, though, is the figure set to show up for this Irish Open looks a lot more assured and confident than the one who complained at the 2013 event about being suffocated by public attention.

He’d been under fire then too for bending a club and walking off the course, and the whole ‘Wozzilroy’ thing was going strong, although not as strong as the whole British-Irish thing, not to mention the management company bit, and all that hoopla about how going for the Nike buck, and its new clubs, threatened to ruin his career.

He’s come through all that, managed to win back-to-back Majors last year, possesses an A-plus game that no one else can match and a B-game that has them anxiously looking over their shoulders. Most of all, though, he appears to have found a way of reconciling what he does with a level of fame unimaginable to the rest of us and still come across as a functioning human being.

In the two years since Carton House, that might actually be McIlroy’s most impressive achievement.

Hagiographic

There are enough inadequates around to prove time is no guarantee of maturity. But while the ‘moxie’ that Nicklaus loves is still there in that swagger, and a foundation indicates levels of wealth beyond most of our ken, there are plenty signs too that the correspondence between an extraordinary talent and a commendably ordinary outlook remains firmly to the Irishman’s credit.

We love to get hagiographic about our sporting heroes in Ireland. The suspicion remains that behind the fascination, the young man from Holywood hasn’t been clasped to the collective bosom just yet. But time usually takes care of most things. They know all about that in Down.