It has been the 46-year-old’s home course since childhood, and throughout his golfing lifetime had been under the stewardship of Martin Lehane, who retired after 40 years as club pro last summer.

Now Twomey is at the helm but the Irish Examiner’s visit to the Alister MacKenzie-designed course is to discuss yet another role and his vision to bring more sustained success to Munster men’s golf.

Twomey emerges from behind the counter of his pro shop and academy armed with a putter he is fitting with a ball grabber for a member with back issues but he is keen to talk interprovincial golf and his design to create a network of Munster centres of excellence he believes can ensure that the southern province’s 2018 All-Ireland successes at both Senior and Under-14 levels are the start of a consistent pattern rather than an intermittent spike on the graph.

Twomey has been a Munster coach since 2002 and has helped steer the province’s golfers to nine interprovincial titles. Yet for the first 16 years he was operating for the most part as a one-man band. With the GUI’s revamping of its High Performance programme in 2017, he became the Munster High Performance Lead, one of four HP Leads in the provinces working in tandem with GUI national coach Neil Manchip and GUI HP programme manager James Corcoran to provide the talent pathway for players from provincial coaching centres onto the national panels.

Twomey’s intention is to bring clarity to the Munster pathway, from the clubs to the provincial elite level via the counties. Three coaches, fellow PGA pros Ian Stafford (Under-14), Paul Kiely (U16) and Michael Collins (U18), have been hired to spread the coaching load and a recent agreement struck with Fota Island’s splendid resort has established a training base at their state-of-the-art academy.

There is much more to do but Twomey believes Munster golf is on the right path, albeit playing catch-up with the amenities available to its rivals.

“We’re way behind Ulster and Leinster, financially and in terms of population base for kids coming up, so what we did last year was hire three new coaches to help me,” Twomey explained. “I know Ian, Michael, and Paul very well, they have a lot of experience.

“And our facilities in Munster were very poor for a long, long time so we did a deal recently with (club professional) Kevin Morris at Fota Island and we’re trying to create a Centre of Excellence in Fota.

“We’ve created a pyramid programme, where young golfers can go from their schools to their regions to their counties and on to the province.

“We call it Through Golf, so they go from their club pros if they’re very good, to see their county coach and if you’re really good you go and see a provincial coach and work your way up.”

Twomey feels the interprovincial championships need both reinvigoration and to embrace the rich heritage of the competition if only to help young golfers understand just what it means to represent their home provinces and to use that as motivation to progress through the ranks.

“If we can bring back a little bit of the history into it, the kids can understand why they’re investing so much time trying to get on the team, from their Fred Daly teams in the clubs to the county side and so on.

“We’re trying to bring clarity to the pathway.”

Twomey’s legacy at Muskerry is a 10-year run of success that has taken the club’s teams to nine All-Ireland finals and brought home a Barton Shield in 2014, Junior Cup in 2007, and, in that same year, a Jimmy Bruen Shield, named in honour of the club’s most famous son.

“We’ve lost finals in the Senior Cup too but we’ve been Munster champions several times and I think we’d be ahead of most clubs on that,” Twomey said.

Added to those nine interpro titles with Munster boys and men, the success rate is such that Twomey has also answered his country’s call to coach on national panels on a number of times, but taking over as his club’s head professional means there is a limit on his time now between “Muskerry, Munster and most important of all my own family.

“No matter how smart you think you are, you can’t do three or four things in one go.”

His aim is broadening out the High-Performance programme to fit his concept of holistic golf, which he developed more than a decade ago with Castletroy’s Liam Martin following conversations with Munster Rugby’s then head coach Declan Kidney and Paul O’Connell.

“We took the rugby model and applied it to our game as holistic golf, asking the question, what makes the complete golfer? From that day, we’ve addressed the mental side of it, the tactical side, the fitness side and so on but the most important side of it is you have to train golfers individually. They have to be screened individually, there’s no one size fits all,” Twomey said.

To that end, Munster have also retained three fitness coaches, Johnny Glynn, David Angland, and Peter O’Keeffe, the Douglas golfer whose return to amateur status has seen him win the Irish Close in 2017 and establish a place on the Ireland men’s panel, one of three Munstermen for 2019 alongside Mallow’s James Sugrue and Kinsale’s John Murphy.

“Peter is on board as head of our fitness programmes for our U16s and U18s, which is great because he is such a great golfer himself and the kids will listen to him,” Twomey said. The search is on for a mental coach as well as golfing specialists such as a putting coach.

He focuses heavily on the basics of the game in his teaching and designs the coaching programmes for all Munster’s teams with input from the other coaches. “You could have a Jim Furyk swing or Eamon Darcy’s, it doesn’t bother me, but if you haven’t a clue where the hell you’re aiming it, there’s not a whole lot of point. The amount of pros who miss this, I find astonishing,” he said.

“So my theory is, if we can get the three new coaches and the club pros just training the kids on the basics first, it can only be good. If you are a good golfer in Tipp, you’d go to Cahir and if you’re a really good kid, you move up again. The young fellas will understand that.

“We already have Fota but we’re trying to find three or four regional facilities, Munster golf centres we’ll call them, and we’re waiting to see what clubs are interested.

“In terms of location, Killarney would be perfect, Dungarvan would be perfect, Cahir is very good as well. We use Ballyneety and we’re going to Dromoland, so there’s six or seven that will be used but the theory is, I’d only want the top kids, the ones at the top of the pyramid, being allowed to go to Fota.

“The facilities will have to have everything holistically, so if there’s no mini gym there, no short game area, and so on, we just don’t go there.

“The GUI formed the High-Performance programme. I’ve met Bernard Dunne now, met Joe Schmidt, all these lads, and they’re doing exactly the same thing (in their sports) and I’m saying we can do it here. I have an idea how to do it but it’s a question of getting it done properly.

“We’ve so many great pros in Cork, so many great coaches and we want to have them in every different area of Munster to develop the kids on an individual basis. Munster won the Senior interpros last year and the U14s, did well in U16s and very well in U18s, so great in all four and that’s not just down to me and the coaches, we also had a brilliant facility.”

Twomey has all his ducks in a row, then, but what’s the next step for the Munster HP programme.

“When myself and Neil Manchip finished in the centre of excellence in Fota, it was down to Kevin Morris and Jim Long (GUI Munster Branch chairman) in fairness. Kevin did a great deal for us so we get 24 to 30 days there to coach and we also got 16 memberships for Fota. Jim Long kicked it off and we had meetings with Kevin and, in fairness, the deal we got is huge for Munster golf.

“The short game area in particular at Fota is so good for the kids, as well as access to the nine-hole course and free golf balls every time.

“I’m saying to myself, if I had that when I was that age, that would be a great opportunity. So the top end is done quite well now and even though we won the Men’s Interpros last year for the third time in seven years, we’re going to do a lot more work on it because we haven’t had a clear programme going into it.

“I did the Munster stuff on my own for 16, 17 years and no matter how good you think you are, there isn’t a hope in hell you can do it on your own. So it’s great having the three lads involved in this.

“I’ve trained more than 50 people to play for Ireland and lost nearly all of them between going to America, us having no facilities in Cork and them getting fed up listening to me. That’s fine, no problem, I don’t blame them. The modern guy doesn’t want to drive from Kerry or Waterford to see me.

“So my design is, if we achieve nothing else, I’d love to have six great coaches across the six counties so the kid has no more than half an hour to go and see a top coach in his own area.

“We haven’t had that in the past and have been competing against the likes of Leinster with the likes of Mount Juliet and the K Club, with great teaching pros. We’re coming from behind.”