He may be the face of Flora margarine, but he knows what side his bread is buttered. Padraig Harrington has become the first golfer to make the cut in the annual Sunday Times Irish Rich List.

The winner of the 2008 Open and PGA Championship is now worth €34m, ranking him at number 239 in the annual list of Ireland’s richest 250 people. After winning three majors in the past two years, the greens are paved with gold for the 37-year-old Dubliner. Lucrative sponsorship deals now place him in the golfing world’s top five earners.

Two golfers also appear in Ireland’s young rich list. Portrush-born Graeme McDowell, worth €6.8m, is ranked at 13 having earned €2m on the European tour last year. He is also listed at number 64 on the UK’s young rich list, up from 94th place last year.

Rory McIlroy, worth €3.4m, is a new entry at 18 on the list, which will be published in The Sunday Times on April 26.

Harrington has earned pre-tax career winnings of €31.7m to date and has augmented his prize money with lucrative off-course earners. Since winning the Open in 2007, his first major, his earning capacity has increased five-fold.

The golfer’s three-season fee from Wilson, a golf equipment manufacturer, is worth more than €6.8m and is just one of 12 deals worth in excess of €22m that he has signed over the next three years, sponsorship experts estimate.

Harrington’s background as an accountant has probably encouraged him to organise his financial affairs more efficiently. He described himself as an “active investor” in an interview with The Sunday Times in 2006. “I tend to invest in a lot of private placings and unquoted companies,” he said. “I like to read the financial pages. I’m very interested in making money work for me.”

The golfer’s sponsorship deals are negotiated by Adrian Mitchell from the London-based IMG agency, who has worked with Harrington since the golfer turned professional in 1995. In recent months Mitchell has brokered deals for Harrington with Footjoy, a shoe manufacturer, and FTI, an American business consultancy whose logo now features on the Dubliner’s visor.

Other sponsors who adorn the golfer’s clothing include Kartel, an Irish-based clothing company; The Marlbrook, a Harrington-designed golf course in Clonmel, Co Tipperary; Oceanico, a Portuguese property company; Titleist, a golf ball manufacturer; U4EA Technologies, a communications technology company; and White Oak, a golf course in Tryon, North Carolina. Wilson has sponsored the golfer since 1998, while he has had a relationship with Kartel since 1996.

Harrington can also bolster his earning through appearance money, corporate golf days, speaking engagements, course architecture, books and instructional DVDs.

The golfer, who lives in Rathmichael, Co Dublin, is said to have been paid “high six figures” to play at a tournament in Abu Dhabi in January.

Golf earnings have been inflated in recent years by the Tiger Woods factor. When the American golfer turned professional in 1996, only nine players made more than $1m on the PGA tour. Last year the tour included 78 millionaires, partly because of the new global television audience and sponsors attracted by Woods.

The golfer has always been clever with cash. “I made my pocket money by selling second-hand golf balls on the golf course,” he has said. “I would sell them for £1 on the sixth tee, then at the 17th hole I sold the same golf balls to the same people for £2. They had to buy them because they had none of their own left.”

McIlroy is also discovering that golf can be a lucrative business. The Co Down player, who turns 20 next month, is ranked 17th in the world and has amassed more than €900,000 in winnings. More than one third of this was earned from his biggest pay day to date — victory at this year’s Dubai Desert Classic.

The leading amateur at the 2007 Open, McIlroy reportedly secured a €1.13m signing-on fee with the golf agency International Sports Management when he turned professional. Originally sponsored by the Dublin business consultants FL Partners, Bennett Construction and Lough Erne Golf Resort, like Harrington he now gets sponsorship from Titleist and Footjoy as well as Jumeirah, a Dubai-based luxury hotel group.

With personal appearance fees and other commercial deals, these will add more than €1m to his wealth in the short term.

“It is obviously nice to be earning this sort of money but I’m still a regular teenager and doing ordinary things,” McIlroy has said.

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