No flies on the GAA president, he was ready for the question.
“Just borrowing (a phrase) from the commercial world, there’s no anchor tenant on it. The anchor tenants are the 2,000 GAA clubs and the 32 counties,” said Aogan O Fearghail.
The association’s figurehead was out in Abbotstown for the official opening of the GAA’s new €12million national training centre in West Dublin.
The National Sports Campus is little over 10 kilometres from where Jim Gavin’s All Ireland football champions currently train at St Clare’s, Dublin City University.
The fact that Dublin are one of only half a dozen counties without their own centre of excellence in place or in the pipeline has done them little harm to date. Three Sam Maguires in the last half decade, plus something of a hurling revival, would suggest the current scenario is not hampering Gaelic games in the capital.
But that is not to say Gavin and hurling manager Ger Cunningham – who currently has no established training base – would not jump at the chance of taking their sessions on Abbotstown superb pitches, one of which is an exact replica of Croke Park.
It wasn’t the Dublin County Board’s preferred option. Their plan was to buy the established Spawell complex in Templeogue and develop their own centre of excellence, like almost every other county in the GAA.
Fifteen kilometres south of Abbotstown on the M50, Spawell would have been a perfect location but their €8.5 million offer was gazumped by an investment fund.
That’s €8.5m for 35 acres of land that the county board would still have the develop. The most expensive centre of excellence on the island is Tyrone’s highly impressive Garvaghy, which cost €8million.
For an extra €500,000 Dublin could not even afford to buy the land on which to build their sand-based pitches, changing rooms, hurling walls and gyms.
That is the reality in which Dublin must operate but now that a custom built, made to measure facility has opened on their door step the GAA president declares that homeless Dublin, spurned at Spawell, will not be “the anchor tenants”.
To borrow another phrase from the commercial world, “quit yanking our chain”.
Of course Dublin will use the National Games Development Centre, they would be mad not to. Having shelved plans for another training centre in Rathcoole, secretary general Paraic Duffy admitted two years ago that the €2m of central funding that would have gone towards that greenfield site would instead be put into Abbotstown.
So, Dublin have already paid €2m in rent towards Abbotstown? Drop the anchor if you like, but Dublin are definitely tenants.
Of course it doesn’t look fantastic for the best funded, most populated and most commercially successful county in the land to be handed the greatest training facility this side of Garvaghy, but to not let Dublin use it would be wrong-headed.
Almost as wrong-headed as pretending they’re not going to use it, all the time.
“Have Dublin any special, first say on it? The answer is no. Nor have they sought it to be fair to them. I’m sure they will use it. Our goal is to have teams of all shapes and sizes and so on using it,” said Duffy yesterday.
“I think clubs from all over the country will be thrilled with the opportunity of coming here for a weekend and maybe using the gym for a session, playing a match here, I think it will be used by all 32 counties, 2,000 clubs. That’s what we want and I believe that will happen.”
First of all, the vast majority of counties already have their own custom-built training facilities – part-funded by GAA grants, of course – and are unlikely to add to their already ballooning expenses by making a trip to Dublin to check out the Croker dimensions at the side of the M50.
It should be a tremendous boon for clubs, particularly underage, looking for a weekend away but put off by the prices of the resort hotels that also offer training facilities. We can see Féiles, blitzes and all manner of competitions played on the five floodlit pitches, but not at such a volume that there won’t be a pitch available midweek for Gavin and Cunningham.
The GAA is a wonderfully inclusive organisation. Ignoring the painfully simple logic of allowing Dublin use their shiny new toy would run contrary to that.
Okay, they’re not your “anchor tenant”. But they have as much right to come ashore at Abbotstown as anyone else.
That said, Mayo have thus far resisted the temptation to make the Connacht Centre of Excellence in Ballyhaunis their main training base, so maybe Gavin and the lads like it out in St Clare’s.
