Mayo GAA is to look towards developing its two training pitches located at the rear of Hastings Insurance MacHale Park to try and develop a centre of excellence on site "for the next number of years", newly installed Mayo GAA chairperson, Seamus Tuohy, said at a briefing with members of the Mayo media last week.
Mayo GAA had been looking into the possibility of developing a brand new centre of excellence at Lough Lannagh in Castlebar in recent years, but that project was pulled last year after a number of difficulties arose.
Tuohy outlined plans to look at whether the county board could develop two full-sized pitches on the existing pitches owned by the county board located at the Davitt House end of the stadium, with one of those proposed as a 4G (artificial surface ) pitch. The cost of such works, he estimated, would be in excess of €1 million.
The newly installed chairperson said: “We need more pitches for our inter-county squads, our academy squads, and particularly at this time of the year there is pressure on us as a board in providing those facilities. We’re trying to provide pitches for four or five teams at this particular time, and it’s hugely demanding. We need pitches now, not in four or five years’ time."
He added that it made sense to try and utilise the existing infrastructure in MacHale Park, such as changing rooms, catering facilities, meeting rooms and gyms, and that by developing the two pitches there, an immediate response could be provided to an urgent need for facilities for the county board and their teams.
County board secretary, Dermot Butler, said that the county needed a centre of excellence for all its inter-county and club teams, but the money is not available at the minute to make it happen. He added: "Long-term, we do need pitches. Do we need a Centre of Excellence? We do. But at the moment, financially, we just don’t have the money for it. And that’s the big problem. I think Seamus is right, the top two pitches in MacHale Park need to be developed, to bring them up to a standard where they can be used nearly all year round. That will certainly alleviate the problems going forward, because MacHale Park is not going to be open for training; the amount of money we have spent on it, we want to look after it."
As for how Mayo will pay for the potential upgrade and development of the two pitches on site currently, Tuohy said: "That’s quite a sizeable amount of funding to raise. When we do have an agreement on it, we will be putting it to the Cairde Maigheo committee, to look at what are our plans and what kind of funding is required to address those particular issues?"
