€15m spend is last thing Mayo GAA needs

When you are in GAA outposts in Mayo like Achill, Ballycroy, Belmullet, Glenamoy, Louisburgh and Lacken, you get a great sense for how vast our county is.

Charlie Collins in Lacken recalled the late John O’Mahony coming to Lacken for a game and saying to Charlie, a selector with him in 1989, that he now knew how far the Lacken lads had to travel to play for Mayo. I’ll always remember interviewing Catherine Doran from Achill ahead of the 2013 All-Ireland Minor Final in which her son Eddie played. The minors trained in Bekan so often they weren’t home in Dooniver on the northern edge of Achill Island until after midnight.

Only 10km or so across Blacksod Bay from the Dorans is James Lavelle in Aughleam. James won a Connacht minor title in 2023 and was on the Connacht-winning U20 panel this year. For him to go to Bekan it is two hours, a four-hour round trip.

The grá those families have for the game meant such trips were undertaken without complaint. But how many more on the periphery have had their dreams dashed by virtue of their location?

Bekan is a wonderful facility that has provided great utility for clubs and county teams not just in Mayo, but throughout the province. The biggest criticism it has received in this county has been its location, on the eastern periphery of Mayo.

That’s not bad design, though. It is a Connacht GAA Centre of Excellence and its location is ideal in that context. With Mayo having no such facility, the presence of Bekan has been a godsend.

Mayo do need somewhere of their own, but when you hear that the plan is to locate it in Bohola, so close to Bekan, you have to wonder about the wisdom of it.

Mayo has a great advantage in having a Centre of Excellence in the county already, in Bekan. If we need a second one, should it not either be an extension of Bekan or at a far more central part of the county?

Instead, Mayo GAA are seeking to proceed with a location, Bohola, only 12 miles from Bekan.

Bohola remains a fair spin from North and West Mayo. This argument was superbly articulated by Anthony Hennigan in these pages recently.

The land in Bohola is 26 acres, extremely generously gifted by Bohola native Bill Durkan. Given the current state of Mayo GAA finances (recall Mayo GAA still owes €7.8 million on the MacHale Park development which will not be paid off until 2057), they cannot ignore such an offer out of hand purely for reasons of geography. But, why, then, are we incurring a cost of over €15 million for a Mayo Centre of Excellence?

Firstly, do we need one at all?

There is no centre of excellence for Dublin GAA, Limerick GAA or Cork GAA? How do they survive? Well, they do have access to state-of-the-art facilities in third-level institutions in the cities so that’s a different scenario.

You only had to listen to James Horan on the Irish Examiner Podcast to learn how problematic the lack of a base is for county teams in Mayo. It’s not something that’s new to any of us who have spoken to those involved with county teams in recent years. So I think there is a need for something, somewhere. But what and where?

Geography-wise, with such a fine facility already in East Mayo, does it not make sense to have a Mayo GAA facility towards the west or north of the county? Or perhaps a Castlebar location in partnership with Mayo County Council and the Atlantic Technological University. This collaborative model was part of plans for a Mayo GAA Centre of Excellence at Lough Lannagh. There were solid plans undone by the poor quality of land (note that Lannagh/Annagh means marsh in Irish).

Surely Bekan can still be utilised: it would be madness not to take advantage of such an exceptional facility in our county.

Perhaps Mayo GAA feel they cannot turn down such a generous offer by Bill Durkan. We spoke to auctioneers and asked about the going rate for such agricultural land within a ten-mile radius of Castlebar. You are talking about just under €10,000 an acre, so €260,000 for 26 acres. Not an amount to be sniffed at but, when backdropped against a planned spend of €15 million, it represents less than 1/50th of the overall budget.

So if it is only such a small fraction of the spend, is compromising for a non-central location in Bohola worthwhile? Particularly a location so close to the Connacht GAA Centre of Excellence?

In terms of the type of facility, a useful comparison might be Faithful Fields in Offaly. Offaly GAA obtained the lease for their centre of excellence in Kilcormac for a nominal fee. They built four full-size pitches with floodlights, one of which has a stand, as well as a complex with dressing rooms, meeting rooms, catering facilities, a gym and an all-weather warm-up area.

The cost? Just €2.25 million. They had to fundraise €750,000, the rest was through various grants. The facility is not extravagant but it is very functional.

Now, granted, this was a decade ago so such costs will have increased but it makes you wonder about the €15 million outlay planned for Bohola which is also due to include four pitches. Recall there are no land costs for Bohola either.

Put simply, the spending planned for Bohola seems exorbitant. If you give an architect a budget for €15 million, they will spend it.

Several people I spoke with who have expertise in pitch and facilities development recoiled at the figures. It reminded me of all the expertise that sits in this county but is not sufficiently resourced at County Board level. There are some fabulous club facilities in this county constructed in a very prudent manner and a top-level Centre of Excellence in Bekan.

Would it not make sense to have an infrastructural sub-committee of the Mayo County Board to tap into this expertise? Especially when we are talking about spending over €15 million.

The figure just jars so much. No county centre of excellence in the country came close to that cost. Seven pitches and a fine central building in Bekan for Connacht GAA were built for less (including the €3.2 million dome, a full-sized astro/all-weather pitch and five Prunty pitches). Why are we spending more on a facility with just four pitches?

We all know what happened the last time we went north of €15 million for a Mayo GAA project. The MacHale Park redevelopment crippled clubs and the county.

To give you a flavour, at the 2009 Mayo GAA Convention, then County Board Treasurer JP Lambe said that because of the expenses related to the MacHale Park redevelopment, ‘I don’t know how can we continue to put that kind of money into coaching’. The amount in question? A paltry €32,000. This was in spite of the argument made by the then Coaching Officer Hugh Rudden that the 2009 Cúl Camps had made a profit of €30,000. That’s how strapped Mayo GAA became that a net spend of €2,000 on coaching was seen as too high.

Do we need to walk down that road again? Does Mayo GAA really need to be saddled with more debt?

The scale of the development of MacHale Park was the single gravest error of judgment made in Mayo GAA matters in my lifetime. Should we not learn the lessons of the past?

Spending €15 million on a Centre of Excellence would increase Mayo’s debt to just shy of €23 million when you add in the €7.8 million outstanding on MacHale Park. Perhaps funding opportunities have been explored but there is no indication that any GAA or Government funding has been secured or promised.

Mayo GAA were flat out raising just over €250,000 for the MacHale Park tiles project three years ago to redevelop the pitch. It would appear that fundraising for such a project is easier said than done.

Clubs have been told that they won’t be saddled with any debt from this capital project. That remains to be seen but clubs’ concern is not just debt. They want the best for Mayo GAA too and want the best opportunities for their talented footballers and hurlers. A Centre of Excellence is needed but not one of a scale that will further imperil Mayo GAA’s already troubled finances.