Outraged Kilmaley protest to GAA president

KILMALEY GAA Club has expressed outrage at not receiving one of the 10 €25,000 Strategic Infrastructure Funding Programme grants, which were allocated at a Clare County Board meeting recently.

The club has written to GAA president Christy Cooney in an effort to unearth why their application failed and to find out how it rated in comparison to the successful clubs. Two weeks ago, the county board did not reveal why the clubs who received the grant managed it. Neither did they explain why clubs who didn’t benefit from the grant fell down.
The GAA distributed €250,000 to each county resulting from the financial dividend of opening Croke Park to soccer and rugby in 2007, while Lansdowne Road was being redeveloped.
Clare GAA appointed a three-man committee of Johnny Hill (chairman), PJ Kelly and Ger Hickey to decide which 10 Clare clubs, from the 24 who were eligible, qualified for the grant. Unable to make a decision, the committee stepped aside and were replaced by Croke Park stadium manager, Peter McKenna and Derry county board chairman, Seamus McCloy, who then proceeded to pick the 10 successful clubs without visiting them.
Clubs had to spend in excess of €100,000 to qualify for the €25,000 grant and have their work completed by December 31, 2009.
“We met that criteria,” Tom McNamara, chairman of the Kilmaley field development committee told The Clare Champion, adding that the club has spent €600,000 so far in developing two full-size playing fields, dressing rooms, a jogging/walking track and a gymnasium. The work began two years ago and the club believe that the project will cost well in excess of €1 million when completed.
“We spent €360,000 to buy the ground. We spent €190,000 to prepare the ground for laying the fields and we spent €50,000 between architects and engineers. We’re up on about €600,000 expenditure. We’ve borrowed €280,000 and we have fundraised the rest from the people of Kilmaley,” McNamara added.
He also pointed out that the €190,000 was spent in a six-week period last autumn preparing the ground for the field development. This specific expenditure and the timeframe during which it was spent qualified Kilmaley GAA Club to apply for the €25,000 grant.
“The contractors moved in on August 2009 and they were in there for six weeks. Their contract price was €190,000 and that’s what we submitted. We completed the job,” McNamara stated.
“It’s a disgrace really that the organisation that we’re supporting and that we’re working for has failed to give us anything. We need to see the scoring other clubs got as well and how much money they spent, what they did and when it was done,” he added.
Club chairman, Conor Clancy said that the club is very angry at the manner in which Clare GAA distributed the grants.
“The club was confident that it had an extremely persuasive case to make to the adjudicators when the opportunity presented itself,’ he explained.
“It is an understatement to report that everybody working in the club is outraged that it was not included in the allocations and that the decisions appear to have been made merely on the basis of the papers handed over by the county sub-committee, without any further investigation by the adjudicators,” he added.
Gerry O’Malley, who is secretary of the Kilmaley field development committee, believes that GAA president Christy Cooney is obliged to give the club a hearing.
“One would expect that, as president of the GAA, he would be mindful of the basic unit of the organisation, which is the club. But we’re also mindful that if he doesn’t, we will be seeking a meeting with him in the context of Féile, when it comes to Clare in June. This is our first attempt at getting the ball rolling at senior level in the organisation. If they don’t respond, we certainly won’t let it lie at that,” he warned.
“We want a debriefing and exactly what the terms were in relation to the decisions that were made and how we stacked up against the rest of them and how they were marked against us. If we fell down in that marking, well let’s see it and at least we’ll see something up front. At the moment, we’ve nothing,” he noted.
Kilmaley club secretary, Stephen Clancy cannot understand how the successful clubs were selected when the Croke Park-appointed committee didn’t visit the applicant clubs.
“It’s hard to see how they made a decision without visiting the grounds. If you’re looking at paper, all you’re seeing is a name and the amount that was spent. But you don’t get the background to it, how far advanced the project is and how much €25,000 would mean to a club,” he commented.
The club secretary believes that the club will not have the energy or interest to support the upcoming annual Clare GAA County Board draw and that they are unlikely to sell many tickets.
“Certainly, there isn’t an appetite to sell them this year. A number of people, that would have gone out and sold them, don’t want to sell them this year. I’ve up to 200 tickets at home and I don’t think they’re going to be sold this year,” he forecast.
McNamara reiterated these sentiments.
“The members are outraged and they said no way are they going to go out on the road. They’ve gone out on the road gathering money for this development off the people of Kilmaley for the GAA. They’re finding it very, very difficult to go out gathering for the county board, after the county board rejecting us in this. All we want is a level playing field. We want the whole thing transparent. We need to know what’s going on and what happened,” he said.
“If there were 10 clubs with a better presentation that us and better work done, then fair enough. But at the moment we don’t know that,” he maintained.