Áras Mhíchíl Uí Mhuircheartaigh will be Dingle's home for everyone

By John Harrington

The late, great Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh was such a brilliant match commentator because he had an innate understanding that Gaelic games were as much about community as they were sport.

So, he didn’t just describe what was unfolding before him, his narration would be peppered with anecdotes that referenced a player’s familial and geographic background almost as much as his style of play.

What makes GAA clubs such pillars of Irish society is that they engender a real pride of place and feeling of belonging, and that was something that Ó Muircheartaigh was always plugged in to.

That’s why it’s so fitting that Dingle GAA club have chosen to name their planned community development, 'Áras Mhíchíl Uí Mhuircheartaigh’, in his honour.

Ó Muircheartaigh hailed from Dún Síon, just out the road from Dingle, and was hugely proud of the part of the country he called home. The language, the culture, and the tradition of sport that binds the community together meant an awful lot to him.

He would surely approve of the fact that Dingle GAA club’s planned development isn’t just designed to service the sporting needs of their players and members, but the community as a whole in all its facets.

The planned €3.47M development will also be an Irish language and cultural heritage hub open to all the community’s diverse sporting and non-sporting groups.

Dingle is famous for the welcome it provides for visitors but ironically enough has a dearth of facilities that cater for and celebrate their own. Áras Mhíchíl Uí Mhuircheartaigh will change that.

“This project was never about GAA, it's about community,” says Dingle GAA Vice-Chairperson, Ronan McCarthy.

“Micheál wasn't just about GAA either. He was a community guy who was passionate about the language and the culture of the area. We all have great memories of him going around dressed in his straw suit when he followed the wren on St. Stephen's Day.

“Ultimately that's what this centre is going to be about, community, so that's why we felt it was fitting it be named after Micheál.

“It would be massively transformative because Dingle town is the service town of the peninsula. When people are looking to do their Irish music lessons, Irish dancing, this is happening in Dingle town but the really unfortunate thing is that there's no space for these things to happen at the moment.

“What's happening is that you have community groups spending their hard-earned donations on renting out spaces in hotels and so forth. We're hugely grateful to the hoteliers in the town who might give us out rooms at reduced rates, but it's wrong. A town should have a community space where these groups can go.

“If you're looking to even hold a bingo night in Dingle there's nowhere to do it. Loads of teams come down to visit here and we were recently trying to arrange a quiz night for one them. You could not believe the amount of difficulty we had trying to arrange a quiz because there was no space. What little space there is in the town was being used for other events.

“We were trying to get onto schools so we could use their facilities but then you're into insurance issues and it turned into a mess for what should have been a great occasion welcoming people down to our area.

“So having a community centre like Áras Mhíchíl Uí Mhuircheartaigh would be transformative for the area.”

The proposed development features a community wing that will include two 120 square metre community spaces, a meeting room, and an office; and a facilities wing that will include four dressing-rooms.

An upgraded floodlit training area and floodlit 3G pitch is also planned, and very badly needed from the club’s point of view because their playing membership is growing all the time.

“As a club we're really fortunate in so far as our pitch is our biggest asset,” says McCarthy. “It's located right in the town centre and is fabulous condition but the surrounding facilities are just totally lacking

“We've got a flat roof structure with two dressing-rooms and between them what used to be our meeting room is now the players' gym so we don't even have a facility to meet as an executive or meet for team meetings or anything like that.

“Our current facilities don't really encourage female participation so the new development will have specific dressing-rooms for our ladies teams, home and away.

“We're in a county semi-final this weekend but we can't even train this time of the year on our own pitch because there's no floodlighting. So even basic facilities like that are missing.

“We're having to leverage the good will of other clubs here in Kerry for the use of their facilities. Again, there's obviously a cost to that, but we're very grateful because they obviously don't want their pitches getting destroyed either so there's only a certain amount of pitch-time you can get as conditions deteriorate.

“The ladies side is a great success here for us. A lot of focus has gone into that. We operate internally under a One Club model and have a great relationship with the ladies side of the club. Their numbers are growing at underage in particular all the time.

They're a relatively young club and they're going from strength to strength but our current facilities don't really encourage female participation so we're the new development will have specific dressing-rooms for our ladies teams, home and away.

“You have Mothers and Others as well. It's Dingle Mothers and Others but it's West Kerry effectively so you've all the ladies from West Kerry participating in Mothers and Others coming in to our facility here in Dingle to train which is absolutely fantastic but, again, it makes it challenging in terms of pitch times and games and all that.

“Our local schooll, Pobalscol Chorca Dhuibhne, use our pitch for training and for their games. Hurling is also going in the club again which is great to see and we're trying to facilitate that too.”

The desire from the wider Dingle community for this development to happen has been very apparent by the enthusiasm with which they have supported all fund-raising initiatives to date.

10 local business people anonymously donated €25,000 each to facilitate the purchase of an apartment in the town for a ‘Win a home in Dingle’ fundraiser which netted the club a profit of over €780,000.

To date the club has secured €1.04M of its own funding and planning has been granted by Kerry County Council, but they need grant supports of €2.43M to see the project through.

“We're completely at the mercy now of the politicians,” says McCarthy. “We're obviously going for every single grant that comes up.

“For example, we recently got grant aided for €140,000 for Leader funding to develop an astro facility on site. That was a 70-30 split - 70 per cent grant funding and 30 per cent of our own funding and we'll be proceeding with that project now.

“We're canvassing heavily for political support and working with the likes of Norma Foley and Michael Healy Rae and all the other TDs to see what they can do for us.

“We're currently on the LSSIF (Large Scale Sport Infrastructure Fund) reserve list and we’re really hoping we can be successful there because we were hugely disappointed to miss out on it previously.

“We're so keen to get going now and the team we have in place is fantastic. There are people on our infrastructure committee with experience of delivering multi-million projects. We have the right people here to get this done and will make this a success.

“We will be doing everything in our power to try to get the funds to get this over the line.”