Carrigaline FC looking for more land to cater for booming club

AN urgent appeal has been sent to landowners, local farmers and the business community for land in Carrigaline to facilitate the soccer club's ever-growing membership.

One of the largest clubs in the country are urging local land owners to come forward to help them to grow their facilities in Carrigaline and PRO Ken Dennehy tells us why there is such a demand for more land at the club.

"Over the last ten years our club has grown exponentially and now we are probably one of the largest club memberships in the province if not the country," said Dennehy.

"Ballea Park is our home and always will be, but we need more land to continue to cater for our growing community. Our goal is to try to procure between eight and 20 acres of suitable land to match our growth of members."

The booming club already boasts some of the best facilities in Cork and both pitches in Carrigaline are always a hive of activity from early in the day to late in the evenings. 

While the current facilities are top class and well looked after, led by chairman Willie Walsh, there is a need to add, in order to facilitate the ever-growing population in the village.

"Currently, we have two state-of-the-art all-weather pitches as well as our clubhouse, we have four dressing rooms and a referees’ room in the clubhouse. We have a full bar facility and cater for our club events and also private events but we need more. 

We as a club are constantly looking for ways to develop our facilities and with the help of local landowners, we hope to achieve this in the not-too-distant future. There is a massive need for land."

The club’s membership is huge, currently, we cater for 68 teams from U11 to senior football. 

"We also have nearly 500 kids in our academy section from U6 to U10 years of age. With these kind of numbers it is critical that we find at least land for two more pitches to assure we can continue to develop our players so they can reach their own potential.

"Our main focus is always our members and providing a Centre of Excellence for them, this will continue not only this year but for the years ahead also, some of the projects we are hoping to complete this year are of course finding more land, the addition of more dressing rooms at Ballea park, new fencing behind our goals on both pitches, on the field of course, as a club of our size, we are hoping to be challenging for leagues and silverware across all our teams. 

"We need the best facilities we can in order to do this."

With the constant building of houses, it is difficult to accommodate the ever-growing population. 

"This is our biggest challenge, our club motto 'peil do ghach duine' which means football for all, this isn’t just our motto but also our club’s philosophy, that is what we strive to achieve every day. 

PRIORITY

"The club now needs to grow side by side with the population increase in the village.

"At present, we are not using any other facilities locally but in the past, we have used Garryduff, Harlequins as we needed to, this might need to happen again until we secure the land that we need.

Nowadays there are a lot more all-weather pitches around so there are options there as well but if we can get more land, it would help us massively. 

"No club wants to go elsewhere and spend money hiring out other grounds. Not only is it difficult to find other venues, but it's also costly and this is something we will try to avoid. 

"Having our pitches for training is what's important to us. It's important for the kids and they are our priority. 

"Kids deserve to train in their locality and have top-class facilities at their disposal so we as a club will do everything we can to secure land in order to provide this for the kids. 

"We urge any landowners out there to get in contact with us if they can help in any way. It's providing a facility for so many kids in the community."