Munster base a place for 'kids to fall in love with rugby'
Munster Rugby chief executive Ian Flanagan hailed the prospect of a “place for kids to fall in love with rugby” as the sod was turned on his organisation’s Cork Centre of Excellence and confirmed his next priority was to secure a naming rights deal for the €7.3 million project.
An Tánaiste Micheal Martin, Simon Coveney TD, IRFU president Declan Madden and Lord Mayor of Cork Dan Boyle helped perform an official sod-turning ceremony on the site at the Dolphin RFC end at Virgin Media Park of what will house the region’s first indoor rugby training dome, a state of the art gym and Munster Rugby’s new offices.
The centre is in part financed by €2.7m from the Government’s Large Scale Sports Infrastructure Fund and Flanagan stressed it was a project designed not just to support Munster’s objectives around boys and girls age-grade and player pathway programme, clubs and schools but also benefit the whole community.
“It’s real pride that we’ve got to this point and it’s a day of celebration,” Flanagan told the Irish Examiner. “It’s a key strategic priority for us in our strategic plan. We want to deliver a thriving domestic game.
“We want to make our player pathway systems more robust and this fits into all of that and what it means is there’ll be kids in Waterford and West Cork who will be travelling here for hands-on skills coaching on a dark winter night in the rain and snow and they’ll be doing that indoors and there will be warmth and bright lights. It just makes everything easier for us, makes it easier for our coaches to coach and it makes it easier for kids to fall in love with rugby and to play rugby in the right conditions.
“It’s also a great community asset for this part of Cork. This is traditionally a working class part of town and we’re really proud of the role we play at the heart of this community and how important we are here. The Tánaiste referenced it, and I grew up here too, there was big walls around the place but now it’s all openness and we want to be open to our community, we want people coming in. Like the summer concerts here, we want people who aren’t necessarily rugby fans to come in and see the place and feel it’s their place and their space.
“And the new facility will be absolutely like that. We’ll have an open-door policy.” Flanagan said there was “a slight gap” in funding to make up but added: “It won’t delay the project in any way but we are looking at in order to close that gap is naming rights.
“We are speaking potentially to local corporates and philanthropic donors who, potentially, would be interested in having their name on a facility like this, which is all about the community game and community development of young players and rugby as a participation sport in the province.
“We’ve had initial conversations because everything only becomes real when people put spades in the ground and workmen are on site. I would be hopeful now we’ve launched this, we will go after those conversations in a far more concerted and deliberate way because the project is real.
“We are very clear. It will built on time, it will be built on budget, it will be open and operating with or without naming rights but obviously we would love to have naming rights in place for the opening ceremony next summer and we’re going to be going after that in a very concentrated way now as a key commercial priority for us.”