QuoteWhere in Dublin is the Iveagh Grounds as I wasnt going to away matches back when they were in the LOI?. Great to see them not folding. Wasnt aware of their history as such.
Huzzah !!Originally Posted by joey B
Where in Dublin is the Iveagh Grounds as I wasnt going to away matches back when they were in the LOI?. Great to see them not folding. Wasnt aware of their history as such.
Gary Cronin is he the right man to manage Longford Town?
Not too far from town, go passed dolphins barn and it’s a few minutes up the crumlin road.
Wouldnt know that area D24 as such. So what has happened in Iveagh Grounds in last few years?
Gary Cronin is he the right man to manage Longford Town?
It was sold to Trinity college by Diageo a while back apparently. The last big match held there was Crumlin United V Dundalk in the cup a few years back.
With all the money Guinness spend on Corporate responsibility stuff its a puzzle that they cut ties with a club with the connection they had with them.
Delighted to see them staying alive but with Bluebell and Crumlin operating with budgets at first division levels its hard to see them carving out a niche.
Afaik Bluebell aren’t anymore. Before Covid they had a set up as good as many FD teams. The bar with pitch views even served food with a menu, shock horror.
It's D12 Marty,nearest landmark to it would be Our Lady's Children's Hospital about 500 yards away.
The pitch and dressing rooms are still the same but afaik the Bar is closed.
Diagio are not the soft touch Arthur Guinness were and have bigger fish to fry.
Indeed and it wouldnt be a surprise if not long after the new Diageo facility in Kildare is brought online that the St James Gate brewery will be wound down slowly, sold off bit by bit, not to cause too much of a stir. They are not ones for sentiment for sure especially if there is a legacy of extremely well paid staff.
There is a real lack of Urban Planning in Ireland (we all know the Housing Crisis)... One of the knock-on effects is on recreational use of land. Because of terrible and inefficient use of land (single houses - total reliance on large roads/ not public transport), there is simply no room for community land. High Rents of pitches and having no 'base' (home pitch- clubhouse) means that clubs will just come and go, and have very little staying power.
There now is just a run for who can provide the most houses (because it is such a desperate crisis (btw- Dundalk is more expensive to rent in than Berlin)... But it will only cause more problems in the future too as it is a Third World way of Urban planning- and has been done in Ireland before with large-scale Council Estates with no access to resources (it doesn't turn out great). It is such an awful crisis- and anyone that doesn't own land already - be it people, clubs or whatever- is going to find it very hard to survive.
In Drogheda, it is also particularly acute. Nearly all junior Drogheda teams are coming and going because they have no pitches. Some play their games outside of the Town in the countryside. Others just disappear. In what used to be a very vibrant soccer town, there is only one schoolboy's club now based in the actual town not affiliated with Drogheda United (Drogheda Town FC). Other clubs just don't have the schoolboy's pitches (like Boyne Rovers/ Newfoundwell/ Boyne Harps/ Drogheda Marsh Cresent)... All had schoolboy teams, but couldn't run a proper section because they just don't have the space. The best thing about the recent Drogheda proposal for a new stadium was the pitches around it. They are so desperately needed.
Urban planning in Ireland is a catastrophe all right. I don't know how true this is, but I heard that on the continent, some university courses about city planning and urban design give Dublin as the example of what happens when you completely balls up city planning. Inefficient use of space, lading to inefficient public services and lack of local amenities. In the end, every citizen ends up paying more (not just financially) for sub standard services. There's no way around it. Proper urban planning has been almost non existent in Ireland for about a century. Hence you end up with an apartment in Dublin costing double what it costs in Berlin or Vienna, even though wages are roughly similar.
The original creation of the modern version of Tallaght in the 1970s used to be used as a textbook example of bad urban planning. Moving thousands of inner-city families with young childre to the edge of a city in an area with no services for them and no family support structures (e.g. grandparents). Then lots of the kids became teenagers at roughly the same time, with still nothing there for them. A recipe for social disaster.
I don't think they did for years - probably not since Guinness sponsored them in their last LOI stint (?) What they did get was cheap access to a home ground etc through the now-defunct Guinness Athletic Union.
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