The Mayor of County Cork is to seek support from the City\u2019s Lord Mayor and his council for a joint effort to persuade the Government to build a second Sport Ireland campus in the region.<\/p>\n
The county council is meanwhile writing to Taoiseach Miche\u00e1l Martin and sport minister Patrick O\u2019Donovan requesting the move.<\/p>\n
It comes after Social Democrats county councillor Eamonn Horgan received unanimous cross-party support calling for the development. He said Cork continues to lack the level of sporting infrastructure expected of Ireland\u2019s largest county and the economic capital of the south.<\/p>\n
\u201cA county of Cork\u2019s size and sporting pedigree should not be without facilities that are considered standard elsewhere,\u201d Mr Horgan said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAthletes should not have to travel across the country to access high-performance supports, sports science expertise or specialist training environments. Nor should growing communities be left without the recreational infrastructure needed to promote healthier lifestyles. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe have three Olympic standard swimming pools in the country. Two of these are in universities, and the other is in the Sport Ireland campus in Dublin. The last of these opened in 2012. What worries me is that there are no more in the pipeline, none being planned,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Mr Horgan said he would like to see a large-scale, state-of-the-art regional serving development.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not just for Cork. It\u2019s needed for proper, fair regional development in sports facilities. It would serve the southern half of the country. There\u2019s a huge deficit in sporting infrastructure in the county and in the southern region in general.\u201d <\/p>\n
The Sport Ireland Campus in Blanchardstown in Dublin is the country\u2019s national hub for high-performance training,\u00a0as well as local community recreation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cA second Sport Ireland national campus would be an investment in the entire south of Ireland. It would support athletes from Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Clare, Tipperary, and Waterford while creating jobs, attracting international events, boosting tourism, and encouraging greater participation in sport and physical activity,\u201d Mr Horgan added.<\/p>\n
He said planning for this has to start now as the newly revised County Development Plan envisages the population of Co Cork will grow by 100,000 by 2024.<\/p>\n
Labour councillor Ronan Sheehan said: \u201cThis motion should be pursued aggressively by whatever means we can find.\u201d <\/p>\n
Mayor of County Cork, Fianna F\u00e1il councillor Bernard Moynihan, said he would be meeting Cork City\u2019s Lord Mayor Damian Boylan next week and would seek the city council\u2019s support for the development. County council CEO Moira Murrell also supported the proposal and said she and her officials would raise it with their counterparts in City Hall.<\/p>\n
Mr Horgan added: \u201cI am calling on the Government with Sport Ireland to commission a feasibility study into the development of a second Sport Ireland national campus in County Cork and to include the project as a strategic priority within Ireland\u2019s future national sporting infrastructure programme.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Mayor of County Cork is to seek support from the City\u2019s Lord Mayor and his council for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":611697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[40],"tags":[781,1263,9,10,42,10011,18,13,14,6,19,17,11,12,15,16,5,7,8],"class_list":["post-611696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-cork-news","tag-cork-sport","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-cork-city-council","tag-cork-county-council","tag-eire","tag-featured-news","tag-featurednews","tag-headlines","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-latest-news","tag-latestnews","tag-main-news","tag-mainnews","tag-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117009147876823533","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=611696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/611697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=611696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=611696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=611696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}