Laois GAA line up Portlaoise Grounds

Published on 23/01/2013 10:50

Laois GAA are set to enter negotiations with Portlaoise GAA club to lease their old grounds on Fr Browne Avenue, beside O’Moore Park, for the rest of this year.

Portlaoise agreed to meet with the Laois County Board after the idea of renting out the grounds to Laois GAA received a favourable response from club members at their AGM on Sunday.

The grounds have been used sparingly in recent years since Portlaoise set up their new facilties and pitches in Rathleague.

Laois GAA are believed to be keen to keep a GAA presence in the grounds, and have moved quickly to secure a lease which would see county teams have access to the pitches there for training. Laois GAA may also take control of the car parking facilities there, which would also offer them another source of income, although the details of any lease have yet to be agreed.

The land at Fr Brown Avenue is some of the most sought after GAA real estate in the country, given it’s position beside O’Moore Park, and it remains to be seen what the long-term future of the site holds.

Should a deal go through, which it is believed is highly likely, then it will be another nail in the coffin for the land purchased in Dooary, Ballyroan, by Laois GAA. Having spent in the region of €800,000 at the time, it had been earmarked as the site of a new Centre of Excellence, but has remained undeveloped and, more recently, has been rented out as farm land.

Laois are unlikely to recoup anything close to the purchse price of the land, if and when they decide to sell it. The decommissioning of the mine in Galmoy, which Laois agreed a deal to buy, for just €10 in late 2008, is close to completion also, and a decision on the future of that complex will have to be made in the next month or so.

Elsewhere in Laois GAA news, the senior hurlers will take to the field for the second time in a week this Sunday when they welcome Antrim to Rathdowney for the Walsh Cup Shield.

Antrim lost their opening round game to Carlow last weekend, but will offer Seamas Plunkett and his team a good workout as he continues to finalise his preparations for the opening league game against Kildare on February 24.

Sport

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Laois GAA line up Portlaoise Grounds

Top stories

Sport