Craughwell AC are over the moon with today’s announcement of a €120,000 Sports Capital Grant towards surfacing the club’s 400m track with an Olympic-standard tartan layer.

With so many people working so hard within the club on coaching and committees and freely giving of their time to 100s of children and adults, it’s so encouraging to get such a huge injection of funding for our facilities.

As everyone will already know, the drive for the 400m track was spearheaded by our World Junior Paralympic Champion Shauna Bocquet and her dad Loic with the huge fundraising 42Challenge that raised almost €50,000 towards the track construction during the pandemic. Together with that and a repurposed 2017 Sports Capital Grant of €72,000 and loans from parents and members donations/loans of over €60,000, the club were able to bring the 400m track to tarmacadam level, with the work expertly carried out by  Seamus Coleman (Coleman Plant & Civil Works Ltd).

The club is indebted to the tremendous support given by our local TD and former Junior Minister Ciaran Cannon. Ciaran was a big part of our 42Challenge, raising over €7000 in a charity cycle and for many years now, has been a huge supporter of the club in advising on grant applications – with the club now having obtained a cumulative €308,000 in grants from the Sports Capital Program in the last 10 years as well as LEADER grants of €132,000 in recent years. The club would like to also thank the Department of Sport and Ministers Catherine Martin and Jack Chambers for considering our application in detail and awarding the grant.

Our expenditure on facilities is nearing €950,000 since we embarked on the facility development in 2014 and will go over the €1 million now with the new work.

The club is also really grateful to the local hurling club who donated a small strip of 100sqm of ground which would have impeded the development of the 6-lane 400m track – a great example of community cooperation.

And the club is very much indebted to our solicitor Ciara Lennon (ciaralennonsolicitors.ie) who did all the legal work regarding the land transfer free of charge and likewise to Kieran Quinn of Sean Dockery & Associates and to Iggy and Claire Greaney of Clarig Consulting Engineers who have done all the drawings and planning applications and engineering supervision for the track works free of charge. And finally the club wish to acknowledge also the great financial support we receive from our main lender Community Finance Ireland who have supported us at every step of the way since we commenced our facility drive back in 2014.

A big shout-out also to our main sponsor Jody’s Spar/Circle K Craughwell who came on board as our main sponsor last year during the pandemic and whose financial support is of great benefit to our ongoing facility development.

The whole project is a fine example of community endeavor and the fruits of the work of the last 10 years are easy to see with literally hundreds of people using the facility to exercise every day of the week.

Its full steam ahead now with the new work – we will have to re-tender for the tartan layer and then hopefully the work can be carried out in May/June timeframes and an official opening in July/August!