Dublin GAA CEO John Costello wants to build a 25,000 seater stadium in Templeogue. Dublin originally attempted to purchase the site from NAMA in 2015 but were unsuccessful.
The Dubs offered to buy the site for €6.5 million at the time but the agency chose to sell the site to a higher bid.
Costello sharply criticised NAMA, as did Colm O'Rourke in the Irish Independent. The latter labelled the agency a "national disgrace" and said it was selling off Irish assets to foreign vulture funds. It was "the greatest plundering of Irish assets since the Cromwellian plantations."
18 months on, Dublin GAA are closing in on the purchase of the site from the original purchaser. The price is envisioned to be around €9 million.
Dublin hurler Liam Rushe believes the county board should find a different use for the land. He told Darren Cleary on 98FM that they should build a centre of excellence on the site rather than a 25,000 seater stadium.
Hopefully they’ll put in some form of a centre of excellence that we can actually train on, at present both squads are out in DCU a lot of the year.
There were some criticism of Abbotstown that we were going to box it off, but we haven't been able to get ourselves a slot there all year, that never materialised.
While Rushe acknowledges that the Dubs use DCU a great deal, he says they've been too nomadic in his time. He believes they need a full-time training base. He referred to Anthony Daly's frustrations while he was senior hurling manager.
Anthony Daly used to call us tinkers because we were literally stopping off in a different club training ground every six weeks, depending on the time of the year.
We’d move onto a different pitch after we’d wrecked the previous one, it’s great to have had DCU the past couple of years, they really helped facilitate us, we thank them for it.
It would be nice certainly to have one fixed Dublin senior football and hurling training ground.
