The €1 million sale of playing fields in Foxrock may not be able to proceed, with one of the clubs using the grounds saying they have legal advice “that it cannot go ahead”.
Relations between the clubs using the playing fields have soured over plans by the Foxrock parish to sell the grounds, which it manages on behalf of a diocesan trust to Geraldines P Moran GAA club (Gers) for €1 million.
The five-acre site is conservatively estimated to be worth €10.5 million if rezoned for residential use from its current recreational status. Dunnes Stores, which has had a long-standing interest in acquiring the fields, sold a nearby site of the same size for a reported €32 million in 2018.
At an information meeting on Wednesday, St Brigid’s Rugby, which says it has been using the fields for close to 50 years, accused the GAA club and the local church of a “massive breach of trust”.
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The dispute has escalated in the past week with rugby club officials saying they have received five legal letters from officials representing the church, demanding immediate action at a time its own legal advisers were away on holiday.
One letter this week gave notice that their use of the pitches was being terminated. This was followed, the club says, by another legal letter saying the termination could be avoided if the rugby club signed a disputed legal letter “and agreed to everything the GAA club wants”.
However, club officials say the legal advice received from senior counsel is that the sale cannot legally proceed as currently planned.
Bishop Donal Roche, who is one of the trustees of the diocesan trust, spoke briefly from the floor. Stressing that he had attended the meeting out of personal interest and not as a representative of the trust or anyone else, he said the decision to sell the land for use as a playing field into the future “seemed like a good deal at the time”.
“The understanding we were given was that the access you would be given would be exactly as it had been,” he said.
This has become a key bone of contention, with a side agreement on the issue of access for other sports between the parish and the GAA club including a set of apparently contradictory statements.
It stipulates that both parties agree to “permit the sporting clubs and other users to have continued use of the premises ... in the same manner as has taken place to date, in accordance with the extent of their use to date”.
However, a schedule to the document says the rugby club would have to remove its signage, equipment and goals “on completion of their allocated time slot”, which runs counter to the terms of their current access.
It also limits recruitment to the rugby club in a way that St Brigid’s says breaches equality legislation and says that the arrangements between the GAA club and the rugby club must be “confirmed each year in a written agreement”.
A separate “clawback” arrangement that would see the parish secure any “uplift” from a sale of the fields by the GAA club raises further questions about the integrity of the 999-year lease to ensure the fields are retained for the sporting use of local children, officials from St Brigid’s say.
“This should have been a good-news story for the Catholic Church,” Morgan Cassidy, chairman of St Brigid’s rugby club, said. “This is an absolute mess.
“Thy have made a mistake here and they need to correct it. We want to progress a solution with the parish and Gers but in the absence of that we will continue our legal engagement with the St Laurence O’Toole [diocesan] trust.”
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