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THE  KERRY  McKEON  BLOG ... ISSUE  61
OUR  NEW  CLUBHOUSE
After a few years of preparation which included much appreciated fundraising work on our new clubhouse in Keash is almost ready to begin. Planning permission has been secured and tenders on costings are at the moment coming in to architects Michael Rowley and Associates. A state of the art facility to include dressing rooms, referees room, kitchen, meeting rooms, toilets, games room and training gym is included in the plans. Overall space at our disposal in Keash is fairly limited and that is the main reason the demolition of the old clubhouse, erected in the eighties, is part of the planning  process with the new building now to be  erected on the same site. With nine levels of male football if we include underage and adult, plus an additional six levels of female football allied to other community events currently being catered for in the club the older building wasn’t able to cope with the traffic so in order to keep pace with the times and the ongoing interest of participating in field sports the new building is an absolute essential.
At this moment in time let all of us spare a thought for the old building. It certainly isn’t the fault of the gallant volunteers of the eighties who erected it, many of them with their bare hands, or the people who fundraised for it in extremely difficult financial times that today, thirty years down the road, it is being demolished because it has outlived its usefulness. Today we salute those men and women, we honour them for their foresight and industry and we sincerely thank them for their efforts, efforts that ensures that they too have contributed in no small way to the many outstanding successes we as a club have enjoyed over the same thirty years. But time waits for nobody and our club today, as evidenced by us winning the recent 2017 Sligo Club Community Participation Award, is a much wider structure than it was in the seventies or eighties. It now involves through varied health, educational and social initiatives a large influx of non playing members to add to those participating on the field. Long may such community integration continue.
Nostalgia is part of our heritage and always will be. Each and everyone of us will recall with fondness this special day or that special day in Keash. The hot day, the cold day, the windy day, the wet day. The day we won this or the day we won that. It is all part of our conversations when we meet up and socialise. It is the very fabric that knits society together. The clubhouse about to be demolished will become part of that nostalgia and that folklore. When multiplied by the hundreds who passed through it will have thousands of stories to tell.  But so too will the new one in the years and the decades to come. Our fervent hope is that for our young and very young  and those not even born yet it will provide as many or even more of all those brilliant memories, that we have all retained and cherished over the last thirty years. 
Lean  na  Clairsigh


Bye for now
PJ  McKeon   for  Kerry McKeon  R.I.P.