A Galway hurling fan has written a strongly-worded letter to a local newspaper lamenting the lack of training facilities in the county.

While Loughgeorge was developed to cater for the county's football teams, it is increasingly being sought by the hurlers who have suffered most from the collapse of the Mountain South project. The senior hurlers even had to train outside the county (at the Connacht Centre of Excellence in Bekan, Co. Mayo) earlier this year, such was the lack of suitable training facilities in Galway.

In a letter to this week's Connacht Tribune, Ballinasloe man John Molloy criticises the decision to pump money into Pearse Stadium rather than a Centre of Excellence for the county.

"The chickens - or is it the seagulls! - of the Pearse Stadium project have certainly come home to roost in the form of lack of funding required to properly prepare all county teams and the absolute necessity of a modern Centre of Excellence similar to the one across the border in Clare," he wrote.

"The tragic consequences of spending €17 million on a mislocateded-360-day idle stadium and a further €3 million on the Mountain South ill-fated venture are now destroying any hope of developing proper training facilities for all our teams. Vision and common sense were obviously not the strongest suits of some of our former board officers."

Molloy also hits out at the board's failure to develop Ballinasloe's Duggan Park to a standard capable of hosting Allianz League games.

"The disgracefully neglected Duggan Park under a succession of myopic county boards would be an ideal venue for these games, and hopefully, future Leinster minor and U21 championship games when our GAA officials has the balls to either go into Leinster fully, or being denied this reasonable demand, withdraw the senior team at the end of this year," he added.

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