They need a home

St. Teresa’s Boxing Club issue appeal

ST. TERESA’S BOXING CLUB in Bray are appealing to business owners or property owners in the Bray area to come forward and give them a home for the immediate future after they were made homeless when the venue they were subletting was sold in recent weeks.

Operated by head coach Mark Buckley and the club that produced former European bronze medalist Regan Buckley, St. Teresa’s is now homeless and in danger of losing their 50 members if a solution is not found to their plight.

‘We started five years, we opened up the club behind Aldi (Bray). We had a small space there and the club blossomed. We ended up with 40 or 50 members. The rent went up there and we couldn’t afford it so we got the use of Giltspur Heights Community Centre, that was perfect, it really was. There were some issues with parking but we solved them.

‘Then the Council wanted to start using it, which I understand, it is a community center, but it hadn’t been used in 17 years. Anyway, they wanted to start using it there and then and we were going to have to start bringing gear in and out. There was nowhere to store it, we had a ring, 50 or 60 mats.

‘We had to leave there, we kind of fell into a place. We were asking councilors if there was anywhere else and they told us that they were offering us Giltspur Heights but on their conditions and it was impossible to move a whole boxing club in and out,’ added Mark.

The club then found a home in Oldcourt Business Park where they were subletting.

‘The landlord knew we were subletting,’ said Mark Buckley. ‘The lads got the ok off them before they let us in. He sold it to the guy next door. We found out during the lockdown. I knew the lease was coming up but the lads we were subletting off were fairly sure we were ok, that they were solid. Then I got a call one day to say that he was selling and we had two weeks to get the gear out.

However, even before the sale, Mark Buckley said the pressures of making the rent for a club who operate an open-door policy for kids regardless of whether they can pay or not was reaching a critical point.

‘It was kind of getting to stage where it was like a mortgage. €600 a month is what we were paying and it was starting to wear me down. You’re constantly thinking if you’re having a bad week, I’d be ringing Ger – he looks after the money – and I’d be asking him, ‘well, what are we like this week?’ And he’d say, ‘we’ve nearly hit it.’ and then you’re grand, you can relax. Other weeks you’d hit the rent early. We were bringing that in with membership,’ said Mark.

Local Fine Gael Town Councillor Aoife Flynn Kennedy said that because the club operate the way they do by allowing everyone to take part regardless of whether they can afford it or not obviously has a big impact on the finances.

‘From an income point of view the club are targeting across the social classes of everybody. You don’t want any child to not be able to participate, so if someone doesn’t have money, they are going to be allowed participate anyway and that’s the ethos you want from the club but that’s obviously going to have an impact on your finances,’ said Councillor Kennedy from Fine Gael.

‘That’s the way we worked up in Giltspur Heights,’ said Mark Buckley, ‘because it was kind of like just maintain the place and cover the ESB and gas so anybody who didn’t pay didn’t pay. There was just a sign-in book. All the adults paid but if a child couldn’t pay then there was nothing said. That was always the plan, to try get something off the council and not to have to worry about subs and just let the kids come and go as they want.’

‘It’s kind of a unique feature of the club,’ added Aoife Flynn Kennedy, ‘so many clubs and activities in Bray are paid so it’s obviously cutting out a whole portion of the community. Then you have a club that’s saying, ‘no, the most important thing is you taking part and you having the opportunity, but then the club have to deal with the practicalities of that financial side of things,’ she added.

Presently, Mark Buckley is trying to keep his club going by bringing three children at a time to the carpark of Rathnew Boxing Club for fitness classes since the easing of the lockdown. He says that’s far from ideal and that he came very close to giving up altogether..

‘‘I had thrown my hat at it. I had given up. I was going to drive out to Wicklow and train myself. I kind of hope not to now,’ he said.

‘That would be a disaster,’ said Aoife Flynn Kennedy (if Mark gave up on St. Teresa’s, a club he named after his late mother). ‘That’s the frustration that comes when you’re living in this massive town with this massive need and you’re giving everything to it and you’ve nowhere to go. So, if Mark and Regan and the rest of the club were to decide not to continue here, that massive loss to the town, I mean, we’d lose young people. It would have such a negative impact, and we need now more than ever we need people to have options,’ she said.

St. Teresa’s are now seeking a temporary home until something more permanent can be found for them. They are calling on business owners and property owners who might have a vacant unit or a premises now empty due to the Covid-19 emergency to allow them use it and maintain it.

‘Ideally,’ said Mark Buckley, ‘we’d like a committee to take over and just say this is the premises and here are the days. We’ll look after the boxing club.’

‘That’s the aim of it,’ said Aoife Flynn Kennedy, ‘Mark and Regan, they’re all the experts in terms of the boxing but there are so many members of the community who want to get involved in the admin side of it, the fundraising side of it. But for all of those things to happen you need a base, you need a place to call home. And obviously it’s very challenging at the moment because we have the situation with the boxing club in Bray and there are legal issues going on so it’s not an option for us and we understand that and we accept that but we still need a home on a short-term basis,’ said Aoife Flynn Kennedy.

‘We’re looking at everything and we’re going to be meeting later on to discuss that but the cross-party support has been just unbelievable; everybody kind of digging in. We’re looking at all of the vacant buildings around the town. But finance is a major issue for the club because you don’t want to get to the situation where you’re paying such a high rent that you are excluding people because the whole basis of the club is not to exclude people so you’re trying to balance that.

‘Ideally. We’d love if someone out there had a premises that they were willing to offer to us because it’s not going to be forever. We’re hoping that the legal issues will be sorted out (with Bray Boxing Club) and we’ll be back there but even for a short-term because the level of skill and the options that this club is offering to people in our community is just phenomenal. And we need more of that in the town, where it doesn’t matter whether you have money and it doesn’t matter what your background is.

‘It’s great to see that we have Dermot O’Brien, Joe Behan, Rory O’Connor, Paul O’Brien from Wicklow, myself, Dessie O’Toole, Jennifer Whitmore. It’s across the whole (political divide),’ said Aoife.

‘We have had a lot of support but we kind of need more than everyone wanting to help,’ said Mark.

‘With such a strong focus on mental health at the moment, and particularly youth mental health, and then obviously with so many young people having been cooped up for so long, this has never been so important that this club get the opportunity to get back up and running,’ said Aoife Flynn Kennedy.

‘The big challenge for us as a town is that we don’t lose them to something that’s not appropriate, that we don’t lose kids. Because you get points in life where you get to make choices and we want the club to be a choice for people, that they don’t have to take another choice,’ she added.

‘The longer we stay out of the game the more chance we have of losing them. And when I say lose, I mean lose them to GAA or to a PlayStation,’ said Mark Buckley.