Former UCC sports director puts home on market

NOT one for hanging around, is Kieran Dowd.

Nor, for that matter, is his wife Una, a professional painter who returned to college after rearing a family of six. With the brood all but reared and fled the nest the couple are selling up from their convenient, western suburban Cork home and making a move westwards to Macroom, to a house with more grounds on which to occupy their ‘retirement’ years.

Anyone who attended UCC in the past several decades will be familiar with Kieran Dowd. Although a quietly spoken Belfast man, he has put the skids under hundreds of high-profile sports people, thanks to his role as Director of Physical Education and Sport. He still is the first chair of the Colleges and Universities Sports Association in Ireland (CUSAI,) overseeing sport in third-level ITs and colleges.

Kieran Dowd oversaw the safe delivery of the new Mardyke Sports Arena. During his 32 years he had dealings with athletes coming into a peak period: Donal Linehan and Frankie Sheahan and Moss Keane in rugby and Gaelic football, Kerry footballers the Lynch brothers, Seamus Moynihan, Maurice Fitzgerald, Anthony Lynch, hurlers Frank Lohan, Nickey English and Joe Deane, Mary Logue and Rachael Kohler (hockey,), Billy Oakes and Ray Shanahan in athletics, and camogie stars Stephanie Dunlea, Una O’Dwyer and Liz Garvan.

“There were those who were on teams that I coached and who went on to very successful careers in business, such as Eddie Murphy, Ted Foley and Dave Ronayne. And then there was Dr Con Murphy and Tony Aherne who now tend to my health needs,” quips the healthy, but retired, sports mad man.

He and Una, a painter with gallery space in Midleton, are selling their family home close to UCC’s campus on the Model Farm Road.

No 28 Melbourn Court is at the back of a cul de sac in the mid-1990s development, one of just five detached houses here built by Murnane and O’Shea. It is a four-bed detached home, in spotless order, with private rear garden overlooked by a sun-room, the kitchen, with a pergola sunny seating area, shed, and water feature.

It is on the market with Alan Browne of Murray Browne auctioneers (he’s also a former Cork hurler, who trained last year’s UCC Fitzgibbon hurling team) and carries a €595,000 asking price.

Liberally decorated with Una’s landscapes of Cork and Kerry (negotiate hard and you might get a few thrown in for a reasonable sale price) the house has good living space, as befits a place that reared six children, and includes lots of TV points, a living room, with cast iron fireplace, a dining room leading to the rear, south-facing conservatory, a family room, kitchen with utility off, and there’s a guest WC. Overhead is a main family bathroom, along with four bedrooms, all doubles, with varnished wood floors, and the master bedroom has a four-piece en suite bathroom.

Set just in off the Model Farm Road at the junction of Melbourn Road, No 28 is a walk-in job. Though Kieran Dowd might rather that you ran, or at least jogged, in.