St Saviours GAA rises from the ashes

Mark Corcoran can remember the phone call distinctly.

“It was Saturday, January 24th at 7.30am,” the chairman of St Saviours GAA club in Waterford recalls, “and it was Ollie Ryan, our caretaker telling me the clubhouse was on fire. I got there within five minutes but there was very little I could do.”

“Soul-destroying” is the phrase Corcoran uses to describe the scene. Their clubhouse, built 20 years ago, but developed season by season in the intervening two decades, was little more than a smouldering shell.