Cork City chairman believes club's trust members feel 'positive' after meeting

Cork City chairman Declan Carey believes that members of the trust which owns the club will have come away from Wednesday night’s general meeting feeling positive.

Having had a general meeting in May, Foras held a general meeting at Cork’s Metropole Hotel and Carey was satisfied that he and the board presented an accurate picture as to the club’s current state.

“I think transparency is always the way to go with your shareholders,” he said.

“It’s the way I like to do my business and as a board we want to be as transparent as we possibly can.

“We stopped a lot of the fake news and all of that getting out. We had our last GM in May and the season took an unfortunate turn after that. We felt it was important to update members before the AGM.

“We have business to attend to at the AGM, we’ve two places on the board to fill and we didn’t want that to be clogged up with questions about 2019.

“We want to put that season behind us now, it’s over. We’ve the Christmas period coming up, a new jersey just launched and we want to drive on now and put everything behind us.

“We hope the members will trust us to steer the club in the right direction and I think they will do that, based on the reaction we got.”

Carey would not comment on reports of losses totalling €400,000 for 2019 or a Revenue settlement of €88,000 regarding VAT issues in previous years.

“They’re drafts and forecasts,” he said.

“Figures emanated from previous meetings that were misinterpreted and so we couldn’t comment on forecast figures that have not been finalised.

“We’ll wait until our audit is finished on January 24. These things are for FORAS members until publication.”

Overall, though, while the questions were not easy at times, Carey felt that they were answered.

“There were plenty of difficult questions from members and we were as open as we possibly could be,” he said.

“We gave plenty of time to folks to put their hands up, we didn’t want to leave the room with any lingering questions.

“Are we satisfied with the position the club is current in? Obviously not, we have areas we definitely need to improve on, off the pitch and on the pitch.

“We felt we gave members a true reflection of where we are now.”