FERMANAGH has 24 GAA pitches.
So says GAA pitch expert Niall Cunningham who has just spent three years trawling through satellite maps to locate every single pitch in Ireland. Now, the 33-year-old Maguiresbridge man intends to map all the GAA pitches in the world.
An image showing a map of Ireland with 1,767 pitches received a huge reaction when he uploaded it to Instagram last week.
Mr. Cunningham was Fermanagh Minor Captain in 1999 and played senior football up to national league level as well as hurling for Lisbellaw. He moved to Belfast to work as a software developer and began playing gaelic football for St. Brigid’s GAC. His new club asked him to create a website and he decided to map the pitches in County Antrim so that supporters and parents could locate the pitches with ease.
His project grew from there. “I thought it would be a good idea to try and find pitches in other counties. The entire process took about three years,” said Mr. Cunningham.
“I used different club and county GAA websites to locate the pitches and then I had to confirm all the pitch locations using google satellite images or street view. When I was searching for my own club in Maguirebridge, google satellite only got to cloud level but Bing satellites got to ground level.”
Work is continuing on the website www.gaapitchlocator.net. Mr. Cunningham, who is currently employed as a software developer in Belfast, was assisted in the website design by Kieran in Shining Light Solutions.
“The reaction has been great. People really seem to take to the image. I get a lot of people sending in information about adding their pitch, or adding names in Irish or telling me the hurling club fell out with the football club so now they have their own pitch! It’s still expanding.”
He has already gathered the co-ordinates of 200 GAA pitches in Australia and America which will be added to his world-wide map.
Mr. Cunningham also has plans for his website to become a central hub for the facebook, twitter and instragram feeds from every club in each county.
“My brother Brendan and I are already well on the way to mapping all of Ulster,” he explained.
Mr. Cunningham concluded: “The sheer volume of GAA pitches is so impressive. I think when most people see the map they’re staggered by the number of pitches out there, and I suppose it shows how important the GAA is in the community.”