Football

Lyon GAA club joins forces with Warrenpoint's Cumann Pheadair Naofa as part of twinning project

Lugdunum CLG president Eoin Campbell with Cumann Pheadair Naofa chairman at last week's launch of the clubs' twinning agreement
Lugdunum CLG president Eoin Campbell with Cumann Pheadair Naofa chairman at last week's launch of the clubs' twinning agreement Lugdunum CLG president Eoin Campbell with Cumann Pheadair Naofa chairman at last week's launch of the clubs' twinning agreement

AN ambitious GAA club in France has joined forces with Cumann Pheadair Naofa, Warrenpoint in the first international twinning venture of its kind in Ulster.

Lugdunum CLG, based in Lyon, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year and has started 2018 with a bang by forming an official agreement with their county Down counterparts.

One of the main men behind the move was Lugdunum president/chairman and Warrenpoint native Eoin Campbell, who has lived in Lyon since 2008.

Campbell was back home for Christmas and last Wednesday night attended a special event to mark the link-up at Cumann Pheadair Naofa’s Mary Street clubrooms.

“I’m from Warrenpoint, Warrenpoint’s my club, so it’s a nice thing from a personal point of view,” he said.

“The reality is we don’t have the infrastructure or the manpower that clubs at home would have, so the idea was to try and create a link and maybe get a bit of guidance from them going forward.

“Over the last couple of years I’ve noticed a huge difference in Cumann Pheadair Naofa. They have become a real community hub, with a lot of great work done off the field in terms of community events.”

The twinning programme was initially launched in 2015.

Gaelic Games has made massive strides across Europe in recent years, with dozens of new clubs founded and existing clubs making great progress in all codes.

In order to further this development, therefore, clubs were asked to consider twinning with a counterpart in Ireland.

Already, relationships have been developed between A Coruña (Galicia) and newly-crowned Munster champions Nemo Rangers (Cork), as well as between Lorient (Britanny) and Salthill-Knocknacarra (Galway) and Berlin (Germany) and Ballyboden (Dublin).

But the Lugdunum-Cumann Pheadair Naofa hook-up is the first venture of its kind in Ulster, and Campbell hopes further relationships can be developed in years to come.

He continued: “Our main coach is a guy called David Lewis from Camlough.

“He’d have been a Carrickcruppen clubman, so maybe one day we’ll be able to bring a team over, have a natural base in Warrenpoint, and maybe play challenge matches with the likes of Carrickcruppen,.

“That’s looking a bit further down the line, but it’s the kind of project we’re looking at long-term.

“Lugdunum CLG is only 10 years old this year, we’ve still got our L plates on, so to hook up with a big organisation like Cumann Pheadair Naofa to get a bit of a help will be massive for us.”

Campbell still plays football for the Lyon-based outfit, which doubles up as an Irish association under the title of L’Association Franco-Irlandaise de Lyon.

He reckons “probably 60 per cent” of the Lugdunum team is made up of French players, fulfilling the club’s aim of sharing Irish culture with the locals as well as providing a focal point for the Irish community in Lyon.

“In France, the majority of people playing are French,” added Campbell.

“If you go to some clubs in Brittany for example, there are no Irishmen at all among a lot of those teams. It’s something fairly special really. Even the management structure, it’s French people running the entire clubs.

“A lot of people in France, when it comes to sport, can be a wee bit more experimental. Sometimes they want to try a different sport every couple of years, rather than joining up to a gym for example.

“And then that interest can be spread by word of mouth when they get to see what the GAA is all about.”