The Mayo county board is considering selling the naming rights for McHale Park in Castlebar to help finance the stadium's EUR16 million redevelopment. County secretary Sean Feeney has confirmed that the board is "actively pursuing" a company that may be interested in purchasing the naming rights. "We did a lot of research into what other counties had done to raise money, naming rights, and the selling of seats," he explained. "We have an open mind on it because you could get naming rights on the stand, and you could also get naming rights on the park. We're actively pursuing that at the moment. We're not ruling anybody in, or anybody out. We have an open mind on it. "In an ideal world, we'd like to have a Mayo company's name on the stadium but that may not be possible. "We would need to have somebody in place by next June really, for the Connacht championship, and I can't see it happening before the start of the National League. "Some people might find it less than appealing but we're living in a commercial world. We're spending practically ?16m in the area, so money has to be brought in from somewhere. There's a limit on what you can ask clubs for because they all have their own activities and fund-raising to do. "For a business, you'll have games there practically every other week with National League starting in February and club championship ending in October. We would also hope that it would be used as a venue for Qualifiers during the summer." Feeney added: "Working out a pricing structure for the naming rights is a complicated process. It depends on how a company wants to invest, and the likely exposure you're going to have in terms of TV etc. We've got a fair bit of advice from Croke Park from Dermot Power (the GAA's Commercial Manager) and Peter McKenna (Stadium Manager). We've consulted quite a lot with them." The only other inter-county GAA ground that has negotiated a naming rights deal in recent years is Kingspan Breffni Park in Cavan. It's believed the Cavan county board negotiated a deal worth EUR500,000 over ten years with the Cavan-based company, Kingspan in 2002. Tweet

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