Finn Harps have been given legal clearance to embark on the road to European glory in their own new ground.
The club, which returned to the League of Ireland Premiership this season, featured in a three-minute hearing at Donegal Circuit Court.
Judge John O’Hagan, who revealed he was a Drogheda United fan, was asked to formally approve the trustees of a new ground for the club.
The application was made by Desmond Murphy, B.L. who also revealed his colours – Derry City. He received his instructions from solicitor Mel Bourke, a Sligo Rovers fan.
Mr Murphy told the court that Harps’ current ground in Ballybofey – Finn Park – was originally bought by a group of men who leased it to the club in the ‘60s. They acted as trustees “in a collective rather than legal sense” and a number had since “moved on”.
The judge was told the club is moving to a new stadium across the River Finn in Stranorlar where a state-of-the art development would also include a separate pitch for a junior side.
Mr Murphy said the move was being prompted by the club’s desire to meet EUFA standards which included legal regularisation of the trustee arrangement.
Judge O’Hagan gave official legal approval to Harry McGowan, Roland Lambe and Fergus McNulty as the members of the new Finn Park Trust.

Next Wednesday, March 26th , Gay Byrne, Chairman of the Road Safety Authority, will attend a ceremony at NUI Galway to honour Donna Ferguson, the young Belleek student journalist who tragically lost her life on the roads in December 2006.
Mr Byrne will deliver the Inaugural Address for the presentation of the Donna Ferguson Memorial Award which will take place in the Siobhan McKenna Theatre in the Arts Millennium building at 2pm.
Gerry and Mary Ferguson will present the Award to John Hogan who achieved the highest mark in the broadcast module of the MA Journalism course in 2006. John Hogan is currently working as a journalist in The Limerick Leader.
Gay Byrne’s address to an audience including Donna’s family and friends, current students of the MA in Journalism, NUI Galway staff and local journalists, will be followed by a question and answer session.

The family of a young Ballyshannon man held in a U.S. jail has appealed to the American authorities not to keep him behind bars any longer.
Soldier’s son Brian Gethins was arrested 10 days ago while on his way by bus to visit his Irish-American girlfriend Shannon Reynolds.
The 22-year-old is being held as an illegal immigrant in Cumberland County Jail, Portland, Maine.
His parents Jimmy and Majella Gethins, of Finner, Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal, who fear he may be kept behind bars for three months, appealed to the U.S. authorities to send him home straightaway.
Jimmy, a fitter at Finner Army Camp, said: “Brian will pay the fare or we will pay it for him, no problem. If he has to be deported we just don’t understand why it can’t be done straight away. Why does he have to be kept imprisoned for so long before processing his case?”
Carpenter Brian, a senior gaelic football star with his local GAA club Aodh Ruadh, visited Boston for three months. He met and fell in love with 27-year-old Shannon and stayed several months beyond the permitted 90-day limit.
A routine immigration check of passengers on the bus bringing him on a visit to Shannon in Maine led to his arrest when he couldn’t produce a green card.
The only communication his parents have had with him since then is through Shannon who has been allowed visit him in jail.
His dad said: “Being locked up will do Brian no good whatever. He has never been in trouble with the law. He doesn’t even have a parking ticket.”
Jimmy added: “Shannon is terribly upset at what’s happened. She has a six-hour journey to visit Brian in jail.”
Bundoran town councillor Michael McMahon, a campaigner with the Legalise the Irish organisation, has taken up the case of Brian, second-eldest in a family of five.
Mr McMahon called on Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and other politicians to intervene.
The Irish consulate in Boston has made representations to the U.S. authorities.

A former fishing pier on the Loughros Point road, Ardara, has been restored following weeks of work. Known locally as St. John’s Pier, it was built in around 1903 to accommodate boats used to fish the Loughros Mor Bay for herring.

Before the pier was built the area housed a fish curing plant. Now it is hoped that tourists and bird watchers will be attracted to the location. The work to the pier, which has included cutting back overgrowth to the original stone walls on the approach lane, clearing the site of unwanted debris, and constructing a platform for a seat and table, has been carried out by Peter Boyle and Charlie Breslin following an approach from the local Tidy Towns Committee.

And for bird watchers the location could become something of a mecca. Recent counts carried out by Emer Magee, Conservation Ranger for the National Park and Wildlife Service, indicate that at least 17 species will be seen from the pier during the year, including the Herring Gull, Oystercatcher, Redshank, Mute Swan, Heron, Curlew and Sedge Warbler. It is planned in time to have a name plate, and illustrated details of the various birds, positioned at the pier.

The clearing of the pier offers just one more location from which visitors can enjoy both the abundance of bird life in this area and see the unique views of the bay. We are very grateful to those who have carried out this project,² said Jack Maguire, Chairman of Ardara Tidy Towns.

Strangely, history records that the pier’s life was relatively short lived. Myth has it that after fishermen decided to fish on a Sunday, the herring mysteriously disappeared! However, it was used up until the 1950¹s by boats engaged in salmon fishing.

Heartless thieves broke into and wrecked a Co. Donegal pub owned by missing toddler Madeleine McCann’s grieving grandmother Eileen McCann.
The thugs smashed their way into the bar in the early hours of St Patrick’s Day – just hours after Eileen paid a farewell visit before returning to the UK after a brief family visit to Co. Donegal.
The break-in happened at a pub in St Johnston leased from Eileen by family friend Joe Peoples.
Thugs rammed a car into the back door and escaped with about €5,000 of booze.
Mr Peoples said: “They cleaned me out of everything that was on the shelves except the Gordon’s gin for some reason.”
The defiant publican quipped: “They must have heard the saying ‘gin makes you thin’. Maybe they don’t want to be thin.”
The crime was committed sometime between midnight on Sunday when the pub was locked up for the night and 8.30 a.m. on St Patrick’s morning when Mr Peoples arrived to reopen it.
He said: “The back door was lying in the yard. There was evidence it had been rammed by a car.”
Neighbouring publicans rallied around and helped him re-stock the bar by 10.30 a.m. on St Patrick’s Day. He said: “To have kept it closed would have been to let the thugs get the better of me and that’s not going to happen.”
Eileen McCann, who inherited the pub premises from her late husband Johnny, was in the area for a few days for his anniversary Mass last Saturday.
She visited the pub shortly after her arrival last Thursday and again before her departure for the UK on Sunday morning when she headed off to Leicester to spend Easter week with her son Gerry and his wife Kate, Madeleine’s parents.
Almost a year ago, a large family group including Madeleine celebrated Easter in The Rosses where Eileen has roots.
Weeks later, three-year-old Madeleine disappeared without a trace during a family holiday in Portugal.

Donegal County Council has moved to shut down the infamous “bog hotel” near Frosses.
Owner Patsy Brogan has been threatened with court proceedings that could end in a fine of more than €12 MILLION and two years in jail if he refuses to comply with an order to remove a bar and lounge from a shed on his property.
A notice served on him by the council describes the bar – which he insists is for private use – as an “unauthorised development.”
It also demands that he remove old cars, caravan wrecks and lorry parts which the council says add up to the operation of an illegal scrap yard.
Mr Brogan claimed yesterday that he is trying to clean up the yard and that council officials have conceded he had made progress.
But he said he won’t be removing the bar which he claims is a private facility he shares with friends.
He has denied claims that he charges for drink although some visitors are known to have left “donations” in a large jar.
He said: “I’m not doing anything illegal. They will have to shoot me to get rid of the bar.”
He added that he got little help from the council several years ago when he and his family were made homeless. He said one of the wrecks he has been ordered to move from the yard is an uninhabitable caravan that’s the council’s own property. It was provided as a temporary home.
The council notice instructs him to return the shed bar to its original state. But Mr Brogan insists he built it as a play-room for his children and, when they reached their teens, added a disco facility.
He says the bar that he built in the same shed as the disco, although up to pub standard, is no different to private bars in other homes.
He has not been prosecuted because gardai say they cannot produce evidence that drink is being sold.
There is a barmaid – 28-years-old Polish beauty Daria Weiske – whom the 70-years-old Brogan says is his girlfriend although she laughs off the claim.
The council notice was pinned to the door of Mr Brogan’s home on January 29th. When officials called him a couple of weeks later he claimed he had not seen the notice so a copy was sent to him along with a photocopy of a photograph of a garda standing beside it on the date of the original delivery.
The notice is served under the same law that provides for prosecution of large corporations for breach of planning regulations. Conviction in a District Court for failure to comply with an order could result in a maximum penalty of €1,904.61 and six months jail.
If a prosecution is conducted in a higher court the maximum penalty could be €12.69 million and two years in jail.
The “boghotel” earned its nickname from its remote location in the Bluestack Mountains and its owner’s readiness to serve drink to callers no matter what the time.