PAUL Durkin took over as the chairman of Cornish Pirates in September 2016, after moving to Cornwall from London with his wife Derath when they both retired.

A former Ernst and Young partner, a chartered accountant, and IT risk and assurance specialist, he now lives in a property overlooking Newlyn harbour – a far cry from his days in the capital.

But the proud and amiable Irishman has had very little time to put his feet up and enjoy the spectacular view as he tries to get the Stadium for Cornwall project over the line.

It will provide a new home for not only the Cornish Pirates, but Truro City Football Club, and new facilities for Truro and Penwith College.

He talked to Cornish Times sports editor Nigel Walrond about the problems and frustrations that have meant work is still to begin on the stadium at Threemilestone on the outskirts of Truro that is absolutely crucial to the prospects of the county’s biggest sporting team.

How important is it to the success of the Stadium for Cornwall that the Cornish Pirates have a wide appeal, not just in west Cornwall, but in south east Cornwall and across the whole of the county?

My own view about the Pirates is coloured a little bit by coming from Ulster originally, where you have got all the local teams, and above that you have got the professional provincial club, and it has done marvels for Irish rugby, and the fact you can still support your Ballymenas and Dungannons but the focus is on Ulster as the professional club.

If we could achieve something like that in Cornwall it would be great, but as a relative newcomer – I have been here for five to five-and-a-half years now – it is very parochial.

I would love to see people focus on Cornish Pirates – and forget the fact they are Penzance and Newlyn, although there is a legacy there we also want to protect, there is no question about that, but it would be lovely if you could get Cornwall as a whole looking to the Pirates as the professional club in the county, with the hope that they would get into the Premiership and do as well as Exeter Chiefs have done.

We have made no secret that the sort of business model you have to look at is a bit like the way Exeter have done it.

In my view there are three things you have got to get right as a professional rugby club.

Firstly, you need to have your own ground, so the Stadium for Cornwall in Truro is that part of it.

Secondly, you need to get bums on seats and get people in to come and support it, so you need big crowds, so that is where we need the people of Cornwall to support the Cornish Pirates. The Stadium for Cornwall will give us the capacity, and it is a bit more central than out here in west Cornwall.

And the third part of it, and which is absolutely key, is secondary income, it is not rugby income, it is conferencing, there are plans for a hotel on the site as well, and all of that needs to come in so that you are using that stadium asset to do lots and lots of things, and that then supports the rugby.

That is the model we are looking to achieve and it is taking a bit longer than we expected, but we are getting there.

Our crowds have gone up in the last two years, not massively, so that is what we are aiming for, and it is about putting the facilities in place.

The other side of it is putting a squad together that is capable of challenging to get into the Premiership, because that’s where the money is going to be.

We could be sustainable as a Championship club with the new stadium and the secondary income, and our business plan shows that is possible, but really you want to get up to the Premiership.

We have got 38 contracted players this year, plus a few dual-registered players from Exeter Chiefs, so we are not quite there yet, but we are not far off and we are getting there.

We are second in the table, and in the quarter-finals of the Championship Cup, so it is starting to work.

Ideally, the stadium would be under construction at the minute, the squad would merge with that, and that was the plan when I took over three years ago, and it is not just about me, it is Dicky Evans as well in particular, and we wouldn’t be here without Dicky, but that’s the way we have been trying to do it, so the stadium has slowed down but the squad side of it has continued to flourish.

We have brought in Chris Stirling as director of rugby, we have increased our coaching staff, and it is not just the players, it is all those people around it with the backroom staff.

But the biggest problem is that we haven’t been able to start building the stadium yet.

So why is there no sign of work starting on the new stadium yet?

It is down to Cornwall Council and the developers Innox trying to do a much bigger deal up there, by putting in Langarth Garden Village, and they are trying to link the stadium to that because the stadium is within that development. It is supposed to be separate, but they want to get it all done together, and that is our biggest frustration.

We know what the land deal is, but trying to get those two parties to sign off on it is something else, and that is what has held us up over Christmas and New Year. We thought it was all done and dusted.

I had a Board resolution back in July to say I could sign off the deal on behalf of the Cornish Pirates, to take the land from the council, because the land goes from the developer to the council and then back to the Pirates.

It has also got a funding agreement to go with it because we are getting money from local and central government (£6m), so that will all be signed off in one go, so we are waiting to see the final documents.

When the deal finally gets signed off, do the Pirates still need the £3m of funding from central government before they can get on with building the stadium?

We do. We got it signed off by the council over two years ago, and we haven’t been able to crack on with getting it done, so the costs have gone up.

So we will be looking to get additional private sector funding and we will go after that, but it is a chicken and egg situation.

If you don’t have the asset, you can’t go out and ask for funding and raise capital, so that is where we are caught up at this point in time.

We are confident that the central government money (£3m) is going to come through. Even recently, they have come back and asked for a little bit more information.

We have passed the business test. They did that as Sport England, and that held us up for nearly a year, and they want more information about how it is going to be managed.

If we get £6m from public funds, we have got to work out how do we ensure they are comfortable that it is being spent in the right way, so do we need someone from the council on our Board? Because the way it is structured, Cornish Pirates is a holding company, and there will be a build company, and then an operating company.

So the build company will spend that capital money on the stadium, so they will have to see that that is being done correctly, then the build company will be closed down and it will move to the operating company. We have said there will be lots of community use of the stadium, and so they will want to see that is being done.

We will have to look and see how we get representation from Cornwall Council, or whoever they want to put on there, to look at that, and that is not a problem for us. We welcome that actually, so it is open and people can see what it is. We do want it to be seen as a Stadium for Cornwall, and not as a stadium for Cornish Pirates and Truro City Football Club.

So where does the crowdfunding scheme fit into all of that?

The crowdfunding isn’t to do with the stadium itself. It is to build the squad and the facilities they require to get to the point where they are capable of challenging for the Premiership. But again, you need to have the stadium in place before you can go out and crowdfund.

While delays over the building of the stadium mount up, talk of ring-fencing the Premiership seems to grow, and if that happened, where would it leave the Pirates’ plans?

We have heard about ring-fencing for a long time, and most fans don’t want it.

I can understand why professional rugby clubs do want it – to protect the investments they have made. But, sorry guys, it is a sport, and you have to have competition, and promotion and relegation has to be the way it goes.

It is almost ring-fenced financially at the minute

anyway, because the club that comes down gets a parachute payment, and they have got around £3.5m more than any other Championship club to spend on a squad, so they are going to have strength in depth, and therefore are almost guaranteed to go back up.

There are 13 clubs with a ‘P’ share – the 12 current Premiership clubs plus Newcastle Falcons – so I can see they would like to bring 13 into the fold, or see one of those 13 fall away, or potentially you could put London Irish into the British League coming in – a Pro 14 type of thing – because of their connections. To me that says you have got to have a really, really good competition in the Championship.

The top five are not that far away from each other, any team can beat any other on their day, but what I think might happen is that bottom of the Premiership plays top of the Championship to decide promotion and relegation.

Continued from previous page

This is just my own personal opinion, but I think you have got more of a chance of beating the bottom of the Premiership in a play-off than finishing above them over the course of a season, but that is just my view, and I think it would be a much more exciting competition in the Championship to have a play-off to get that top spot, and then have another play-off against the bottom-placed Premiership side.

But that’s not for the Cornish Pirates to decide. That is for the Championship clubs to decide, and the RFU.

We have done our numbers and the new stadium is sustainable as a professional rugby club in the Championship, without having Premiership money, but things are going to change, there is no doubt about that.

CVC, who have a 27 per cent share in the Premiership, have very clear views of what they want to do, buying into the Pro 14, the Six Nations and the Premiership, so what does that mean for Premiership Rugby Limited, and the clubs that are there? I don’t know.

Having improved some of their facilities last summer, what is the chance of the Pirates playing Premiership rugby at the Mennaye Field, while you wait for the new stadium to be built?

It would have to be the gift of the Professional Game Board. There are minimum ground standards required for the Premiership, which means you have to have a seated stand for about 4,200 people, and a capacity of 10,000, and the things that go along with that with regards to toilets and things like that.

Our plan is for the new stadium to provide all of that, but if we win the Championship, and there is still a possibility of that as we are second in the current table, the RFU require you to put in an application to show how you would plan for finishing top, and we did that in November.

There are two options. One is you go to somewhere like Plymouth Argyle, but personally, I don’t want to take the Cornish Pirates out of Cornwall, though you could do that for a season as a temporary measure.

We also asked our architects to look at what we could do at the Mennaye, and we have submitted that.

The ground will not hold 10,000. We could put in temporary stands, and they could also be used for parts of the ground in Truro as well, so it is not wasted money, but we would probably manage 6,500, so then you have got to ask Professional Rugby, would you give us a dispensation on those minimum standards for one year if the stadium is being built? You are then relying on their goodwill to do so.

It would have been remiss of us not to have submitted something like that in November, and we will see what happens.

Could there be a situation where Truro City might play their home games at the Mennaye on a temporary basis, as they did when they had a short spell at Torquay United?

That was one of the reasons why we did some of the work on the ground last summer, but it is difficult to say.

The previous owner took them out to Torquay as a temporary measure while the stadium was being built, and now that has been delayed a little bit.

I am sure if we asked again to move them somewhere temporarily until the stadium was built, it would come under a lot more scrutiny.

The FA have been down and looked at this ground and the things you have to do are quite amazing, and you have to do them before the end of March. You have got to have turnstiles, more toilets, the hardcore we have got has to be tarmacked over because you can’t have people throwing stones at each other, and you have to segregate fans and they have to have separate toilets etc. It is unbelievable what you have to do

It is sad, and I am not saying Truro fans are a problem, because they are not, but those are just the rules.

To get someone like Chris Stirling joining the club was quite a coup.

A director of rugby has a different role to coaching, and is looking at where the squad needs to improve, and who you can bring in to do that. Gav and Paves (joint head coaches Gavin Cattle and Alan Paver) were having to do absolutely everything, as well as coach. They completely respect Chris and they know how to work together.

We have had approaches from other clubs to take both Gav and Paves away but we want to try and keep that continuity. Chris knows the place, and we are sorry he went to Yorkshire Carnegie last year, but we got him as soon as we could!

We are way out on a limb down here in west Cornwall and you have got make it an attractive place to be when trying to entice players. It is a lovely place to go training, and you have got the beaches and everything else down here, but you have got to make it a place where they know there is a very clear plan to progress and that it is not a step back for them but a step up. If you attract people like Chris Stirling as your director of rugby, you are showing the commitment to do that.

The links with Exeter Chiefs must also really help the squad?

It always does and it is a two-way street.

It is great to see Josh Caulfield back with us, but we had Tom Lawday here last season and he has now joined Harlequins in the Premiership. Sam Simmonds played for us the year he went on to play for England.

It is important that you give the younger players at Exeter the chance to play a proper rugby game because the A League is a joke, with some clubs struggling to field teams.

It gives them the chance to play tough, competitive rugby and earn their stripes.

It was like when David Beckham was at Manchester United and was loaned out to play for Preston North End.

I think the Championship is a great pathway for English rugby, and you have to look at it that way and give these guys a chance to progress.

So it is just a case of carrying on waiting until everything for the stadium is approved?

Yes, it is frustrating not just for us, but for our fans. I have been approached by people saying you haven’t started your crowdfunding yet and we want to invest, but we do not want to put anyone at risk, and we will get on with that as soon as we possibly can, and there will be a bit of a party when it all gets signed off.