Nenagh Snooker Open invites the World to North Tipperary
By Thomas Conway
These are heady times for New Institute Snooker Club. On Thursday, October 23rd the club - a local institution which has stood as a sporting pillar of the town since 1887 - will open its doors for the 2025 Nenagh Open. But it will be a Nenagh Open like no other.
The tournament - which will be staged over five days and run from 10am in the morning to 10pm at night - has existed for the last eleven years. This year, however, the competition is different.
It has gone from a well-regarded national fixture to a global event affiliated with the International Billiards & Snooker Foundation (IBSF) and Snooker & Billiards Ireland (SBI).
48 players from a variety of different countries will compete, injecting money into the local economy and elevating the status of New Institute as a whole.
The tournament has jumped upwards in scale - dramatically. The primary architects of the project - Andy McCloskey and Brendan O’Donoghue, of sports company AMC Cue Sports - have worked on this for months. Now, the project is finally nearing fruition.
It’s a chilly Saturday afternoon and Nenagh is bustling with busy shoppers. But walk through the doors of New Institute and you enter a different realm. In one corner a match is ongoing and there is dead silence. In another, complete calm, the Loughmore/Holycross game on the television and a couple of the members whispering to each other.
It’s impossible not to notice how well the place is looking. There are bits and pieces left to do, Tony Seymour, the club chairperson, remarks as he opens the door to the kitchen. But the place is impressive. The lights, the tables, even the sofas are striking and pristine.
Inside the kitchen is Brendan O’Donoghue. A former professional with multiple national senior titles, Brendan is one of the most extraordinary talents this club has produced. He won’t tell you that though. He’s too humble, and plus, his mind is totally focused on the Nenagh Open, on bringing this gargantuan project to life.
AMC Cue Sports is a rapidly growing Irish-American enterprise founded by Portroe native and snooker fanatic Andy McCloskey. With a background in sports management, Andy is the current US National Snooker coach.
Now based in Sacramento, California, he set up the company just this year and ran a similar event in Sacramento in March. It turned out to be such a roaring success that Andy and Brendan (who was at the tournament) were inspired to package the whole thing and take it home with them, as Andy recalls.
“It was after the first night of the tournament, at about four o’clock in the morning in my sitting room drinking tea, and we’re banging the table saying we can take this thing to Nenagh as well,” Andy revealed.
Myriad benefits
The duo brought the idea to club chairperson Tony Seymour, citing the myriad benefits a tournament of this scale could deliver to the club and the town. It was well received. Brendan describes Tony as “a fiercely positive guy who doesn’t see any roadblocks,” a man with a “can-do attitude”.
Once they got the all clear, the real work started. AMC Cue Sports is staging the event in conjunction with New Institute along with club PRO David Lynch, with the support of the club committee. The company is also bringing its own support team from the US and Canada, along with renowned Bulgarian referee Desislava Bozhilova, who took charge of the 2025 World Championship Final in Sheffield between Zhao Xintong and Mark Williams.
The company did some number-crunching to calculate the predicted monetary value of the event to the local economy. The figure landed at €70,000. That is, of course, just a ballpark estimate, but it gives an idea as to how valuable this could be to Nenagh as a town. Everybody jumped on board, from local politicians to the county council to innumerable sponsors. And of course, the club is the major beneficiary, as Brendan emphasises.
“The knock-on effect is that we get to run a great tournament here in Nenagh, bring in all these international players, really enhance the club, and when it’s over the club would be left with all these enhancements off the back of it,” Brendan said.
It’s certainly a visionary project, one which will put Nenagh on the global snooker map. But Tony, and indeed Brendan, are keen to emphasise that New Institute doesn’t just revolve around elite players and high-end events. The Nenagh Open is just one element of a club that swings open its doors to snooker enthusiasts of all ages, of all types, of all abilities - as Brendan outlines.
“The club has lots of strings to its bow. It’s not just about producing top-class players. There’s other players coming in, players with disabilities, schoolchildren. We’re trying to cater for all those types of things,” he said.
The event is open to spectators. Capacity is limited to 100 at any one time, but entry is free and the club is expecting the atmosphere to crackle.
There will be many out there who will have watched snooker at home on the television but never truly tasted the tension of a real-life event. This is your chance.
If all goes well and the Open is a success, they’ll do it all in 2026, a year in which the company will also run events in Seattle and the Isle of Man. This is new ground for New Institute, and a boon to Nenagh as well.