Sports Facilities
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-20
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Shane Moynihan (FF), Dublin Mid-West

As I have said and the Minister of State has acknowledged, Dublin local authorities continue to highlight the ongoing challenges in acquiring land for active recreation and sports facilities, not least of all because of the housing pressures that are in the capital and the pressure on them to deliver housing, as well as the fact that they often cannot compete with the premium that is on land that is being bought for houses and that could be used to develop additional playing pitches.
Clubs and community groups have repeatedly raised the pressures with elected representatives and my clinic has often been attended by club representatives who point to the fact that there is a huge shortage of pitches. This is brought into focus when we see, for example, that less than 30% of the pitches that GAA clubs play on in Dublin are owned by the GAA clubs themselves, so they massively rely on the pitches the local authorities provide.
Dublin City Council last year stated that there is no capacity to accommodate new playing fields in existing public parks and open spaces. South Dublin County Council operates 166 pitches serving over 1,000 teams. The local authorities have rightly been told to focus on housing, but that means that they are not necessarily always able to compete with developers. Will there be an outcome from the engagement between the Minister of State's Department and the Department of housing on what this looks like as a concrete proposal for local authorities?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-20/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:31+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-20