Sports Funding
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-20
============================================================

Ryan O'Meara (FF), Tipperary North

The example I gave of Youghalarra National School is one that probably will not fit in to what the Minister of State is saying the next round of the sports capital fund will be, but if the Department of education is giving out grants to build something, surely when the Department of sport is trying to build facilities such as AstroTurf pitches, and we want to see AstroTurf pitches because they get so much usage and are so much safer and cleaner for schools in particular, that the Minister of State would be able to engage with the Minister for education to see if the summer works programme can be changed so that, although the funding is not coming from the Minister of State's Department, it is very much sport-related. My reason for raising this question was to try and fit it in for sports capital funding, but perhaps we could get common sense to prevail here and the Department of sport would advise that section within the Department of education, as the expertise exists within the Minister of State's Department.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

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