Sports Funding Dail Éireann — 2026-01-20 ============================================================ Malcolm Byrne (FF), Wicklow-Wexford I speak in strong support of Deputy O'Meara's question in this regard. I have regularly asked the Department of education what facilities are specifically going to be provided for sport, particularly for new builds, but also in terms of existing funding streams that can be made available to schools to get sports funding. I look at somewhere like Riverchapel National School in County Wexford. Incidentally, it is the primary school of the Minister of State's colleague and mine, the Minister, Deputy Lawless. It has over 300 pupils and it has a hard tarmac and flawed play area at the back. It is not a real sporting facility. The Minister of State needs to tell the Department of education that there has to be a more integrated approach to the provision of sport in education at primary and second levels. --- 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