Sports Organisations
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-05
============================================================

Dara Calleary (FF), Mayo

All of us will agree that without volunteers we would not have any society, particularly the GAA, but any organisation. I always take the opportunity to ask those who give out about volunteers what they would do on a Saturday if they had no GAA, no drama, no rugby, soccer, swimming or anything to go to and if their kids did not have those outlets. They are run by volunteers. The Minister of State and I are focused on the challenge outlined by the demographics committee that we met in terms of the disparities within counties. I also raise the pressures within urban communities in our cities to get playing facilities within the city of Dublin, where the population is there but the facilities are not keeping up. In terms of Our Rural Future, we will seek to try to address that. Some of our discussion earlier was on housing. The Deputy and I have had discussions on the rural housing guidelines, the updating of which is necessary to encourage young families back into rural communities. I noted his comment about the pressure on clubs on the Meath border in Cavan. It did not seem to affect Meath at the weekend, but we will look at that.

---

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/2026-02-05/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:36+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-05