Sports Facilities
Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-07
============================================================

Charlie McConalogue (FF), Donegal

I look forward to continuing to work closely with the Senator on our shared objective of seeing St. Tiernach's Park continue to evolve and be renewed. There has been significant funding towards the GAA from the two rounds so far of the large scale infrastructure fund. The 2020 round saw funding for 14 projects to a value of €30 million. Those included projects backed by the GAA or which incorporated GAA elements of significant projects, including those at Walsh Park, Páirc Tailteann and St. Conleth's Park. In the 2024 round, 11 GAA-backed projects were awarded funding, including, for example, the Clare GAA centre of excellence and the Wexford GAA centre of excellence, as well as €1 million to Killeevan Sarsfield GAA Club in Monaghan.
There will be significant demand now that the large-scale infrastructure fund is an established part of our sports funding infrastructure. Sporting organisations are looking towards projects of scale to see how they can avail of the fund. St. Tiernach's Park would meet the criteria. It is the type of project that would be suitable to be funded through that fund. There will obviously be a competitive element to the applications that are received. I look forward to working with the Senator to support Monaghan County Council to make an application that will be considered in the context of that next round. I suggest the council should look at the community sports facilities fund to see if such funding could help St. Tiernach's to do smaller scale work in the meantime.

---

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/seanad/2026-07-07/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:09+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-07