Sports Facilities Dail Éireann — 2026-05-07 ============================================================ Charlie McConalogue (FF), Donegal We need to do more on this. Certainly, with the next round of the community sport facilities fund opening over the course of this summer, we want to try to do as much as we can in that short timeframe to encourage collaboration between schools, local authorities and clubs. We also have to look at how we can do more to identify land and communal grounds where municipal-type facilities can be developed. The programme for Government commits to that. My officials and I are engaging with the Department of housing to establish that. One recent example I saw was a GAA club where the local authority had required that an area the size of a football pitch be made available to the club free of charge as part of a zoning permission for a new housing estate beside that pitch. That is the type of joined-up thinking we need to see more of and that is the objective. --- 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/2026-05-07/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:46+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-07