Paul Walsh remembers training a team of juvenile hurlers from Ranelagh Gaels on a school hockey pitch on the Stillorgan Road. Teresian School were kind and welcoming hosts, but hurling is wild at heart and Walsh was at pains to reassure them that no harm would come to their property.
The pitch was surrounded by low walls but, unlike a GAA pitch, there were no high nets at either end. The only way Walsh could conduct the session was with air traffic control: low ball striking and hand-passing drills. One kid, though, couldn’t contain his impulse to swing with abandon, just once. The sliotar left the no-fly zone and sailed through the open sky light of a neighbouring house.
No casualties were reported. Maybe nobody is supposed to know. Don’t tell.
Teresian School is still on Ranelagh Gaels’ exhaustive roster of training locations. On the long list are eight other schools and three municipal pitches. They also use grounds owned by Trinity College, UCD, Leinster Rugby, Sport Ireland and the Department of Defence. In total, 18 homes away from home.
RM Block
Ranelagh Gaels have no pitch of their own and, according to Walsh, the annual outlay for hiring places to play and train is up to €140,000, a staggering cost for any club to bear. And yet, they don’t have enough capacity. “If more locations were available,” Walsh says, “we’d be renting more.”
The job of co-ordinating their pitch slots with the needs of nearly 40 teams became so onerous that Ranelagh Gaels employed somebody on a part-time basis a couple of years ago to distribute the loaves and the fishes. Even still, it wouldn’t be unusual for three teams of young teenagers to train at the same time on the same pitch. Manage that.
For GAA clubs all over Dublin this is a massive, debilitating issue. In the other 31 counties GAA clubs regard owning a pitch as a birthright. Many clubs outside of Dublin own two or three fields now and maybe an all-weather facility to boot. Depending on where they are in the country, they might still feel squeezed.
But in Dublin the GAA is rapidly outgrowing its capacity to provide basic facilities. Of the 412 pitches available for Gaelic games in Dublin only 124 are owned by GAA clubs; 217 are local authority pitches and 71 belong to religious orders or schools.
“We did a survey back in 2024,” says Brendan Waters of the Dublin county board, “and we reckoned that between the county board itself and clubs we were spending €1.3 or €1.4 million every year on renting facilities.”
[ Cuala agree deal to buy six-acre site from Bective Rangers for €2mOpens in new window ]
On Wednesday news broke that Cuala had struck oil. The Dalkey club has won three All-Ireland club titles in the last eight years without owning a blade of grass. In a letter to its 3,500 members the club said that it had negotiated a €2 million deal for a six-acre site currently owned by Bective Rangers rugby club. Cuala’s executive described the deal as a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity that would secure the club’s future. All of a sudden, they are the lucky ones.
Land in Dublin is cripplingly scarce and outlandishly expensive. Na Fianna, the reigning All-Ireland club hurling champions, have a 100-year lease on the pitch in front of their clubhouse on St Mobhi Road and they own a couple of small all-weather pitches in the same location, but otherwise they are depending on a variety of outside arrangements.
Land recently went on the market off Griffith Avenue, not far from Na Fianna’s base on Dublin’s northside. The guide price was €4.5 million an acre. A bare GAA pitch, just inside the white lines, requires 3.3 acres alone.
Just like Ranelagh Gaels, Na Fianna use “17 or 18” different locations for training and matches, according to their chair, Cormac O’Donoghue. Some of those pitches are near Dublin Airport, which is a 15-minute drive at dawn, but could be a tortuous 45-minute journey at teatime.
Na Fianna now has 4,000 members and more than 200 teams, in all codes and grades, female and male, which means that in a typical season they will play more than 1,000 matches. Navigating the white-water rapids of the fixtures schedule is a daunting feat if you have untethered access to whatever pitches you need. In their circumstances, they’re dancing on the head of a pin.
“It’s a big problem to find any space,” says O’Donoghue, “and the lack of space militates against the playing of Gaelic games, and in particular the playing of hurling. We have growing numbers who want to participate in the games but we have serious difficulty in finding access to facilities. Unfortunately, it delivers increased tensions internally because of the pressure on resources.”
Between lease arrangements and access to school grounds, Na Fianna have secured the use of 55 acres, all of which they tend themselves. “We have a facilities committee of over 50 volunteers who look after those grounds,” says O’Donoghue.
“We cut the grass and line the pitches across 55 acres in places where we have a short-term lease or arrangements with third party organisations. When you think about it that’s bigger than Stephen’s Green. If it wasn’t for the work of that committee we couldn’t operate, quite frankly.
“Some of that [55 acres] is in schools where we manage the grounds. That has generally been a contra deal so to speak but unfortunately, with the pressure schools are under now, some of the schools feel obliged to ask us for a financial contribution. So, we not only tend the grounds and manage them on their behalf, but we actually pay for the use of some of them as well.
“I can reference at least one school in our local area who, in their interests, have sold a section of land which means it is no longer big enough for competitive juvenile matches.”
That is one of the hazards of depending on others: needs are not always aligned.
For many clubs in Dublin, local authority pitches are essential, but in that case, clubs have no agency over grass cutting or whether the pitch is playable or not. During a bad spell of weather, it is not unusual for a local authority to announce on a Friday that their pitches are closed for the weekend. Clubs are not allowed to train on those pitches and must apply annually for a license to use them.
And yet, the GAA are dependent on local authorities for future proofing. “Outside of Dublin, there are next to no local authority GAA pitches,” says Peter Horgan, the GAA’s Strategy, Insights and Innovation manager. “Kerry has one local authority pitch for the whole county. Kilkenny has none.
“There two new schools and 10,000 houses being built in the western environs of Kilkenny city. Kilkenny [county board] are looking to put a new club in there, but neither of the schools will have a GAA-sized pitch. They’ll have a soccer pitch each.
“The big problem we have as an organisation is the complete underprovision of GAA pitches by local authorities in urban areas. The thinking of local authorities is that the GAA is fine [for pitches].”
The GAA has been engaging with the Office of the Planning Regular [OPR], whose role is to ensure that local authorities and An Cominsúin Pleanála implement Government planning policy; on a parallel track they have also been making their case to Government ministers.
“All the talk at the moment is about housing and, of course, that is absolutely right and correct,” says Horgan. “But the reality is that we need to develop communities as much as we need to develop housing estates. What we’re saying is that if there are sporting and recreational facilities being built – and especially GAA club sized stuff – we’ll help build a community.
“But there needs to be a strategy at national level for the provision of sporting and recreational facilities. It’s not there at the moment.”
In contrast, Sport England has a planning unit which actively engages with local authorities. New housing developments are guided by what is called the six-acre standard: one thousand units of housing must be accompanied by six acres of sports and recreational facilities. Of that, four acres must be playing pitches. No such regulation exists here.
With land in Dublin at such a premium, GAA pitches are increasingly regarded by local authorities as an inefficient use of space. “Dublin City Council is proposing a shift away from full-sized pitches in favour of informal and smaller recreational areas,” says Waters.
“And some local authorities are saying that GAA pitches are not going to be used exclusively for GAA because they’re going to grant permission for other sports to play across the pitch.”
The smaller recreational areas that are being proposed are known as MUGAs: multi-use games areas. “The new sports strategy from Dublin City Council specifically advocates the idea of moving away from the provision of full-sized pitches,” says O’Donoghue.
“MUGAs actively discriminate against the playing of Gaelic games. It’s not possible to play Gaelic games correctly within them and they’re certainly not areas that you can coalesce around as a club and create a social unit.”
In the face of all those challenges, though, clubs somehow find a way to thrive. In GAA terms, Ranelagh Gaels is just a pup. Founded 25 years ago at a meeting of 24 men in Smyth’s pub, they now have nearly 1,500 members and are one of the fastest growing clubs in the country.
Everything about them is resourceful and progressive and dynamic and inclusive. When international protection applicants were housed in their orbit, they started a Gaelic football team to involve them in the club. Ranelagh Rockets was set up to provide coaching for children in their area with additional needs. They started in 2020 with just six children and now they have more than 40.
Not having a pitch to call home has not stopped their march, not for a second.
But that’s not the point.
