State fails to meet schools’ basic PE requirements

The State has yet to organise itself to meet the basic requirements for sports in its schools, a conference in Dublin has heard.

Speaking at the Sports History Ireland symposium at Boston College on State policy and sport, Irish Examiner columnist and sports historian Dr Paul Rouse of UCD pointed to the background to current state sporting policy, referring back to the 1930s, when Irish army sergeants visited schools to train children on an ad hoc basis, up to reports in the 1960s on the utter absence of a PE programme in many primary schools.

Those reports led to the opening of Thomond College as a dedicated college for physical education teachers in 1973.