Public-funded facilities must be open to others, says Shane Ross

By Brendan O’Brien

Lost amid the 106 pages of the National Sports Policy launched yesterday and the subsequent soundbites was the segment explaining how the country’s stadiums and other facilities will be audited for the first time.

What that means is that the scattergun approach to building and rebuilding bricks and mortar should be a thing of the past or, at the very least, a rare occurrence in a country which, for the most part, has never indulged in such joined-up thinking.

Add that to the insistence, according to Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport Shane Ross, that those in receipt of large-scale infrastructural funds will have to make their facilities available to local communities when not already in use and it is clear that a sea change is upon us.

The relevance of all this has naturally been linked to the ongoing controversy over Páirc Uí Chaoimh and the Liam Miller testimonial game, but this policy, if adhered to, will have wider, major ramifications for the sporting landscape and the GAA in particular.

It will, in short, involve a complete cultural shift, given the isolationism of most sports bodies, who have usually tended to build, run and use their own facilities, unlike on the continent, where multi-sport infrastructure is taken for granted.

“We are looking at it now in 2018, but you can’t overlook the history that we have had, the 20th century in particular,” said Brendan Griffin, Minister of State for Transport, Tourism and Sport.

“These are legacies of the society that we had in Ireland in terms of the politics of sport that prevailed for most of the 20th century, so it’s not easy just to change that overnight.”

“From the Government’s point of view, certainly, we want to see facilities shared as much as possible and, certainly, in terms of the new, large-scale sporting infrastructure fund, that is something that is going to have to be watertight going into the future as well.”