Community Sport Facilities Fund: Driving Sports Infrastructure Across Ireland

A recent report from the Parliamentary Budget Office’s (PBO), "Community Sport Facilities Fund" (CSFF) provides a comprehensive overview of the CSFF’s operations, funding trends, and strategic priorities. The Community Sport Facilities Fund, (previously the Sports Capital and Equipment Programme) has been the cornerstone of sports infrastructure development in Ireland since 1998. As of 2023, it has delivered over €1.4 billion in support across nearly 19,000 projects, spanning equipment purchases, facility upgrades, and new builds.

€277.9 million was awarded in 2023, reflecting a steady rise from €62.2 million in 2017. Grant types varied across equipment (100% funding up to €40,000 (with exceptions); over €70,000 only in rare cases for national bodies), local projects (grants up to €200,000), regional projects (Larger-scale funding up to €500,000) with the average grant size increasing from €33,842 (2017) to €91,204 (2023), driven by rising costs and expanding participation needs.

When that total is broken down across counties, we can see that significant growth. Between 2018 and 2023 funding for Dublin grew from €11 m to €38.6 m, Cork from €6.4 m to €29.1 m and Longford from €0.48 m to €2m. However, when examined at county level Per-capita disparities appear for 2023. Leitrim appears at the top with funding equivalent to €102.92 per person and Dublin is the lowest at €26.50 per person. The median is €70.73 and only half the counties exceed the median, illustrating geographic imbalance.

Overall the fund aims to raise participation in all sport to 60% by 2027, to closing the gender participation gap, currently just 3%, with ambitions to eliminate it by 2027, prioritising accessibility for disadvantaged communities and people with disabilities and supporting sustainability, including solar panels and LED lighting, with €15.4 million dedicated to such upgrades in 2020. Gaelic Games dominated funding, receiving €107.8 million in 2023 which equates to about 38.8 per cent of the total. The top seven sports (including multi-sport projects, soccer, golf, rugby, athletics, tennis) claimed 88.2 per cent of funding in 2023. The remaining 11.8 per cent then was shared among 51 other sports.

The CSFF has been found to have a long term impact, substantially advanced Ireland’s sports infrastructure and community engagement. However, challenges remain. Despite growing budgets and ambition, disparities in per-capita funding and sports representation persist. Maintaining the fund’s momentum and equity will require balancing participation goals, fair regional distribution, and transparency in allocation processes. The use of the Pobal Deprivation Index in the 2023 round helped steer funding toward more disadvantaged areas. 

The report has an accompanying data visualisation tool that can be accessed here. 

Adult Participation in Sports

Forty-seven per cent of adults (approx. 1.97 million) participated in sports in 2023, an increase of four percentage points from 2022 and the first time a return to pre Covid levels (46 per cent in 2019). Personal exercise ranked as the most popular activity followed by swimming and running (1). Based on current population projections, an additional one million people will need to participate in sport on a regular basis in order to achieve the 2027 target set by the National Sports Policy 2018-2027 (2). 

In general, men are more likely than women to play a sport on a regular basis. The gender gap has been closing, from 15.7 per cent in 2007 to just under 3 percentage points in 2023. In 2023, the 19 percentage point socio-economic gap in sport participation was lower than at any point since the pandemic, and indeed considerably lower than the 34 percentage point gap recorded in 2017. Inactivity was higher among disabled people (21 per cent) and has increased by 2 percentage points since 2019. Overall, only 39 per cent of the adult population meet the national physical activity guidelines through participating in at least 30 minutes of moderate or greater intensity exercise or physical activity at least five times per week (1).

Child Participation

Child participation in sport deceases with age. Eighty per cent of primary school children in the Republic of Ireland participate in a community sport at least once a week, compared to 58 per cent of post primary school children. The gap for school sport is narrower (70 per cent of primary school children play a school sport at least once a week compared to 63 per cent of post primary school children), however with just 17 per cent of primary school children and 10 per cent of post-primary school children meeting the physical activity guidelines, more work is needed outside of the school environment to support child physical activity. 

Organised sport does not appeal to every child, and physical activity through outdoor play is especially important to ensure that children are encouraged to get active. Outdoor play is also important for socio-emotional and cognitive development. A study on the importance of outdoor play, based on the Growing Up in Ireland data, found that although the majority of Irish children engage in some form of outdoor play, neighbourhood safety was a concern among some parents who limited their children’s outdoor play time due to heavy traffic, adequate/appropriate outdoor play facilities in their area, poor condition of footpaths, roads and lighting, or littering. This study does not look at the socio-economic profile of the children involved; however, it provides a clear indication that investment in neighbourhood safety and outdoor play facilities would increase the likelihood of outdoor play among young children.

National Physical Activity Plan 

The low rate of participation in physical activity among Ireland’s children and adults, high rates of use of private transport for even short journeys, including the school run which sees approximately only one quarter of primary school children walking, cycling or skating and the increasing prevalence of online shopping means that Ireland is becoming a more sedentary country. The National Physical Action Plan, published in 2016 as part of the Healthy Ireland framework, contains ambitious targets for eight key action areas including children and young people, work places, public awareness and sport and physical activity in the community. 

The Report of the Youth Stakeholder Forum on Sport asked how to achieve increased levels of sports participation by young people and found that there is a need to provide more facilities to address current gaps; to share existing facilities more, especially between schools and local communities; to prioritise the development of multi-sport facilities to improve range and variety; develop coaching standards and capability; have a physical activity friendly school uniforms policy; provide better access for young people to sports facilities during peak hours after school; have more active travel to and from sports facilities and improve public transport availability, especially in rural areas; have more time dedicated to a more diverse physical education (PE) curriculum and recognise the need for Gender equality. Social Justice Ireland commends Government on the initiatives undertaken in furtherance of this plan, such as ‘Park Runs’ and the site ‘getirelandactive.ie’ that recommends physical activities for a range of ages and lifestyles and calls on Government to encourage children and adults, particularly those from a low socio-economic backgrounds to increase their participation in sports through the further development of playgrounds and subsidised sports centres.

The largest and most well-known sports organisation in Ireland is the GAA, whose clubs not only provide a physical outlet for those playing the games, but also as a social and recreational space for people to volunteer. However, maintaining facilities to a high standard, ensuring insurance cover and encouraging wide
participation is expensive and there is a need to offer support-funding to clubs in this regard. This is particularly important for sports which do not have access to large gate receipts. Government should be cognisant of the health, societal and economic benefits of sports and social outlets, and continue to provide sufficient ring-fenced funding to complement this voluntary effort. 

(1) Sport Ireland. (2024). Irish Sports Monitor Annual Report 2023. Dublin: Sport Ireland.

(2) Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. (2018). National Sports Policy 2018 - 2027. Dublin: Government of Ireland.