New Inn Community Development Company is set to begin construction on a €1.5m all-weather sports campus in east Galway, one of the larger single grant allocations made under the national sports capital programme this year.

New Inn Community Development Company, a volunteer-led body in New Inn, Co Galway, previously secured funding for the area's first full-sized astro-pitch in 2020, and is now delivering a wider campus including an astro pitch, tennis court, games area and grass pitch.

The €1.5m was allocated under the Large Scale Sport Infrastructure Fund, a national scheme administered by the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport that has committed a cumulative €297m to major sports facilities since 2020 alone.

Galway East TD Seán Canney called the investment a significant development for New Inn and east Galway, delivering high-quality all-weather facilities for field sports, and praised the community company for bringing the project to construction stage.

Construction is expected to begin within weeks, with the facility targeted to open in spring 2027; no delivery contractor was named in the announcement.

The grant is valued at €1.5m (£1.28m); the wider construction contract value and delivery route have not been disclosed.

Grants like this only convert into construction contracts once local volunteer bodies get through a full procurement process, meaning the funding announcement and the eventual contract award are two distinct, often widely spaced, events.

The Large Scale Sport Infrastructure Fund carries a "use it or lose it" clause requiring drawdown within two to three years of allocation, and sits within a €2.22bn capital plan for the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport running to 2030.

The current round builds on two earlier LSSIF allocations totalling more than €250m across 60 projects since 2020, illustrating how much grassroots sports infrastructure now depends on periodic national funding rounds rather than continuous local capital budgets.

For the sector, contractors chasing this tier of community sports work need to track individual grant recipients' procurement timelines directly, since volunteer-run bodies like New Inn's typically take longer to reach site start than local authorities running comparable schemes.

Source: Irish Independent / Federation of Irish Sport / Government of Ireland