Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 11 December 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport

Minority Sports and Women's Participation in Sport: Discussion.

Mr. Jerome Pels:

It is particular to our sport that we play on a specific surface. This means we cannot play in all stadia. As I mentioned in my opening statement, we knew from the reaction within not only the hockey community but the community at large that many people were interested in watching the women's hockey team play on Irish soil. As we currently do not have a hockey stadium with sufficient capacity to enable it, in co-operation with Leinster Rugby we were able to lay a temporary surface over the existing surface at the Energia Stadium, where the match was played in front of a very large crowd. This technology was developed by a hockey pitch manufacturer and England Hockey working with people on the base layer and coming together to form the organisation Big Stadium Hockey. They are trying to repeat the use of this technology everywhere in Europe. We benefited from that technology in terms of being able to roll out a hockey carpet at the Energia Stadium.

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