Emer Currie (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for bring here personally today.

Four minutes does not seem long enough to summarise the four years it has taken for a local sports club, St, Oliver Plunkett Eoghan Ruadh "Plunkett's" GAA, to get to the point where a proposal for the redevelopment of Martin Savage Park, just off the Navan Road, was ready for a Part 8 planning process.

We have an issue when it comes to our parks in Dublin city. With an increase in development and the concentration of that development, our parks have to work harder and be used better for the growing and diverse populations they now serve. Unutilised parks and green spaces, whether that be for active or passive use in terms of biodiversity, is not an option anymore.

In the Navan Road area of Dublin West which Martin Savage Park would be in the heart of, we have 15,000 people, including more than 3,600 children who attend the local primary and secondary schools. Pelletstown, one of our newer areas of Dublin, or, as we know it, Ashtown, Rathborne and Royal Canal Park, is still being built and will have more than 3,500 homes and we do not have enough access to local sports club facilities.

Plunkett's GAA, a club with more than 1,350 members - with 600 families living in the area and 45% female membership where the average age is 25 years - has over 70 teams across all age groups, 400 volunteers and 150 children attending its nursery every week. They run an inclusive all-stars group for children with additional needs and have many other break-out groups, such as sheds, Gaelic mums, cycling and golf.

This club is currently over-delivering for a community under-served by community amenities. They need access to functional and basic club facilities to do that and they do not have them.

Currently, the clubhouse is situated beside Dublin city-owned Martin Savage Park where they have access to basic green pitches but these pitches are frequently waterlogged and unplayable for six months of the year. This year they have not be able to utilise them for 70% of the time. They cannot play on dark evenings because they do not have floodlights. They travel all around north Dublin to rent all-weather facilities or any facilities at short notice when matches, training sessions and - for instance, recently at Easter - kid-camps are cancelled.

Now it looks like their modest plans to rectify this with the addition of an all-weather pitch in Martin Savage Park are in disarray because of the presence of Brent geese or because Dublin City Council did not sufficiently prepare for the appropriate assessment in the Part 8 application in relation to the protection of Brent geese.

It is not like the presence of Brent geese or the statutory protections around them is new news. The site of the all-weather pitch in Martin Savage Park was chosen so as not to disturb them as one of the 139 playing field and other inland sites in the Dublin area that they use. We have knowledge from large-scale housing developments at St. Paul's College in Raheny, the old Cadbury sites which had been refused for development and where geese have been a consideration, and we have knowledge from an all-weather pitch application at St. Aidan's CBS in Dublin 9 which was given the green light. Everybody knew how important ensuring the conservation of the Brent geese was but with a stroke of a pen at the eleventh hour - a letter from the Department that states that this all-weather pitch in combination with the effects of other mooted developments of artificial pitches on playing field sites utilised by the Brent geese in the Dublin area - those proposals are in complete peril leaving a giant question mark over the delivery of essential sporting facilities for hundreds of adults and children in a local community. We are talking about 130 m by 70 m of a facility in an area of growth. Surely we have enough space for both the Brent geese to feed and our children to play.