What was once a soft, green grass pitch has become “barren, dusty ground” at the home of Castledermot GAA club in Co Kildare.
This summer’s long dry spell was particularly unkind to many sports clubs across the country as facilities suffered due to a lack of rainfall amid record-breaking temperatures.
Club chairman Aidan Byrne said the harder ground this summer was “absolutely” a concern compared to previous years.
He said the state of the club’s pitch had hindered playing conditions, saying, “I know from speaking to other clubs they’re experiencing it too.”
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Byrne said a number of players from the under-16s girls’ team recently made comments at training that stones were starting to appear in areas once covered by grass.
As a result of hardened conditions, the injury list this season has doubled on the senior men’s team. Nine players have been sidelined while four or five suffer from long-term injuries as training plans are being amended to prioritise player safety.
At an underage level, parents have been “more reluctant” to send their children to training on hot evenings.
Byrne said the club “have to consider the possibility of all-weather infrastructure” in the face of a changing climate, but first “you have to consider the cost of it all”.
For facilities to receive any significant upgrade “you’re talking in the millions”, Byrne said.
He said the Kildare GAA board “couldn’t be more supportive” of clubs during this time, but it was an “unprecedented” situation.
Gerry Gorman, site manager for the North Eastern Football League, said he has “never seen it as bad” when it came to dry pitches that otherwise “would’ve been a top-class surface”.
The league is home to more than 50 soccer clubs, predominantly located in Co Louth and Co Meath.
Gorman said soccer pitches in Navan in particular “really took a hammering” during the prolonged warm weather over the summer.
Although the football was still running, the ground had become “very hard” and organisers of the league were now “under pressure to get the pitches in good shape” before a number of important finals in the coming weeks.
Met Éireann analysis found that July was one of the hottest, driest and sunniest months on record.
Ireland received barely a sixth of its average rainfall for July. Some places recorded just over 1mm of rain for the entire month, Met Éireann said in its climate statement for July.
Temperatures over summer have consistently reached up to the high 20s, with the May temperature record broken twice on the same day on May 26th when temperatures reached 30.5 degrees.
Ian McGill, chairman of Ballyboughal GAA club, Dublin, said the lack of rainfall had “impacted us, no question”, but it was becoming a familiar issue to sports clubs.
“The last three or four years this has been a growing challenge” for clubs as pitch conditions have become “more hardened than you’d like”, he said.
“In some ways there’s less maintenance, but that’s not a good thing” as it is due to the reason that “nothing is growing”, McGill said.
Junior teams took a break for the summer, but senior teams have found the conditions “hard to train under”, McGill said, as the championship season gets under way.
Dr Suzanne Kelly, a GP based in Ballincollig, Co Cork, said sports injuries “definitely are increasing” this summer compared with previous years from what she has seen.
Sports equipment, including football boots that lack cushioning, is not designed to brace the impact on drier, hard ground. This causes “a lot of bone and joint stress”.
“You’re going to get concussed more easily if you’re hitting a rock-hard ground,” said Kelly, who is deputy medical director of the Irish College of General Practitioners.
Broken hands, when players try to break their fall, and cut knees were also among injuries that could happen on the hard grass surfaces.
She said she was constantly providing advice on general wellbeing regarding hydration and specific times for exercise to prevent patients from heat stress or fainting, which one of her patients recently experienced while playing golf.
“In all my years I’ve never had a summer in which I’ve been giving this advice so consistently,” Kelly said.
