The Big Freeze Update:The adverse weather conditions have put paid to nearly all the weekend's sport. The opening weekend of the new GAA season has effectively been put on hold, while Magners League fixtures have been postponed, as has horse racing at home and in Britain.
GAA’s Leinster Council has postponed all eight of this weekend's O'Byrne Cup matches, while the Connacht, Munster and Ulster Councils have postponed all scheduled FBD Insurance League games. All first round fixtures in the Dr McKenna Cup have also been ruled out, with revised fixtures pencilled-in for later in the month.
Tomorrow’s Magners League games including Ulster v Ospreys and Connacht v Dragons have already been lost to the weather, while Leinster’s game against leaders Glasgow at the RDS remains in doubt despite officials remaining hopeful the game will go ahead.
Munster officials are confident Sunday’s game against the Scarlets will go ahead as planned at Musgrave Park.
In domestic rugby, all this weekend’s games in the AIB League have been postponed, while Ulster and Leinster Rugby have confirmed the postponement of all schools’ matches in the interests of player and spectator safety.
Further games cancelled include the women’s interprovincial finals that were due to take place in Naas this weekend.
The rescheduled dates will be announced once the current period of bad weather has ended.
Tomorrow’s race meeting at Thurles was lost earlier in the week while Saturday's meeting at Punchestown is also off. It remains to be seen if racing will take place at Leopardstown on Sunday as the track there is currently frozen.
There will be no National Hunt racing in Britain until Tuesday.
Hockey fixtures have also been badly affected as all this weekend’s Irish Junior Cup and the one Irish Hockey Challenge fixture (Athlone v Clonmel) have been postponed.
New dates for the fixtures will be announced early next week but will not take place on weekend of January 16th due to Irish Senior Cup.
The Leinster Ladies and Munster Branch also confirmed all local league fixtures have been postponed.