Growing appeal of sporting life ‘across all age groups’

From the perspective of national sport across the spectrum at almost rock bottom over the last six months, some encouraging news emerged from the Irish Sports Monitor (ISM) report published on Monday.

Almost half the population of Ireland in 2019 took part in some kind of sport with numbers showing that 46 per cent of the population participate regularly, an uptick of 3 per cent from the previous 2017 survey.

"We can see across all groups participation is up," said Peter O'Leary of Ipsos MRBI, who compiled the report on behalf of Sport Ireland. "Overall it is a pretty encouraging story across all age groups."

In what is the most robust survey that tracks sports participation in Ireland, ISM interviewed 8,504 people before the Covid-19 outbreak hit Ireland with the figures reflecting the 12 months prior to 2020.

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Personal exercise the most popular form of sport for people in Ireland

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The 46 per cent equates to approximately 1.7 million people who gain from the physical, mental and social benefits that regular sports participation brings. In 2017 the survey identified that 43 per cent of the population participated regularly in sport, suggesting that an additional 150,000 more people now participate than two years ago.

One thing to emerge is that most people prefer to take part in sport that they can do by themselves with individual sports topping the list of the public preferences. Personal exercise followed by swimming, running, cycling and soccer remain the five most popular forms of sport undertaken by Irish people. Yoga, dancing, golf, GAA and weights follow as the 10 most popular sporting past times in the country.

Personal exercise primarily consists of gym-based activities and remains the most popular sport for people with participation levels in these activities increasing from 12 per cent to 16 per cent, while participation rates in all other popular activities remain broadly unchanged.

The second most popular sport, swimming returns a 9 per cent figure with third-placed running at 7 per cent. Cycling is at 4 per cent and soccer, the highest placed team sport, is at 3 per cent.

Yoga and dancing at 3 per cent are more popular than golf, Gaelic football and weights, all at 2 per cent, with pilates, hurling/camogie at 1 per cent.

Only three of the sports, personal exercise, swimming and running, now have participation levels in excess of 5 per cent. As the increase is strongly focussed on one activity, this also means that the gap between team and individual sports has increased further, with 42 per cent (approximately 1.6 million people) now participating in an individual sport and 8 per cent (approximately 310,000 people) participating in a team-based one. The comparative proportions in 2017 were 38 per cent and 8 per cent respectively.

“One thing quite notable is the sport that people do by themselves,” said O’Leary. “But even though it is individual activity they are more than likely to do it with someone else. There is a social aspect to it.”

Less educated and poor backgrounds

While progress has been made in increasing the numbers that regularly participate in sport, a social gradient has persisted. Those from more educated and more affluent backgrounds remain more likely to participate in sport than those from less educated and deprived backgrounds. Additional research is under way to deepen the understanding of the underlying reasons behind the social gradient.

Most of the people surveyed, 93 per cent, say they participate in sport primarily for mental and physical health reasons with 80 per cent reporting that having fun is an important factor. In contrast, 49 per cent report that improving their athletics skills and 31 per cent report that competing with others are important factors.

Compared to other European countries Ireland’s participation levels are about mid-point of the list of countries. Although comparisons were not part of this report they have been made in the past.

"We did do some comparison quite a few years ago with some other countries and found in relation to Europe the levels of activity tended to drop off north to south," said director of research at Sport Ireland Peter Smyth.

“So the Scandinavian countries were very much considered the exemplars in terms of their engagement and then falling off to the Mediterranean countries. Needless to say we were somewhere in the middle.”