Ireland

Until recent times, research on children's play, or súgradh, in Ireland was limited. However, there are exceptions—the Irish Folklore Association and the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) are both a rich resource on the history of play and sports of Irish children during the last century. Recently the issue of play in Ireland was addressed by the Irish government to meet commitments made in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and the National Children's Strategy (2000); during the consultation process with children, the lack of play opportunities was the most frequently cited concern of children throughout the country. This led to the first Irish National Play Policy in 2004.

The Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) was established in 1884 to revive and nurture traditional, indigenous pastimes, especially hurling and Gaelic football. Hurling is a game similar to hockey, in that it is played with a small ball and a curved wooden stick. The stick, or “hurley” camón is curved outwards at the end, to provide the striking surface. The ball or sliothar is similar in size to a hockey ball but has raised ridges. Hurling is thought to be Europe's oldest field game and was introduced to Ireland by the Celts. Hurling features in Irish folklore to illustrate the deeds of heroic mystical figures, and it is chronicled as a distinct Irish pastime for at least 2,000 years. Gaelic football can be described as a mixture of soccer and rugby, although it predates both of those games. It is a field game that has developed as a distinct game similar to the progression of Australian Rules. The GAA is the largest sports organization within the primary education system in Ireland for children aged 4 to 12 years, and both games remain extremely popular with children.

A road sign seen in Ireland attests to the committment to protecting the rights of children at play.

Folklorists in Ireland conducted “The Schools' Scheme” as it is popularly known, which represents the largest folklore collection ever carried out with children in Ireland back in 1937–38. Over a period of 18 months almost 100,000 children aged between 11 and 14 years of age in 5,000 primary schools were involved in researching and recording material dealing with a wide range of Irish folk traditions. Among other topics, the collection includes material on folktales and folk legends, riddles and proverbs, songs, play activities, games, and traditional pastimes. The children collected this material mainly from parents and grandparents, and from older members of the local community. The result of the scheme was the Schools' Manuscript Collection, which extends to more than half a million manuscript pages. This rich resource remains in constant use today by a wide variety of academic disciplines.

In more recent times, the publication of the first National Play Policy in 2004 was an acknowledgement that in the past, children's play has been seriously neglected at policy level. There was a serious deficit of public play spaces; in 2004 Ireland had 405 golf courses but only 168 [Page 326]public playgrounds for a population of 840,955 children under the age of 14. Previously, there had never been any ring-fenced government funding for play, and there was a poorly developed societal awareness of the value of play. While the objective of the National Play Policy is to provide children with more play opportunities in a variety of settings, there has been a strong focus on increasing the number of public playgrounds throughout the country, in which they have been very successful. More recently still, the government launched the National Recreational Policy for Children (2007) which focuses on the play and recreational needs of adolescents.

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