Conor Fleming (left) and Alan Fleming pictured off the Ice Rink at Point Village, Dublin yesterday
Ice hockey.
On the rocks.
Leon writes:
The Irish [Ice Hockey] Team are training on the ice rink [Point Village, Dublin] at the moment but after it closes in late March they will be homeless…The Irish team have won gold in the IIHF World Championships in Luxembourg in 2010, but without a rink to train in they will not meet the international minimum stantard criteria and as a result will lose full membership status with the International Ice Hockey Federation. They are calling on the Government and Dublin City Council to help fund a permanent rink in Dublin
(Leon Farrell/Photocall Ireland)
Sponsored Link
What happened the one they had on Santry? Makes you question the GAA getting 75 million to redevelop a white elephant vanity project on cork and these lads can’t get a rink
+1
Is it one of the few sports in this country that has a Rep. of Ireland team and a Northern Ireland team? If not, why not train in Belfast?
I hope there is a single team. They have some chance of being competitive, if there is a single team on the island.
They’d go all-state and on to win nationals then, easy.
So where does that idea leave the Cork Wolfpack (5-12 year olds) ?
clearly we need a permanent ice rink in Cork too!
Fupp off, why build an expensive facility of a sport that has no following and only a few participants and we are not even a cold country. There are plenty of established athletes in this country who need more funding.
No following and little participants because we have no rink! All sports should be encouraged and facilitated as best we can
Bort do you live in the real world with the rest of us we badly have enough money to fund the sports we currently compete in, so building an expensive facility which is expensive to run makes not sense.
Drogg, go read the balance sheets. If we’re in a recession and have to fund our established athletes first and so on, then two quick questions need answering:
1. Why are we funding the GAA through the Sports Council when they earn enough in a year to cover the total grant they get from the ISC without even touching their core funding;
2. Why would we not fund a sport that’s won a world championships? Surely the point is more bang for the buck, so to speak?
“Why would we not fund a sport that’s won a world championships?”
Please. They won Division C or something along those lines. The lowest of the low. Competing against RSA and North Korea. The World Championships (Division A) are won by the likes of Canada, Sweden, USA, Russia etc.
I appreciate the enthusiasm these guys have but it’s just too expensive to upkeep an ice rink.
So they can’t compete against countries that fund the sport, where they have facilities to train in.
Well, that sounds like a perfectly good reason not to build facilities, doesn’t it boys and girls?
Mark i agree i think it is shameful the amount of money the GAA get from the sports council. But an ice rink is expensive to run and maintain but sports like boxing, martial arts, athletics even your own target shooting are relatively cheap to run but are left lacking in funding and facilities.
Drogg, are you saying nobody in this country would ever use an ice rink?
Ever?
So no ice hockey, no figure skating, no general skating at all?
Or might it be more likely that without the facilities available to do the more fun and interesting sports, they can’t ever become popular enough to become self-sustaining; and without being self-sustaining they can’t ever pay for the facilities themselves?
I suppose having catch-22 as your sports policy for the country is in keeping with how the rest of politics works in this place, but that doesn’t mean you’d be correct…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11382771/Three-year-old-shoots-both-parents-after-reaching-into-mothers-purse-for-iPod-and-finding-gun.html
Aw, sick, you adorable little puppy, how are you boy?
/scratches sick behind ears
Who’s a good widdle puppy?
Who can say “charged with felony child negligence”? you can? Good dog!
Meant figure skating…
Wilhelm, every argument you just made there applies to facilities like swimming pools as well…
I don’t know much about swimming and the costs associated with it. I would however argue that swimming is a lot more accessible to kids. All you need is a pair of trunks and goggles. Yes, the pool costs as well (does it if it’s on your school’s grounds?) but the cost of ice hockey equipment is enormous and needs to be changed quite regularly. For figure skating the big cost is outfits (compare it to Irish dancing if you will).
I’m all up for a skating rink but only when it’s sustainable and the moment it isn’t.
And how does it get to be sustainable?
More people using the facility.
And how do we get more people using the facility?
Have it open, advertise it, build it up over time until it becomes a known thing that people do.
And what’s the first thing you need for that?
A facility.
And how do we open a facility?
Well first it has to be sustainable.
See, this isn’t a new argument. This is what every “minority” sport out there is told, and all the while the larger sports that are already self-sustaining have the money to chase after any grants going and they hoover up all available public funding. That’s why you have sports like the GAA making tens of millions a year in ticket sales and still getting sports council grants while smaller sports struggle daily to stay around while the Sports Council gets used to sports with full-time staff and build the system around that assumption, just adding to the workloads for volunteer-run sports.
I put that there to see what deluded rubbish you would come up with. I see you obviously went to Gay Byrne school of patronising comebacks, which were probably cool in the 80s.
Mark, the problem is you assume “if we build it, they will come”
But the other possibility is “we build this very expensive facility, it goes unused most of the time because there isn’t the demand, few people take up ice hockey because, seriously, ice hockey? and other sports that are popular lose out on funding as a result”
You can’t just pick a minority sport and fund it because it is a minority sport and maybe lightning will strike. Look at the sports that people are interested in, look at the sports where a little investment can yield a lot of improvement (and sure, yeah, exclude the sports that have large commercial revenues if you like)
Drogg, your point could be applied to a lot of county GAA grounds but they all receive plenty of funding
I already said it is shameful the amount of money given to the GAA but in saying that though plenty of events and community activities happen in county grounds so there is that also.
Drog, so because other sports have no money, ice hockey, curlers and figure skaters should just go away? give me a break.
yea but like can we not just have a feckin ice rink? Get Coors light to sponsor it
Thats a much better idea.
There was a full size rink in Dundalk for a few years (2007-2010). Had to close because nobody used it.
Great facility, badly managed and located
It closed because the clique running it didn’t want non-Dubs from outside their little circle competing in the leagues. We were a roller hockey team in Cork interesting in branching out to ice and the only time they could offer us for league matches was 11pm on a Tuesday.
Derisory and meant to put us off, guess what, it worked. The Irish Ice Hockey Assoc has gotten better but it’s still very very Dublin-centric.
Come on down to Belfast and have one team for the whole country. Another example of wasteful partition duplication.
It’s not just about sport, a rink would provide another leisure time outlet for youth (and not quite so young) that isn’t [insert anti social behaviour here] or getting wasted in the pub.
Not only that, this continual slapping down of the “minority” sports in this country means that if you’re one of those people who doesn’t like GAA, soccer, golf, rugby or horse racing, then you have basically nothing else. Congratulations, you get to not have sport in your life for the rest of your life, which the statistics say will as a result be shorter, have more healthcare problems (costing the state more money), and in some areas have less career advancement and fewer social contacts.
Don’t have a great experience of them. My wife played international hockey at the Olympics and has her coaching qualifications. When we moved to Dublin, she popped up to the Irish Hockey team at training one time and offered her services as a coach. They didn’t seem at all interested and she never heard back from them. I would have thought a minority sport would have taken any help it could get.
Hockey or Ice Hockey?
Ice Hockey. Sorry, the wife refers to it as Hockey (the other hockey being “Field Hockey”). I’ve started doing the same, which I’m not proud of.
Doesn’t surprise me. IIHA (&by extension Irish team) is very much a closed shop. The politics around ice hockey in Ireland would leave the Dail in ha’penny place.
I always thought Dublin could do with an ice rink. Back in 2006/7 I tried to push for an ice rink and seafront public facility to be created on the Blackrock Baths site (as an alternative to the apartment blocks that were being proposed at the time). Lots of people liked it, but the politics involved…
Link in case anyone is curious: http://goo.gl/5MXwGN
Ice rink? If there is a market for it then someone will build it. If there isn’t, they won’t.
Train on rollerblades on tarmac, then play your matches in Belfast? Hard to justify the expense in building and running an icerink when there is one 100 miles up the road.
won gold in the IIHF championships?
Wow, that’s very impressive for a country ranked 44th out of 49 in the world!
(It’s a minority sport, expensive to participate in and requiring massively expensive infrastructure. If I were drawing up a list of sporting infrastructure priorities it would be much lower than 44th)
Dublin had two rinks for many many years in phibsborough and dolphins barn but they were not viable. if these guys are serious they could work on raising money and set up in a cheap industrial unit on the outskirts of the city. They don’t need to build a massive arena. How much have they raised themselves.
Going by some of the negative comments here you would swear no-one played this sport and they were looking for an Olympic facility with 12,000 seats. Classic case of if you have nothing to say….