Find the keys, dust down the welcome mat and let’s get ready for the return of full crowds to sporting venues within the coming days.
That is the message coming out from the Government ahead of a Cabinet meeting and NPHET meeting that will determine the slowing down of Omicron and the speeding up of reopening.
Speaking to RTÉ News yesterday Minister of State for Sport Jack Chambers said that “My aim and objective is to ensure we can get to 100 per cent as soon as possible.”
“The background to this is that all the public indicators are moving in the right direction. We’ve passed the peak of the Omicron wave.”
“We have engaged with Martin Murphy, the chair of the working group on the return of spectators, and we have a big number of fixtures coming up.”
“We have the Six Nations in February, the National Leagues in GAA starting at the end of this month, and the League of Ireland in February.”
“Many fans want to get back to a full return of spectators and that is my aim, to do that as quickly as possible and I think the public health conditions can make that happen.”
Martin Murphy was also interviewed and said “It becomes a logistical nightmare to deal with less than full houses, deciding who gets to go and who does not.”
This run of absence from our sporting venues in anything other than small numbers is not as long as it was through almost the whole of 2020 and 2021, and when we saw full stadia in November there was no apparent surge attributable to those major gatherings in an outdoor setting.
We can now have a realistic hope that the ~Sporting year of 2022 will run along more normal lines, akin to where we were last in 2019.
Over the weekend you could look at Premier League grounds in England and NFL Stadia in the United States to see full attendance. That’s what we need here and hopefully, it is just around the corner.
