GAA club officials in Co Clare are asking for policy changes at Government level to encourage more people to live and work in rural areas to save their GAA clubs and their communities.
The change in demographics means more rural clubs are being forced to amalgamate.
The west Clare town of Kilkee in the Loop Head peninsula sits on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.
The town's year-round population is about 1,200 people but that swells to 15,000 during the peak weeks of high summer.
St Senan’s Kilkee is the local GAA club, and it has a storied past, winning Clare senior football championships in the 1980s in and most recently in 2003 and 2005.
The club last reached a senior county final in 2009 and fielded 52 adult players that year in their senior and junior teams.
Fast forward to 2025 and the club is now Junior and at most has access to 23 adult players, while at underage, they are amalgamated with the two clubs immediately west of them, O’Curry’s and Naomh Eoin.
Diarmuid Keane is the club chairperson and while in the veteran category, he still plays.
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Numbers dictate that he has to. His cousin Mícheál Keane does likewise and is also over 40.
"Between 2026 and 2029, Kilkee will have two potential new adult players," Mr Keane said.
"It’s bleak. This year we had one player coming through. Next year we’ve no one. The following year we’ve one, the year after that we’ve one and then we’re looking to this year’s U-14s.
"There’s about ten of those lads. So, we’re looking to 2029 before those lads will be eligible to play adult football," Mr Keane added.
There are just 15 five-year-old boys currently living in the peninsula, which encompasses three parishes.
"That’s assuming that they’ll all be interested in football and that they’ll all stay playing. It doesn’t read very well but we’re working with what we have," Mr Keane said.
What has led to this decline in playing numbers in a town that represents an idyllic place to spend their summer for thousands of visitors?
Kilkee is nestled in a tranquil setting, but its remoteness makes it difficult to sustain year-round jobs.
Mr Keane also cites housing as a key factor in people not being able to afford to live and settle there.
Around 66% of the 1,692 houses in the town are holiday homes.
"It’s very hard for people to get on the market because any house that comes up in Kilkee will be snapped up very quickly as a holiday home," he said.
"We have people here looking to get on the housing market but there is nothing there.
"They are being outbid and there has been no new housing development in Kilkee for over 20 years. There is no social or affordable housing.
"These people are moving away. They’re moving to Ennis, they’re moving to Limerick. They’re going to where the opportunities are and where the houses are," he added.
Rural geographer at University of Galway Dr Maura Farrell suggested building housing clusters could be the answer to the housing shortage in rural regions like west Clare.
Cluster housing is generally multiple housing units built on a shared open space close to towns or villages.
"There are really good models of housing that you can have in rural areas. If you take small rural towns and rural villages, we could start to think about clustering in those areas' half acre sites," Dr Farrell said.
"You can see a whole new repopulation of that area and a whole new vibrancy that brings an added impact to schools, the economy of the area and the likes of the GAA.
"We may not be able to build one off housing that we had in the past, but we surely can look at a model of clustering in and around small towns and villages that really could be a model to help bring people back to rural areas," Dr Farrell added.
Chairperson of West Clare Gaels ladies football club Ciara Harvey said that more remote working opportunities are needed to cater for families who might consider remaining in or moving to the area.
The club caters for all female footballers in the peninsula, which stretches to Loop Head lighthouses on the extreme tip of west Clare.
"The opportunities are not in west Clare. It’s all Shannon-based, Limerick-based and Dublin based.
"You can see that there is a generation slowly starting to move back into the area because of hybrid and remote working.
"You need that flexibility, if you’re living in the Loop Head peninsula to work one or two days from home," she said.
Recognising the rural de-population issue for small GAA clubs, the Clare County Board appointed 2013 All-Ireland winning Clare hurler Pat O’Connor as their Demographics Officer.
From Tubber, which is a rural club on the Galway border in north Clare, Mr O’Connor said that clubs' future must be maintained even if that means amalgamating.
"The one thing that is constant in rural Ireland is that there is a GAA field that everyone goes go and you’d hate for all of that tradition to wilt away over time.
"If we get the right people in the room, I’d be very confident that we can do something.
"Once you get a mutual agreement between two parties it has a better chance of succeeding and I think that’s the key to this," he said.
Diarmuid Keane feels that rural areas need significant government aid if they are to remain viable places to live and work.
"We can’t develop without Government saying 'we care, we want to see these towns thriving."
"There’s life outside Dublin, there’s live outside Galway, there’s life outside the big towns and there’s life in west Clare but it’s about making sure that keep the light on and keep life here," he reflected.
Meanwhile, Ciara Harvey feels that if the housing and remote working issues were addressed, living by the sea in the Loop Head peninsula would be a viable option.
"I just love the Loop Head peninsula. I love being beside the sea. We were living in Ennis and we moved back home five years ago.
"My dream was always to raise my kids within a community where they knew everyone.
"It’s a thriving community. It’s something special and you can’t really describe it until you’re in it.
"Our club has had a few girls who emigrated to Australia in the last two or three years.
"Two of them are coming back this year and I asked them why?
"They said there’s just nothing like home. Even though they’ve got to experience and travel the world they just said there’s nothing like Loop Head and home," she said.
