It’s time for more scrutiny of swapping grass pitches for astroturfs, some councillors and academics say

Last month, Skerries Town Football Club became the latest sports team in the wider Dublin area to tell council planners that it is looking to replace its grass pitch with astroturf. 

“We’re doing it very reluctantly,” said Martin Tully, the club secretary, on Tuesday. “Because we prefer grass but we don’t have the facilities to train our teams.”

They have almost 40 girls’ and boys’ teams and four adults’ teams, he says. 

“Grass pitches can only take a certain amount of usage,” he says. “The quality of the pitch would deteriorate. You end up with holes, you end up with mud rather than grass if you play too much.”

That proposal in Fingal joins a steady drip of clubs in the Dublin area converting grass fields to astroturfs, amid burgeoning demand and wetter weather – from Cabra to Rathmines, and Rathgar’s Kenilworth Square.

Dublin City Council has previously found that converting a grassy pitch to a synthetic surface doesn’t require planning permission, deciding it is exempted development – though, when it comes to Kenilworth Square, this is an issue now before the courts.

But as the trend continues, some councillors and experts say that the changing grass to astroturf perhaps needs more oversight, to ensure that the environmental impact is properly taken into account in the push for much-needed, busy sports facilities.

How many?

Because it doesn’t require planning permission, exactly how many grassy pitches have been astroturfed over the past few years isn’t clear. 

Council planning databases hold examples, though, of clubs checking that they don’t need planning permission for their plans, through the process known as “Section 5”.

In July 2025, Beggsboro Football Club told Dublin City Council that it intended to switch out a grass pitch for astro at Cabra Community College. 

In July 2024, the Congregation of the Holy Spirit told the council that it intended to do the same, and make some other changes too, at Kenilworth Square.

The council told them that August that was fine, it’s exempted development, but a residents’ group has challenged that in court – with a decision expected in March.

So, if they don’t go through a full planning process, does that mean new artificial pitches aren’t assessed for their impact on drainage and flood risk? said Green Party Councillor Carolyn Moore at a meeting of Dublin City Council’s Climate Committee last May.

"We have ongoing concerns about flash flooding and drainage and the loss of drainage,” Moore said later on the phone. 

“It seems a bit crazy to me that these exemptions from planning permission exist for astroturf, and that you can potentially be losing such a large area of free draining soil, and have it replaced with astroturf,” she said.

Padraig Doyle, a senior engineer at the council, said at the meeting, “We won't know about it, it'll just happen. So, yeah, we've no way of … we've no way of controlling that either way.”

Fiachra O’Loughlin, an assistant professor at University College Dublin’s School of Civil Engineering, says he isn’t a fan of replacing grass with astroturf. 

“It does completely change the flow of the response of water. It removes the storage,” he says. 

So, flood risk downstream grows, because natural grass absorbs water while artificial grass repels it, says O’Loughlin.

“You're removing what would technically have been a sponge in the city or in that area,”  said O’Loughlin, who is also director of the Dooge Centre for Water Resources Research at UCD.

Astroturf designs can come with drainage, he said. But still, a lot of research shows that replacing living grass with artificial grass means more run-off, says O’Loughlin. 

“If it’s short artificial grass, runoff volumes increase by roughly 10 percent. If it's longer grass, you could be talking more,” he says.

Tully says that his club’s plans do include drainage – even if they didn’t have to go through the full planning process. 

And while he said they’re reluctant to do it, if they roll out an astroturf rather than a grass pitch, they should be able to have kids play at weekends, he said.

Most of the kids at the club haven’t played a match since November, he says. “They do tend to lose the enthusiasm for training if they think there’s going to be no match at the weekend.”

Fine Gael Councillor Luke Corkery says that in his constituency, Swords, some local GAA clubs, rugby clubs, and soccer clubs are waiting on all-weather astroturf pitches to be built.

“As far as I'm concerned, my priority would be for the delivery of as many playing pitches as possible, whatever mechanism we use, and the more playable that pitch, the better,” he said.

An audit of sports facilities in Fingal, by the council, last year found that there’s a need for two additional pitches in Balbriggan, nine additional pitches in Swords, and 16 additional pitches in Ongar by 2029.

In the meantime, it suggested increasing the number of playable hours and days on existing pitches in the county in lighting to allow play later into the evenings, and transitioning from grass to all-weather pitches.

John Walsh, a Labour councillor, said he thinks that it is enough oversight for clubs to put in for a “section 5” declaration – to ask the council to confirm that the pitch changes don’t need planning permission. 

And at that stage, the council planners can give advice around issues such as environmental and flood risks, he said. “I think a partnership approach is important.” 

“I think we want to facilitate clubs to get the best and safest pitches,” he said. “And we also, you know, want to ensure that there's no unanticipated environmental implications, I should say, and also there's no unanticipated kind of flood risks.”

Other impacts

O’Loughlin, the assistant professor at UCD, said there are other issues beyond flood risk from astroturfs.

There are also wider environmental impacts, he says, from insects and animals such as brent geese losing feeding grounds, to the spread of microplastics, to a much wider water system.

Astroturf is plastic, he says. “So then that, then that's either going into either your wastewater treatment works, or it's been discharged straight into a river or a stream.”

“And then, like, we have a whole issue with microplastics making its way into our food stream,” he said.

Some astroturf is worse than others but many are heavy with microplastics, or nanoplastics, which are even smaller, says Róisín Nash, a researcher and lecturer in aquatic ecology.

In research with the EPA, Nash looked at how microplastics are transported and dispersed away from pitches, and contaminate freshwater environments.

“You find it on your clothes, and you get home and, in your socks, in your boots,” she says.

It gets into the washing machine and that'll end up in wastewater treatment plants, she says. “And so there is a potential there to get into our waterways.” 

Nash’s research studied the impact of astroturf on water sources, but  also recommended ways to mitigate the spread of microplastics.

She says it can make an impact if there’s internal drainage systems, small walls around pitches, wiping off boots before leaving the pitch, and if players buy boots with socks built into them.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.