registration for the 2026 round opens on monday 28 september. here's what your club should do this week.

The Community Sport Facilities Fund, the new name for the Sports Capital & Equipment Programme, opens for registration on Monday 28 September. Applications open on Monday 19 October and close on Friday 26 February 2027, and the 2026 Information Guide is due the week of 12 October. It's the biggest source of facility funding for clubs in the country: the last round put over a quarter of a billion euro into more than 3,000 clubs and community organisations.

You have from 28 September to get registered and until 19 October before applications even open, which sounds like plenty. It never is. The clubs that win are the ones that arrive at the deadline with the paperwork already done. Five jobs for this week:

The one that catches clubs out: in the last round, registration closed before the application deadline. A club that waited for the round to open before registering was locked out with a perfectly good project. Registration is free and takes minutes. Do it first, do it now, and make sure your organisation's details are up to date.

1. Register on SPRAOI from 28 September

SPRAOI is the new portal and it replaces OSCAR. Registration opens on Monday 28 September. Clubs that were on OSCAR have been migrated across automatically, which is the bit that catches people out: the account exists, but nobody has checked it. Log in, confirm the organisation name, contact, bank and tax details are current, and make sure someone in the club actually has the login. If anything looks wrong, the Department's address for this is sportscapitalprogrammes@ccs.gov.ie.

2. Decide the project before 19 October, and break it into elements

The Department funds elements, not vague ambitions. "Do up the grounds" isn't an application; "resurface the car park, replace the perimeter fencing, LED floodlights on the training pitch" is. Breaking the project into elements also means the Department can part-fund you. If the full ask doesn't get over the line, a well-structured application can still win money for the elements that matter most.

3. Rank what matters

If you could only fund part of it, what would you keep? Agree that inside the club before you apply, not after the allocation letter arrives.

4. Line up your evidence

Own-funding proof, tenure documents (deeds or lease), planning status, and quotations or estimates covering every element of the project. The quotes requirement is where good projects go to die in the last week. It's exactly the piece Tugadh was built to sort.

5. Talk to whoever's done it before

Every county has clubs that have been through the process more than once. Their scars are your shortcuts. And that's what the Grants Hub is for: the knowledge, written down.

Start your project on Tugadh now and you'll have the elements, the budget and the quote requests structured before the guide is a week old. Free, and it always will be.

Ready to put a project through it? Start your project. Five minutes, free, and the quotes are sorted as part of it.

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