History
The community games were set up in 1968 - initially only in Dublin as a way to deal with the problems of the lack of leisure-time activities for young people. In the first games, 3,000 took part at the John F. Kennedy Stadium in Santry; the following year it was 5,000 - today, over 500,000 children compete for the chance to make the national finals. For most of the games history, the National Finals were held in Mosney, County Meath. However, as the former campsite became unavailable due to being turned into a residential area for asylum seekers, from 2009 onwards the Games are held at AIT in Athlone, Co. Westmeath.
Read more about this topic: Community Games
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)