John McGahon (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Cathaoirleach for accepting this Commencement matter and the Minister of State for coming to discuss this important issue. I will provide some context as to why I am raising this matter. I have met Katie Byrne from Dundalk, who has been working for the Irish Wheelchair Association since the age of 18. At the age of 18, she took an interest in wheelchair basketball and providing this as an outlet and sport for children and adults with disabilities to enable them to play and engage in sport. She has been doing this for about 12 years and does it primarily through Northeast Thunder Wheelchair Basketball Club, a junior and senior basketball team based in Dundalk that plays out of Dundalk Sports Centre. The club does not just cater for people in County Louth. It caters to people in the Minister of State's part of the world in County Meath, people from across the Border and people from Cavan, Monaghan and parts of north Dublin. There are about 11 junior and about ten senior wheelchair basketball teams. One thing Katie Byrne told me that really struck me was the cost of playing wheelchairs. A playing wheelchair for a child costs somewhere in the region of €1,000 to about €2,500 while the cost for an adult is somewhere in the region of €2,000 to about €6,000. All of this is dependent on the size and particular disability of the individual. This is a significant and prohibitive cost.

Perhaps quite rightly, the sports capital grant goes to the national wheelchair association, which then distributes that among its clubs. That is a good process. Other grants they can apply for have traditionally been things like national lottery grants, but again this goes on a regional basis. If you get it one year, you cannot get it for another three years. HSE funding grants are another form of funding. There are local sports partnership grants through the local authority, but they are in the region of about €1,000 to €1,500 and they are always split through a variety of multidiscipline sports.

I hope the Department could have a look at providing some sort of dedicated funding stream for wheelchair basketball, which is a really good sport. I am not coming in here asking for that dedicated funding stream to be fully funded. Let us say we turn around and say we will make sure every club in this country has €3,000 or €4,000 from the Government. That allows these clubs to know the fundraising target they need to reach to be able to buy the proper wheelchairs to ensure people taking part in this sport can enjoy to the best of their ability. That is the benefit of having a dedicated funding stream for these clubs so they can at least know for perhaps a three to five-year term what amount of money they will receive each year and will not be dependent on whether an application is approved or whether an application scheme is oversubscribed.

It is very difficult for people involved in sport, particularly wheelchair basketball, to ask at the start of the year how they will fundraise a specific amount of money to be able to buy wheelchairs. The issue then is they are playing with shoddy equipment. They are playing with wheelchairs they do not fit into, wheelchairs that are broken or wheelchairs that just are not designed for playing this sport, which is a very fast-paced one. When I visited Dundalk Sports Centre last Friday, there were children ranging from the age of four to 12, 13 and 14. Their siblings came along and played with them and engaged in the sport with them, and it was a great thing to see. The work Katie Byrne puts into this club is astounding. There are Katie Byrnes on every edge of this island and in every community helping wheelchair basketball. It would be a great thing if we could examine or start the process of looking at how we ensure that some kind of dedicated funding goes to clubs like Northeast Thunder Wheelchair Basketball Club in order that they know they have a specific amount of funding coming each year and are not relying on grant applications in each continual financial year.