Mr. Páraic Duffy:

I wish to take up the interesting point Deputy Harrington made about subliminal advertising. He is absolutely correct, it is very effective. Let us suppose that a ban on alcohol sponsorship in sport was introduced. We can assume that the investment the companies make would go elsewhere. They would continue to invest in marketing their products. The money may not go to sport but they would find other ways of investing their money. It would be taken from sport and invested elsewhere. This is important because we have tried to point out today that if there was hard evidence that alcohol sponsorship of sport had an impact on increasing the numbers of young people drinking we would all have to take a totally different line, but the evidence is not there.

A question was asked about player welfare. Our player welfare is conducted largely through the money we give to the GPA. We hand it over to intercounty players. The Deputy is correct. There have been many cases of players with alcohol or gambling addictions and so on. Considerable work is being done to deal with players who find it hard to withdraw from the limelight and so on. The Deputy is correct to state it is a real issue. We are doing that work quietly beneath the radar. We use players from time to time. Often we use our top players to speak in clubs about alcohol education as part of our education programme. The Deputy is correct. Perhaps we need to do more in the public domain but certainly we use our players in that regard.