Mr. Ger Ryan:

First, on the person in charge, as we are an organisation with 420,000 players, we cannot always presume on the presence of a medical doctor. Consequently, there is always a clearly identifiable person in charge and the guideline to coaches, referees and parents is to go to that person in charge. As part of our guidelines and our training, this point is made clear to referees, that is, they can insist that somebody be removed from play by going to the person in charge of a team. Related to this at intercounty level, where one always will have a team doctor present, if that team doctor suspects concussion, it is his or her duty to go to the person in charge, namely, the team manager, who must act on the doctor's instructions in that regard. The incident in the 2013 all-Ireland final has been raised a number of times. We have updated our guidelines since then and as a specific part of that, we went to the GAA's central council, its supreme governing body, which approved and reiterated this approach. This has been communicated to all team managers and in this year's championship, I recall a game involving a Derry player in which the required action did take place. Consequently, I believe we have learned from the aforementioned incident and have updated our guidelines accordingly.
The issue of independent doctors was raised and we believe that because our doctors do their work pro bonoand because we are an amateur association, they effectively are independent and have demonstrated this over a long period. There was a question on the mandatory reporting of injuries. Since we established our injury database in 2007, we have found that voluntary compliance with that from more than 20 teams each year is the best approach, because we work directly with the medical people. That gives us an excellent database for research from which we identify a number of programmes for both injury treatment and injury prevention. We have had a number of success in that area, one in particular being the whole area of anterior cruciate ligament, ACL, injuries or cruciate injuries as they are more commonly known. This is an approach whereby one gets together a good research database after which one can then take actions on foot of that. As to whether this is something that can be combined from all sports is a matter I will leave to members to decide but we certainly would be willing to co-operate with some sort of database in that regard. We recommend the education route, rather than legislation at this point. Compulsion through legislation is not necessary at present and I believe we could work on education. As for first-aid training, we certainly would support any initiatives in this respect but as an organisation, we encourage it and there is appropriate first-aid training at every club in the country.
Finally, there was a question on the task force that we recommended and we have met representatives of the Departments of Education and Skills and Health on this matter. It actually was initiated by the Department of Education and Skills but we suggest it should be driven through the Department of Health. We consider it to be a matter of public health and we recommend consideration of the programmes in Canada. As for prioritisation, we suggest that awareness and prevention should be the focus of any initial campaign. In addition, there is no formal policy in respect of call-out procedures but every club in the country has trained first-aid personnel, maintains a list of local emergency services and has easy access to it. At any significant games, even at club level, there are trained personnel, who again are volunteers, from the Order of Malta and such like. In addition, there also will be ambulances present. Consequently, I believe there is a high awareness of that.