Mr. John Treacy:

I am joined today by my colleagues, Mr. Kieran Mulvey, chairman of Sport Ireland, Mr. Liam Sheedy, chairman of the high performance committee at Sport Ireland, and Mr. Bernard Allen, chair of the Sports Council's national governing bodies, NGB, grants committee. I will now provide the committee with a summary of my full written statement.

High performance sport is an internationally competitive business and talented people move between systems and are well remunerated. It is no surprise that Mr. Billy Walsh was approached by USA Boxing. Our initiatives here were based on a belief that Mr. Walsh could be persuaded to stay and that the IABA had a sincere desire to retain him. Mr. Walsh has departed and we wish him well in the USA. It is important to put on record our appreciation of his contribution to Irish sport. Mr. Walsh is an extraordinary coach and, in effect, he had been doing two jobs since 2008. He had developed sophisticated and rare skills particularly in the performance environment and he will be missed by us all. However, he leaves a legacy. There are exceptionally talented boxers, coaches and service providers within the IABA system that will continue to perform and hopefully excel at Rio 2016. We have confidence in them and will continue to support them in full.

It is also important to acknowledge the contribution of the wider IABA to the success of the high performance unit. The clubs and the volunteers do excellent work. To state that this is not understood or appreciated by Sport Ireland is unfair and not correct. This finds practical expression through substantial grant aid. The IABA receives the highest level of Sport Ireland grant funding for its high performance programme - €925,000 in 2015. It received the fifth highest core grant in 2015 of €431,716 and over the past two years has seen investment from Sport Ireland increase by 12%.

This is in an environment in which our budgets are actually going the opposite way.

It is accepted that there has been tension within the IABA between the high performance unit and the rest of the organisation. This was highlighted in our London debrief document, which was published some time ago. Comments published in the media and attributed to named board members simply endorse this view.

The IABA stated on 23 October that the majority of negotiations with Billy Walsh were on financial matters. It was clear from the outset that the non-financial matters were of paramount importance. Sport Ireland cannot understand a nine-month negotiation process that excluded serious discussions on key issues. The requests of Billy Walsh on the non-financial aspects of his role were consistent with the recommendations of the London debrief, which is Ireland's official review of our Olympic performance.

It is worrying that the chairman never felt confident that he could get a proposal that we worked through with the IABA in Sandyford by the board. This suggests that the high performance unit does not enjoy the confidence of a significant element within the IABA. This fracture within the IABA must be addressed once and for all. Furthermore, the absence of a board decision is a corporate governance issue. Questions of a governance and operational nature naturally arise from what is known about recent events.

Sport Ireland is not involved in any attempt to undermine the IABA. It has consistently supported all activities of the IABA, even through times when it was challenging to do so, and the evidence speaks for itself.

Some of the comments attributed to the IABA were a clear attempt to misdirect and distract from the failure to retain Billy Walsh. Our intervention here was based on our belief, which we share with the IABA, that Billy should have been retained. Sport Ireland has statutory responsibility regarding high performance sport and makes no apology for working to retain Billy Walsh.

Sport Ireland has written to the IABA with a series of questions to find out how this matter unfolded, and we await an appropriate response. Although attributing blame will not bring Billy back, it is imperative that we examine the factors that led to his departure and never again lose world-class talent needlessly.

The fundamental issue is how the events of the past weeks and months affect the long-term health of the high performance unit within the IABA. As the statutory agency for sport, we have a responsibility and a duty to ensure that public investment in governing bodies is supported by effective corporate governance. There is a legitimate interest in investigating and understanding what happened.

We are strongly of the view that the over-reliance of the IABA on Sport Ireland funding is not healthy and is one underlying factor that leads to tension. The past few days have demonstrated that there is an enormous amount of public interest in Irish boxing. Surely the IABA has missed an opportunity to benefit from this public interest in recent years. Specifically, Sport Ireland does not seek to control those functions that are rightfully under the authority of the governing body of a sport. In fact, we are trying to empower the organisations all the time by ensuring they have the right people in the right place, including performance directors, coaches and so on. We have also demonstrated that by getting the NGBs themselves to allocate the carding. So we are empowering the governing bodies in this particular area. However, the NGB must acknowledge the legitimate and statutory obligation of oversight vested by the Oireachtas in Sport Ireland. Sport Ireland is accountable to this committee, to the Minister and to the Oireachtas. In turn, those bodies that are funded by Sport Ireland must accept levels of oversight consistent with the amount of taxpayers' money invested in them.