Mr. Joe Christle:

Up to €500,000 is spread among all of the provincial councils, county boards and local clubs. One of the matters on the agenda of the last board meeting was the approval of an amount of money to cover the costs for referees and coaches from the four provinces who come to all the championships that are staged in the National Stadium. There is roughly one championship event 25 weekends of the year. For example, the intermediate championship was on last weekend and will be on this weekend and the following one. There are a lot of entries and roughly 25 different competitions through boy level, youth level, intermediate and senior for boys and girls. In an amateur boxing contest, there are five judges, a referee and a supervisor, essentially seven officials. They do all this work and come from the four corners of Ireland. The approved budget to cover their expenses was for the amount of €2,000 per province. This was to be distributed by the province to the team of referees and judges.

These championships ensure the development of boxers from youth all the way through to intermediate and senior level, which is the conveyor belt - the pipeline - that guarantees a solid intake into the high performance programme. The €2,000 for a whole year has to be distributed among 25 or 30 referees per province. It is an extraordinarily thin spread; it is like margarine.

Deviating slightly from the Senator’s question, the need for a strong pipeline into the high performance programme was demonstrated in several examples over the years. It was also enshrined in the strategic plan’s recommendations to facilitate the transfer and the development of talent from club level through to the high performance unit. The high performance ethos was put together by Gary Keegan from the Irish Institute of Sport and continued by Billy Walsh, with Gary Keegan’s support.

It was recommended that this ethos be drilled down into four regional academies to provide closer access to that talent in order that talented boxers at provincial level would be able to make the transition to national level.

In the past, we saw the likes of Joe Ward, who has just qualified for the Olympic Games in Rio but who unfortunately missed out on qualification for the London games in unlucky circumstances. When he came along, in Kenny Egan, he had one of the greatest boxers Ireland has ever produced as the sitting champion. Kenny Egan is an Olympic silver medal winner and a winner of international medals of all different types. Joe Ward came along at 17 years of age and was able to beat him in the national senior final. What is a great tribute to Kenny Egan, because I hate to make reference to the one fight we all saw that he lost, his first national championship, is he came back year after year until he finally retired. Kenny Egan demonstrated an enormous heart and has won the affection of everybody in boxing; he is an unbelievable man. However, the question is from where will the Joe Wards of tomorrow come. That is the concern of the board of directors. That is why we had realistic concerns arising out of funding and taking on future funding at the level at which Billy Walsh's package would have been, had he remained on as a permanent employee. We always wanted him as a permanent employee but at the level he was at previously or with increases of 5% or 10% or with negotiated bonuses. In international sport, it is not normal to have a long-term contract for a high performance coach. I am not talking about boxing but about other sports, and contracts usually are for one, two or three years and are then are rolled over. This is not to state they cannot be renegotiated during their term to extend them if it is in the interests of both parties to so do and this is what was envisaged by the Irish Amateur Boxing Association, IABA. We would be able to tell the board of directors that while we have taken on this responsibility, we have an assurance and a guarantee from the funders that we can cover it. The IABA was not taking on a long-term responsibility and at 52 years of age, it would have been 13 years of responsibility for that elevated salary. This is something we simply were obliged to take into account. Did I go on for too long? Pardon me.