Mr. John Treacy:

On the comments of Senator Eamonn Coghlan, as he is well aware, we work in partnership with the governing bodies of sport and it is very much a partnership on the high performance side. We work on this with the coaches, mainly with the high performance directors, and it is a partnership. Since this issue arose in February, that partnership with the IABA definitely has been strained. That is the best way I could describe it. As for the urgency of this issue, we urged the association to deal with this issue and it was not dealt with. To my mind, without question it fell down on the non-financial issues. Sport Ireland will work closely with the IABA in the coming months and will meet the association on a monthly basis. We have had strained relationships with national governing bodies of sport, NGBs, in the past and what we have done is to work with them to work through issues and solve problems and where we can provide resources to support the organisation, we will do so. This is what we propose to do with the IABA over the next number of months.