Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses and compliment the work the Irish Amateur Boxing Association is doing across the country, including in my own constituency in Limerick.

From looking in at this and speaking to people who are involved in coaching and boxing, they are absolutely flabbergasted. Something which started to fester in Beijing rumbled on to London. There were eight months of protracted negotiations up to now and we are left in the mess we are in. One thing we could not say is that no one was proactive in trying to deal with this. A total hames has been made of it. We are where we are and everybody is saying we have to move on and be all positive. We have to hold hands and pretend there are going to be all good days ahead. An absolute bags has been made of this from start to finish.

Reference was made to heat - taking the heat and the shock and the bombshell out of it. It was some length of a fuse that was lit for this man's so-called bombshell last week. This has been going on not for months but for years. Reading some of the media reports, it appears a coach was denied access to the key people in China and accreditation. Even more recently negotiations were reportedly held in the Clayton Hotel in Leopardstown over two days between 20 and 22 August, there was agreement and everybody walked away and shook hands on it. Then an e-mail was sent by the CEO, it is reported, which referred to Mr. Christle as having a dysfunctional relationship with the coach. An e-mail was then received looking to have some terms and conditions of what was agreed renegotiated. We have had the toing and froing between Mr. Kirwan and Mr. Mulvey as to who has the more experience in employment law, and we have a person in the middle of it who ultimately must feel there is no trust in him here. To bring it up to today, that person has said to RTE: "I could not work for someone who clearly did not want me."

In anybody's language there has to be a serious look at how this thing was handled and what changes have to be made. On the one hand we have the funding agency, which might have used emotive language last week.

I do not agree with the use of emotive language in making potential threats and things like that because there has to be structural change. However, it seems somebody of his calibre has walked off the pitch because, in his view, he clearly was not wanted because there had been an absolute and total breakdown of trust. It was agreed to in Leopardstown, but the delegates can correct me if I am wrong. Like everybody else interested in this matter, I am only basing it on what is in the media. It is a case of "Dúirt bean liom go ndúirt bean léi." Unfortunately, the one person who should be here is not here to give his side of the story. Billy Walsh is in America getting on with his life. Good luck to him. What we have seen in recent weeks is a dysfunctional relationship between the court and the IABA and between the IABA and the Irish Sports Council, with the result that the net losers have been those who enjoy watching boxing and others who train in clubs around the country, including in Rathkeale, who hope they might one day box for Ireland.

Mr. Kirwan believes that, under the clauses included in the contract, he could not talk to the media or pick a team without the board's approval. I do not know how many all-Ireland and provincial championship winning teams the Chairman has managed. However, if he had to run them by the chairmen of the Galway, Mayo or Leitrim county boards before he spoke to Marty Morrissey at the end of a match, it would have been unworkable. I appreciate what Mr. Kirwan is saying about his experiences, but if one looks at it from Mr. Walsh's point of view, he has given his professional life to the development of the sport, in many instances on a voluntary basis, no more than anyone else up and down the country. It was as if the sword of Damocles was hanging over him. The IABA got the tone wrong when it walked away from Leopardstown and then came back to seek further changes to the contract. As an outsider looking in, if I were in Mr. Walsh's shoes, I would have been saying to myself, "These people are not serious about me working for them. They want me out."

I ask the Irish Sports Council how this issue was left to run for so long to the point where Mr. Walsh has now left. I know that the Minister of State had to intervene and that the interventions were necessary. That is all well and good, but now that Mr. Walsh has left, are we are all going to pretend that everything is hunky-dory? He had a proven track record. It is my understanding the meeting in Leopardstown was convened after the European championships. Mr. Walsh had to leave in the middle of the meeting but came back the following Tuesday. He walked away with a handshake but then received an e-mail, as reported subsequently in the media, stating, "All bets are off. We are looking at things again." How could it have wound up other than being a disaster?