Mr. Paul McDermott:

There are a number of points that are worth making about the performance of Irish athletes in Rio de Janeiro. We had a target of winning three medals and won two. Those who watched the games know where we missed our target. Unfortunately, a lot of things went wrong for our boxers, some of whom felt they had been judged wrongly. However, we have a lot of work to do to get the boxing programme back to where it was. We had 14 athletes who achieved a place in the top eight and more athletes in the top 16 and top 20 than ever before. We were generally happy with the performance. Any Olympic medal is hard won and converting a top eight place into a medal position is very difficult. Obviously, the performance in London was exceptionally good. It is also noteworthy that our athletes who competed in the Paralympic Games did exceptionally well both in London and Rio de Janeiro. We have a number of programmes which are delivering performances at the highest level. Our athletes are winning medals between games and year to year. The systems are stronger. We have to put up our hand and say we did not hit the target in Rio de Janeiro where we won two medals, but we did have a number of top eight, as well as top 16 and top 20, finishes.

The review of the Rio de Janeiro games has essentially been completed. The sports bodies are acting on the recommendations and the funding proposals and plans for this year are well advanced. We are working towards the Tokyo games and the high performance sports are already looking at the young athletes. We have had meetings in the past few weeks with all of the high performance directors who are already identifying the athletes who will be in Tokyo and how we can support them during the next four years.

We were asked about the performance of the athletes from New Zealand and Denmark. We looked at the systems in place in these countries to learn from them. We are trying to build a system for Irish athletes and Irish sports and generally trying to do it from our base in Abbotstown. We think we have made significant progress, but we have looked at other countries that have succeeded to try to learn lessons. There are two points to be made. We must understand how the best high performance programmes work and we are learning all the time. New Zealand and Denmark have about 20 years on us in their formal structures, but they also have much greater levels of funding available. Notwithstanding this, one does not win every day in high performance sports as everything does not go one's way every day, but we have made major progress. As we have learned the lesson that we can compete internationally, we have demonstrated our ability to win in a number of sports. We were very proud of our boxers at the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Our athletes have delivered good performances in athletics, equestrian and many other sports. We accept, however, that in Rio de Janeiro it was a mixed bag. We will push on and prepare for the Tokyo games at which hope we will enjoy success.