Mr. Paul McDermott:

I assure people that we have very good oversight of the money that is spent on the high performance programmes. For example, we continued to support hockey when it was not so successful but it was a huge breakthrough for them and the Irish system that we had a team in Rio and it performed exceptionally well. The women's team were the width of a post away from qualifying and had a exceptional result last week, with a brilliant win leaving them top of world league 2 and in line to qualify for world league 3.

They will have a great run at Tokyo. They are squads of 16 people. They are based on wider squads of 24 and 28. That is about 56 athletes in one sport, which does not have a huge resource.

As we go up, and as these systems get better, swimming, athletics and cycling, which was referenced earlier, have more athletes. These sports all have very strong and improving performance systems. What they are doing, as they should, is producing more and more athletes. There is a greater resource as one goes up the chain. We do have oversight on the money and we do try to make sure that the money is well spent. There have been an awful lot of medals, not only at the Olympics and the Paralympics, but in between. We averaged 60 medals per year on supported programmes in the last number of years. Before these programmes were in place the number was about 20 a year.