Robert Troy (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Okay. I will now ask a few questions of the representatives from Sport Ireland. Sport Ireland has confirmed again today, as it has over the past 12 months, that it is satisfied that no taxpayers' money that has gone through Sport Ireland has been spent misappropriately, for want of a better term, by the OCI. It has stated that it is satisfied that all of its money is dedicated to the athletes. Mr. Mulvey also said in his contribution today that all applications coming through Sport Ireland are rigorously assessed in terms of the funding that is provided. I would then ask why only 11 of the sporting bodies have signed up to the voluntary code of governance and why 42 bodies remain in the process of signing up or maybe are not even going to sign up. What was Sport Ireland doing to ensure that the various sporting bodies were adhering to a proper code of governance over the years? Would we be in the position we are in now had it not been for the arrest of Mr. Pat Hickey in Rio? Were there plans in place? Was Sport Ireland in the process of ensuring that there was proper governance within the sporting bodies or did it take the arrest of Mr. Hickey for that to happen? If proper governance had been in place it could have been a check and balance prior to any funding being made available in the overall structure, rather than the way in which Sport Ireland seemed to concentrate its efforts solely and exclusively on the funding that it was making available to this organisation. Had it been looking at various organisations, particularly the OCI, with a wider lens in terms of the governance that was going on over the years prior to making funding available, which, incidentally, it is now doing, this would have been identified much earlier.