Ms Sarah Keane:

This is a fundamental problem facing international sport. There is a real question as to whom the most powerful sports bodies internationally are reporting. Ultimately, it is their members who make the decisions. That is why external rigour is required, but people trying to drive change internally are also required.

The IOC, as a voluntary organisation with very significant resources, believes in good governance and is supporting us around that but there are 206 national Olympic committees, so when the IOC puts forward good governance many of the principles are very general. They might not be based fully on what we in Ireland believe is in line with good governance. That is definitely one of the challenges. If one is looking to restrict funding, that only works with organisations that are fully dependent on it. Certainly, in my time the Olympic Council of Ireland, OCI, has built up reserves. That is prudent as well. I do not know what happened, but it also meant that it could say "fine, don't fund us, we are going to do what we want anyway because we have enough." That is potentially a situation we would find with other charitable bodies or sporting organisations. It is certainly an issue with international bodies. We definitely need more discussions, and brave discussions, in Ireland and internationally. They are happening on the doping front in terms of sport but we also have to get involved and be prepared to drive change from the inside. Change is not fast when it is cultural; it is not easy. It is a question of what one can live with and what one cannot live with. One has to be conscious of that all the time if one is involved in that kind of organisation in order to protect one's integrity and the integrity of sport as a whole.

What I can say today is that we have spoken to the International Olympic Committee about what the autonomy principle means. It has a template. It is a four-page document which states what it believes autonomy means, which we have never seen before. We have now given that to Sport Ireland. It does not mean that one does not work in partnership. It does not mean that one puts one's fingers up to the Government or Sport Ireland. Members should excuse me for being crude but that is not what it says. What it says is that one is supposed to be independent in thinking because one is an organisation and the IOC is the parent body but when one is trying to deliver for Irish Olympic sport or the Olympic sport of another nation, one should be working within the framework of the nation to do the best ultimately for the people involved. That is what it says and that is what we need to do. Without doubt, that is the commitment from this board. We have to put the people who are affected first. Therefore, if there are some things that we hear that we do not like, then we will have to work through them with a view to not affecting the athletes and others.

The other issue that has been referenced concerns some of the issues before the 2009 committee in terms of certain performance directors being left without accreditation. One of those performance directors was coming from our most successful sport. The current board of the Olympic Council made a decision in the past four months that the team leader for the Olympic Games for Tokyo for every sport is the performance director and we will not accept anybody else. We have sought to address that with three years to go. It is already part of our commitment and our partnership with Sport Ireland towards trying to do what we believe is better for athletes and those involved but we need to hear that from the athletes' commission and others who are at the coalface. That is the reason at that meeting I referred to earlier in May with our performance directors, CEOs and member federations it was vitally important to hear what they need and to tell them where our challenges are, speak to them about that and try to come up with a solution together because there still will be challenges in certain areas, such as accreditation and ticketing, among other areas, given that the Olympic Games is a massive event involving a massive number of people.