Brendan Griffin (Kerry, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

With regard to optics, we cannot stop because people are jumping up and down and crying that there was interference. All we can do is be as fair as possible, which we were. We cannot control what people will say about it. We feel there was not a more transparent and fairer way of doing sports capital than the way we did it in 2017. It could not possibly have been fairer. There are two things an applicant can do to ensure it does not have invalidation in the future and has as good a chance as possible to get all the relevant information into its application. The workshops we had prior to the closure of the 2017 programme were very helpful. There was huge attendance at them. To their great credit, the officials went through the application process and how points are scored. It is something we envisage repeating and we might have more of them for the next time. We will give everyone the best possible chance to have the best possible application. We did it already and it worked well. I hope we can repeat and intensify it. Never again will we have a situation where people will be invalidated without a second chance. The weakest aspect of the sports capital programme has been that clubs were excluded on a technicality such as not ticking a box or not putting a folio number in a certain box or because the name on a bank statement did not correspond to the name of the club even though it is the bank statement of the trustees. We want to try to avoid that scenario in the future. In the 2018 round we envisage that when clubs make applications, if there are items of further information required, rather than just being invalidated as would have happened in the past, they will be written to and asked for particular items so their applications can be validated. That is important.

While the Deputy was absent from the committee room, I spoke about collaborative approaches to sports and facilities planning and I referred to the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government. There is a role to be played in terms of new developments and the provision of sports facilities. It is something in the sports policy that we want to try to touch on. It is important that we look at that, bearing in mind that technology is becoming more affordable such as AstroTurf, 3G and 4G pitches. They are not as expensive as they used to be. In a country where it rains for so many days in the year, green areas are really important. AstroTurf and all-weather areas are hugely important for our children and all members of our community. We can incorporate that into future housing policy. It would be a very good day's work if we were to do that.

Deputy Troy asked about how the funding is distributed. To move away from the years when Donegal or south Kerry, for example, got a disproportionate amount, what we have tried to do is have a system in place in which the money follows the people. Based on census population figures for a county, the county receives a directly proportionate amount of the sports capital budget for distribution within that county. Clubs get larger or smaller allocations depending on what points they score. That is how it works. The €30 million was split into €26 million and €4 million for local and regional schemes. That means the amount of funding that was available to each county ranged from 12% in Cavan to 56% of the overall value sought in Dublin. That was with regard to valid applications. When we got the increase in the budget, we were able to get €56 million to distribute to all counties, which meant that Dublin's figure went up to in excess of €15 million, even though €13 million was valid at that stage. There was funding to redistribute. Dublin was the only county where 100% of the amount sought was available for distribution in the county. Cavan went from 12% to 29%. My county of Kerry went from 16% to 37%. That happened because a portion of a larger amount of €30 million was added on to €25 million. The surplus from Dublin was redistributed among the other 25 counties on a per capitabasis, excluding Dublin. That is exactly how we arrived at the allocation to each county. What each county got was distributed based purely on the points that each application scored. That is how it was done. There could not have been a fairer way of doing it so long as we stuck with the per county per capitasystem.

There are flaws with the per county per capitasystem. One of them is that when we are dealing with some counties, there is a heavy level of oversubscription, for example, in Cavan. In Dublin, everyone who is valid gets whatever is looked for. The points system does not count there because there is the full amount to meet the requirement. With the regional scheme, we had €4 million to meet about €8.5 million worth of valid applications across 82 different applications. That is the top two thirds of applicants. We could not spread that €4 million across €13.5 million worth of applications. It would have been spread too thinly. What we did there was based on the points. We had a national league table and we applied the formula in the same way we did internally in each county to determine the outcome for each applicant under the regional scheme. It has merits in that a club is not getting less because of what county it is in or as a result of the level of oversubscription in a particular county. It also means the allocation will always be reflective of the score an applicant gets. That was the case for 25 out of 26 counties in the local scheme. One of the flaws is that some counties might not have received anything in the regional scheme because they were not in the top two thirds of applications in terms of scoring. It is worth considering whether it is a way of doing the future round for the local scheme as well as the regional one. There are arguments for and against that. The per county per capitasystem was introduced in the first place to stop some counties getting more than others based on who was doing the administration of the grants. There is no system that seems to be perfect but we are trying to find the fairest way and I think what we did this time around based on what we were dealing with was as fair as we could possibly have been under the circumstances.