Mr. Richard Fahey:

We thank the chairman for inviting Tennis Ireland to attend today's meeting. We welcome the opportunity to engage with the Members of the Oireachtas at all times in respect of the sports capital programme and funding for minority sports. The Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport's current high-level goal for sport is to contribute to a healthier and more active society by promoting sports participation and by supporting high-performance sport and the provision of facilities. We strongly believe that Tennis Ireland supports this goal effectively but probably a bit too quietly.

Tennis Ireland is a 32-county governing body. We have just under 45,000 registered players with an additional figure of approximately 30,000 players who play recreationally or through programmes such as Parks Tennis, which has operated for over 40 years. We have a strong network of almost 200 clubs nationally. Unusually for a sport, we have an equal ratio of male and female participation. We are a sport that actively promotes lifelong participation in sport. We have people who play from the age of four or five up into their eighties and sometimes even into their nineties. On average, our players play 2.3 times per week so they are making a very significant contribution to the health and well-being of our nation. Tennis Ireland won the best national governing body, NGB, award at the 2018 CARA national inclusion awards in recognition of its Enjoy Tennis programme, which caters for over 800 people with a range of disabilities, and was a finalist in the NGB of the year category at the recent Irish sport industry awards. We are finalising a new strategy that focuses on participation, coaching, performance, competition, visibility, commercial and governance.

Our income has been relatively stable over the past number of years but it is important to note that like many other sports and unlike the GAA, soccer or rugby, we do not get income from TV rights. We do not get major grant-aid funding from international federations. The only other area of funding that is available to us which can be exploited is around increasing commercial and philanthropic income. We are very grateful for the funding we get from Sport Ireland. There has been a lot of debate today around the sports capital programme. Three things allow the environment for good sports development to happen. The first one is facilities, namely, places to play. The second is the type of programmes we have such as competition programmes, participation programmes like summer camps or coaching programmes to try to get people to play the sport. The third element is people such as volunteers or coaches. Governing bodies play a major role in those two other areas in terms of people, training and supporting volunteers and through the delivery and development of programmes.

Regarding what the challenge for us as a sport, and probably for all the sports represented here, if I look back on the funding we secured from Government, I can see that our core funding in 2008 was €436,000. In 2018, it is €353,000. That is a fall of 20%. If I look at our performance funding in 2008, I can see that it is €190,000. In 2018, it is €175,000, which is a fall of 8%. That fall took place in a very challenging environment for our sport and other sports in terms of increased expectations from our players, including- performance players or just players at clubs; volunteers; parents; the media; and Government in terms of safeguarding, governance, the GDPR, etc. They are all really important things and we fully support those regulations but they have put a huge strain on governing bodies in terms of meeting the day-to-day costs of compliance with those regulations while also trying to develop our sports. We appeal to Government to not just look at capital funding. We are very grateful for that but we also feel very strongly, as Mr. Treacy outlined, that there is a need to increase funding for sport to support our performance athletes but also to help us help clubs and participants around the country.