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

I apologise for having to leave soon, but I am due to speak in the Dáil. I also apologise to the delegates for the delay in commencing this session, but we had to deal with other committee business first. I thank them for being here and their opening statements.

As rightly stated by Ms O'Connor, sport is powerful in terms of mental and physical health well-being, in reducing anti-social behaviour, in team building, in terms of leadership and in boosting national pride, as witnessed two weekends ago when Ireland won the Grand Slam and our rowers won Olympic medals. On many sporting occasions we all are proud to be Irish and don the green jersey. The sports we are discussing are termed "minority sports", but that is not what they are. All of the bodies represented are sports bodies. The level of participation for some of them is higher than for others, but that may be because some of them have greater facilities, resources, numbers of training and development officers and greater potential to recruit new participants than others. We invited the organisations to ask them what we, as a committee, could do to support them and what needed to be done at national level.

I was disappointed to hear in the opening statement made by Rowing Ireland that, despite what had been stated previously, a valid application for capital funding had been refused and that this put in jeopardy our chances of competing at the next Olympic Games in a category in which we were successful at the most recent Olympic Games. One would expect the areas to be prioritised for investment to be ones in which we were doing well. On that point alone, it is a pity that we did not hold this session prior to the last one because had we done so, we would have had more questions to ask of the Minister and his officials.

My first question is for Mr. John Treacy. He has outlined that funding was cut in 2007 but is now increasing. Approximately €10.8 million has been provided for 57 national governing bodies. It is a very small amount. From 2001 to date, €150 million was provided in youth field sport grants for three large organisations, the IRFU, the FAI and the GAA. While not wishing to diminish the work these organisations do, there is no fairness in the allocation of funding. I hope that in saying this I will not annoy the IRFU, the FAI or the GAA. In her opening statement Ms O'Connor said, "We were asked here today to speak about minority sports, but we do not believe there is such a thing in Ireland." According to Mr. Páraic Duffy, outgoing Ard Stiúrthóir of the GAA, the federation represents all Irish sports and while the big three can negotiate for themselves, it works with the federation as it believes in the power of all sports. Unfortunately, the figures support the arguement that that is not the case. My question for Mr. Treacy is how can we balance the figures and support development officers in the respective sports in order that participants can develop and excel. I recently met a representative of Hockey Ireland who told me that it had eight development officers in the province of Ulster and only 1.5 in the Republic. We are not at the races. If we want to be at them and able to compete on the international stage - I accept that it is not all about competing and that participation is equally important - we need to accelerate the funding being provided for the respective sports bodies.

I regret that we do not have greater time to engage with the bodies present, but I again thank their representatives for being here.