Mr. Jim Leacy:

People find going on committees is very time consuming. Everyone seems to be working now and has very little time to contribute to committees. It is not unique to us. Everyone is struggling to retain volunteers. More people are working and more are working later at night. Sometimes parents bring children to events and they want us to be minders for the children for the day. They do not seem to stay and watch the children, and this is a problem. We have volunteers who run tournaments and parents who bring a group of children go off shopping or working.

The professional association in England ran a programme of putting fold-up snooker tables into schools and it worked very well. It helped the children with mathematics because they had to be able to add up the scores when they potted the red and black balls. They had to do this in their heads and they did not do it on their phones or a calculator. We have one person who puts four fold-up tables into a van and runs it around to schools. We could never cover the entire country. We have tried to get a school to go to a snooker club in a town, but we had to fund a bus from the school to the snooker club so the children could play and see the sport. I hope we will get increased participation from this but it is a lot of work. As we have stated, a small increase in funding would help many of the organisations tremendously.