Brendan Griffin (Kerry, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The likelihood, which studies show, is that if people develop a good habit at an early age, they will keep doing it. As someone who runs marathons, the Deputy will know the massive benefits of sport across the board for everybody at all ages, not just for children.

On the national governing bodies and development officers, one of the positive things that came from this budget is that we have been able to increase the core funding of the national governing bodies of sport across the board by about €2 million, which is very important for those national governing bodies. That is on top of the Women in Sport programme initiative increase. This money will allow them to roll out programmes for people. We have done well on the capital front in recent years but the funding for programmes and people have not really matched it. This is the first budget where we have seen a substantial increase in the core funding for the national governing bodies which will augur well for on-the-ground programmes and the rolling out of those programmes whether through development officers or other means. It is very encouraging to see. If we can keep that momentum going, it will see more people on the ground trying to get more people active in sport.

One of the core principles of the new policy is to see local authorities taking on a more proactive role in involving people in sport. If one wants to compare the tourism side of the house to the sport side, on the tourism front we have seen a delegation of duty to local authorities in recent years. It has worked well in most cases. It is a ground-up approach. We want to see local authorities getting more involved with local authority plans and working with the local sports partnerships who have an excellent knowledge on the ground of the issues and challenges. We need to work on the parts of the community where participation is lower than the national average. I very much welcome local authority involvement and the policy hopes to see more of that in a structured and integrated way. It will be very important in terms of leading this forward and for local authorities working with the various organisations and clubs in their areas to try to roll out programmes that are not there at present and to make the most of the facilities. We hope to see a lot of progress on local authority-led audits of sports facilities around the country by next year. They will establish where we have facilities in abundance and also where we are lacking to see how we can best address gaps. We can adjust the policy based on the outcome of that. I think I have covered most issues.

The large-scale sporting infrastructure fund is a new fund. It is an exciting one because, to date, projects of that nature have been planned on an ad hocbasis whereas this gives structure to that planning process. It is one that has taken a lot longer to get ready to open than we initially hoped. We are very hopeful of opening it in the very near future. It is something there is massive demand for because there is a pent-up demand from a number of years where that level of funding was not available.

On governance, we have a bit of ground to make up on that but we are making good progress on it. Sport Ireland is very enthusiastic and passionate about ensuring we get the best level of governance across all our national governing bodies and agencies.

I am passionate about ensuring we get the best levels of governance across our national governing bodies and agencies. Thus far, 16 bodies have fully adopted the governance code. They include 12 national governing bodies, three local sports partnerships and one other. However, we have a lot to do. We anticipate that by 2021-----