Shane Ross (Dublin Rathdown, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The first question was about the sports grants. Our ambition is certainly to have sports grants every year. They are a wonderful facility and I have seen that the competition for the money is incredible. They are put to very good use. It is a really effective way of getting money to people who participate in sport. It is one of the most compelling and satisfying mechanisms whereby money is spent and spent well on young people, their mental and physical health and abilities. It would be preferable if we had this every year although we have not been able to do so. I think we had it in 2016 and 2018 and we have another lot coming out this year. We would certainly like to have it every year if we could.

On boxing, it is a delicate issue. The Deputy really wants to address the issue of the International Olympic Committee, IOC, suspending planning for the 2020 Olympic boxing tournament. International sporting organisations such as the IOC are independent, autonomous bodies that are responsible for deciding their own operational procedures and competition rules. It is not the role of any government to intervene in such decision making. Sport Ireland and the Irish Amateur Boxing Association, IABA, are continuing to work collaboratively in preparing our Irish boxers for Tokyo 2020 and are monitoring the situation closely. The IOC will not make a final decision until this coming June. There is an expectation there will be a boxing competition at the Tokyo Olympics, but probably not under the IABA banner.

Deputy Troy asked me to lay out the criteria that will be used for the sports capital programme this year. That has not been decided yet but there is no intention to discriminate against anybody. It has been done in the past on aper capitabasis. I have not heard much quarrel with that but there are all sorts of alternative ways of doing it, such as placing a high bar for people to get over before they can get anything at all. There are numerous ways in which it could be done. However, I have not heard a large number of complaints about how it has been distributed in the past. We are looking at various ways of doing it. We could change the weightings a bit. Maybe the disadvantaged should get a little bit more than they did in the past. We are strongly considering the possibility of disadvantaged areas being given a greater share. However, we have not made any decision on it yet.

The large-scale sporting infrastructure scheme is open to applications until 17 April. This will take some time and I will not promise a date for completing that but I am sure it will be well into the second half of the year. There will be a serious assessment. This is a fund of €100 million, with €8.8 million allocated for this year. They are very large projects and will have to be looked at extremely seriously and very thoroughly, which will take some time. There are a couple of streams for that as well. We will look at it as discretely as we can as we do not want to see a deficit in the draw-downs. It is a very exciting prospect. We will approach this forensically, strictly and objectively. At the end of the day, the projects will be very worthy but they will be very big ones.