Ms Michelle Carpenter:

I am joined by Mr. Eamonn Colclough, president of Rowing Ireland, and Mr. Neville Maxwell, chairman of our high performance committee and board member, as well as by world silver medalist Mr. Philip Doyle and twice world gold medallist Ms Sanita Pušpure. I thank the joint committee for giving us the opportunity to present on the challenges facing minority sports in Ireland.

There is one week every four years when the mass media cover minority sports. It is the first week of the Olympic Games. However, in recent Olympiad the amateur ethos has been abandoned and we have seen the introduction of professional soccer, basketball, tennis and rugby. This development has resulted in an incursion into the domain of minority sports as the summer Olympiad has a ceiling of 10,500 athletes and the introduction of the sports I mentioned has resulted in a reduced allocation of athletes in traditional Olympic sports.

There are many challenges facing minority sports in Ireland and they are exacerbated by the overwhelming media coverage of major sports like Gaelic games and professional sports such as soccer and rugby. When opening an Irish newspaper, people observe that these sports enjoy 90% of sports coverage. They are mainly mass participation sports in that the games can fill a stadium, although their coverage does not regularly extend our sporting success as a nation. The former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has stated "the nation unites when [we] succeed on the international stage. All sport is a powerful force in creating social harmony." Minority sports, however successful, are conducted in a virtual media vacuum and, therefore, struggle to attract significant commercial sponsorship. They rely on remittances from participants, the excellent sports capital grant system and Sport Ireland funding. However, what pride and achievement they bring to a country when they bring home those medals. This affects not only the country's mood but also the economy as a whole. To those of us involved in minority sports, it is a source of amazement that such a vast amount of State funding goes into the major sports which enjoy in our perception vast financing by gate receipts, television coverage and commercial sponsorship. Most of these significant sports have the luxury of being held behind high walls, which enables them to command significant income from gate receipts.

In the 2016 Olympiad in Rio de Janeiro Ireland won its first Olympic rowing medal. In a post-race interview after the semi-final our two athletes decided to have a bit of craic with the interviewer. The interview was so refreshingly different from the media trained, cliché ridden conversations that it went viral. With that, the O'Donovan brothers became an Internet sensation. In Rowing Ireland we assumed we would be able to capitalise on this publicity to attract significant commercial sponsorship. However, despite contacting dozens of Irish firms and corporations, the media circus had quickly moved back to major sports and it became evident that if a sport was in a virtual media blackout for all but one week of the Olympiad, commercial sponsors were not interested. I have been fortunate to be involved in rowing since I was 13 years old. Rowing has followed me from Limerick city and its six rowing clubs to Dublin and the banks of the River Liffey throughout my career in Strasbourg and Frankfurt and back to Ireland. I have seen the benefits, as have my colleagues, of the sport of rowing. They are dedication, hard work, perseverance and the ability to work alone and in a team. It sounds like a job specification, but it is what we learn with our sport.

One of our first achievements when I took over as chief executive officer was launching our strategic plan last year and its four main pillars. The first pillar is "Rowing for All: A Sport for Life". In 2019 Rowing Ireland has increased its membership by 25%. This total does not include anyone who does not race and just rows for pleasure or recreationally. They are licensed, competitive members, but there are thousands more members of Rowing Ireland. Rowing Ireland also has 30,000 individual students as part of the Get Going, Get Rowing programme, a schools programme that allows students to row, with a pathway to clubs and on-the-water rowing. In 2019 we had numerous students from the Get Going, Get Rowing programme who went on to clubs and represent Ireland at junior international level.

Being in line with the national physical activity plan is key for us in Rowing Ireland, working with all ages and abilities, from women in sport to men on the move, as well as children and young people with autism, Down's syndrome and other skills. We see no barriers in our sport.

Although we may be considered a minority sport with only racing licence memberships captured, we punch well above our weight and work hand in hand with our local sports partnerships, as is recommended under the national physical activity plan.

Our second pillar is leading our sport. With a small staff base and limited resources, we strive to do this. We are one of the few national governing bodies that has achieved the governance code of Ireland. Despite constraints, we will continue to strive to be an innovative national governing body using effective and efficient internal structures and systems.

Our third pillar involves supporting clubs. Rowing clubs are the hub of our sport. Many are located in areas of socioeconomic need and cater for all. Most of our clubs are struggling with volunteers and the ability to provide for new members. However, last year, our Irish championships, which took place at the National Rowing Centre in Cork, had the highest ever number of participants with thousands racing over three days. Our regattas are seeing record numbers and clubs have the highest ever membership. We have clubs that cater from the ages of eight to 88 across the 32 counties of Ireland from Cork to Antrim, Galway to Dublin.

Last but not least is the pillar of the sport of which we are so proud, namely, high performance. Our objective is to excel. We had five athletes after the Olympic Games in Rio, two of whom retired. In August 2017, when our high-performance director joined our team, we had 11 lightweight rowers in our programme, a category in which Ireland has always been steadfast. However, we were aware that the lightweight programme may be slashed from the Olympic Games and we needed to up our game. Two years later, we have nine lightweight men and women and ten open weight men and women. Three of those open weight boats have qualified for the Olympic Games. We are now in a different place. We are ranked second in the world in Olympic boat classes ahead of our rivals in Germany and Great Britain and such great rowing nations as the US and Australia. We have qualified more boats than ever before. Four boats will go to Tokyo to represent us. With three world championship medals in Olympic class boats, we are poised and ready for it in less than 37 weeks' time. We will not stop there because we are also confident we can qualify a fifth boat at next week's regatta in Lucerne. In addition, we have an amazing athlete - Katie O'Brien - who took home a bronze medal in this year's PR2 event. She was trained by a volunteer coach all year. If one was to look at research on world rowing, one would see that it is a well-known fact in coaching that it takes €1 million per year per boat to win an Olympic medal. It also takes one-to-one coaching of crews. We have qualified on a fraction on that. Pathways are crucial. In 2019, we won two medals - silver and bronze - at the World Rowing Under 23 Championships. The winners were also coached by volunteer coaches. Our junior men's four came fourth in the World Rowing Junior Championships while the same crew won a silver medal at the European championships. Our future is bright. We are ready for Tokyo and the benefit it will bring us as a country. Sport provides a platform for people to come together and support their country. International events like the Olympic Games serve as a point around which to rally and show national pride and unity. We are ready to drive this. Despite efforts, we still do not have a large sponsor or philanthropist to support us. As stated, most minority sports suffer from this ailment. Despite our success, it seems few want to invest in our journey to Tokyo and the dream and reality of Olympic medals. We rely on Sport Ireland for funding and are very grateful for its support. As an organisation and a country, we must give our athletes, who dedicate their lives to training more than 15 times per week, the dream and reality of medals. It is also important to support the pathway so that we can continue until Paris and Los Angeles.

I will conclude with the words of our high-performance director in his recent summary of our position. He stated:

With three Olympic class medals, Ireland was ranked 2nd in the world for the Olympic Boat categories (not including the Para), surpassing all objectives and expectations and in doing so breaking Rowing Ireland records. With three medals and four crews selected for the Olympics, we are no longer the Irish underdogs, but we are now what countries and crews worldwide will look at and think of when training and striving to improve their performances. This means that we have now set a bar and that more than ever, we as a team must be even more dedicated, committed, and focused. We must strive to look for ways to improve and keep our foot firmly flat on the accelerator.

All our opponents will put the photos of our medallist athletes on their mirrors because they are the ones to beat.