Mr. John Treacy:

We do not have investigative powers within the Act. We are not a regulatory agency. We are a sports promotion agency, which works in partnership with other governing bodies. That is the ethos of Sport Ireland as to its functions. If one looks at these functions, these relate to participation, high-performance, anti-doping and codes of conduct. There was an opportunity in 2015 to make Sport Ireland a regulatory agency but that would have been the wrong thing to do. We do not want to be a regulatory agency but want to be here to work in partnership with and to support the organisations. I have made the point in here previously that we took on an audit function where, in many other areas involving grant aid, such functions have not been taken on. We took it upon ourselves that if were giving 50% of funding to an organisation, we would do a full audit. We took a view which was shared by others, that if one is not providing a huge amount of funding to an organisation - 5% was the figure used by the FAI - and we tried and wanted to push the boat out. We were rebuffed and pushed back because we did not have the power to do that.