Brendan Griffin (Kerry, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Again, I would like to emphasise, as someone who has come from a small club myself, that I know how important even relatively small figures are in terms of funding. That is why I want to emphasise to the committee that it has been incorrectly reported in various media that we are not continuing grants to soccer. We are continuing sports capital grants to individual clubs around the country. We have allocated a huge amount in the most recent round. We will be opening it up again in a couple of months and all of those clubs will be eligible to apply again. We are not going to see a situation where the small clubs, the volunteers and the players at grassroots level are being negatively impacted upon. What we are doing is that we are not providing the sports capital that has been allocated to the FAI itself. We are not making that available for drawdown, but it is only a relatively small amount overall. All of those clubs throughout the country are eligible to come back in again for sports capital, and those that have been allocated funding are eligible to draw down that funding as normal.