Jack Chambers (Dublin West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for his questions. He is a pursuer of peak sports, having been a former manager of his country team, and we have had discussions on sport. I agree with him that what clubs throughout the country have done during the Covid pandemic in the spring and now in the community call shows the scale of volunteerism and everything positive that happens with sport. This week we announced funding and have split it into four different pillars. Pillar schemes 1 and 2 are for the governing bodies and where there are specific Covid-related losses. Pillar 3 and scheme 3 relates to a club resilience fund. All clubs can apply through the different governing bodies if they have specific losses or exposure, which I know they do, as do their affiliated clubs. Under the restart and renewal fund, many of the local sports partnerships will be disbursing funding through Sport Ireland in the coming period and funding has been announced for those also. We focused on disability funding and sports innovation funds to allow clubs to embed different changes they want to do in a post-Covid environment. We were keen to run that across the four schemes as well as giving clubs hope for the future in a post-Covid environment. That is why we intend reopening the sports capital programme this month so that clubs can plan for the future and we will support them through that.