Mr. John Treacy:

When restrictions were put in place in March, Sport Ireland acted quickly to make sure the case for sport was included in the Government roadmap, which was critically important; creating an environment where the athletes could return to training as quickly as possible; presenting a very strong case to Government in terms of funding; and looking at how sport could support the Government, the Department of Health and society in general in terms of battling the pandemic. We were ably assisted by the Minister of State, Deputy Griffin, at the time in terms of all these initiatives. An expert group was established by the Department and that was the mechanism whereby protocols developed by the national governing bodies, NGBs, could be approved. That is chaired by the Department officials and it is doing very well and has proven to be very beneficial. We instigated and increased our year in terms of the international carding scheme. We extended it for a year into 2021, which is something the then Minister of State, Deputy Griffin, was keen we would do. That was done very quickly to ease the minds of the athletes.

The big piece for us was getting the athletes back into training in the centres as quickly as possible. That happened in June and it released a great valve in terms of the athletes getting back into training, which was critically important.

The institute has continued to deliver services to our athletes. We are conducting many Covid-19 tests for the athletes as they go to international competition.

There is much activity around the lockdown in terms of physical activity. We ran numerous campaigns. In terms of social media, we got the governing bodies to put pieces online. Sport Ireland and the local sports partnerships, LSPs, were very active in that regard. We ran a plethora of programmes around physical activity and the research that came back during the pandemic showed that the numbers increased. Walking was up to 83% and the participation numbers got up as far as 50% so the impact in terms of social media was very important. The LSPs and the NGBs worked hard with us to ensure those programmes were successful. They were basically programmes to encourage people to exercise at home during the lockdown and they were provided with a good deal of advice to them. That was very well received.

We ran Covid awareness courses. More than 185,000 people touched on that. We had compliance officers training for the governing bodies and the clubs so we reached down to the clubs in terms of all that training.

This month we are doing a piece, Your Personal Best Month, which is aimed at men over the age of 45 to encourage them to get out and keep active, with no more excuses. That is the kind of message we want to filter into that age group. Also, for the next three months we will be working with the Government and Healthy Ireland on the Keep Well campaign.

It is important that we stress to members that yesterday we launched a campaign on our website on all the different programmes that are available. We strongly advocate that people would look at it to see what they can do. We run a community walking initiative, which will be centred around the sports and involving local authorities. With Get Ireland Walking we developed a walking app where people can register and slot in a time for walking in these various facilities and monitor that.

The local sports partnerships will roll out initiatives for people with a disability. We will also link in closely with "Operation Transformation" over the next number of months. We will operate a programme called FitLine, which is geared at older people who might not have access to social media. We will make sure there is a telephone line through which they will be able to get advice and guidance on what to do from home. People can talk them through it so that they can exercise.

The big piece around this is to try to encourage people to be active during the lockdown, which is critically important. We all know how important physical activity is for mental well-being and always-----