Alan Dillon (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank our guests who have joined us this evening. It is fair to say from their opening statements that the 20x20 campaign has probably done more in the past two years than what possibly would have been achieved over the past 20 year. It has certainly increased awareness in Ireland and internationally about the value and importance of women's participation in sport.

I appreciate that women players across all sports put in an equal, if not greater, effort in their chosen sports to ensure that they perform to the best of their abilities and I would second Deputy Munster's proposal on setting up a task force to address the inequality that is present in terms of how men are perceived. I speak as someone who comes from an inter-county background and worked with the Gaelic Players' Association, GPA, for more than 15 years. We need to change the language in terms of how women are treated and respected.

I have some generic questions. The Ladies' Gaelic Football Association, LGFA, mentioned issues around access to sporting grounds for training and matches. I would like to get an understanding from Ms O'Rourke of the difficulties of the LGFA in accessing capital grants and what plans the association has to resolve this.

In terms of the foundations or the building blocks to ensure there is equality of opportunity for women at elite, club or participation level, what would be the required funding structures to support women in sport? Each organisation in its opening statement referenced funding streams. If there are any recommendations, I would very much welcome them.

Talking about the sports capital grants, if we were to go about it as an association by ourselves, we would not have the finances to back up what is required. We currently support clubs and counties in a position to access this funding. We support them in the statements because in recent years everybody is working to access or improve facilities at a local level, taking into account that young girls and women are playing this sport. We support those applications.

Some counties in the past number of months have invested in or are planning in investing in their own facilities, which really is not possible for the majority of our counties and us as an association. Our support must lie with the current structures that are in place.