Ms Sinéad McNulty:

I thank Senator Carrigy for his question. As Ms O'Rourke has outlined, for the last three years we have had a memorandum of understanding with the GAA and that has seen progression and development in leaps and bounds. It may not have been visible until 2021 because Covid delayed a lot of the launches of joint projects last year. We have been working on a joint coaching initiative and a player pathway coaching framework, for example, at a national level. Work is ongoing at both club and national level, including with the one club initiative. We are not suggesting that there is a specific need but that there is a need for more facilities to accommodate the increased number of female players. The GAA was established with male members and had X number of facilities. We have seen huge growth in the ladies' games and we need additional facilities to cope with that growth. If it happens under the one club model, that is absolutely perfect but again, there are issues around managing time, equity of access and so on. We also have situations where clubs are not joined up.

There will be huge progression over the next few years in the Gaelic games family. I welcome the suggestions that will come from our members around areas they think we can do more on. We launched our national development plan last year and got great insights from our members on ways to work more closely together with the GAA and we are continuing to do so. Our relationship with the LGFA has never been stronger. We have been able to iron out lots of issues and things that were happening ten or 15 years ago are not happening now because of that increased engagement. That is benefiting all of our members at all levels across the associations and we will continue with that engagement. There is a really positive attitude to collaboration across the Gaelic games family.