Mr. Ciaran Kirwan:

Of course they can, but what the Senator must remember is that change is never easy. Corporate governance to achieve the required standard is never easy. As an organisation, we cannot continue in a situation where somebody is in a powerful position such as a provincial president for 20 or 30 years. It is just not good. It causes blockages in the system. It leads to other people not being able to come in and it leads to the disenchantment the Senator is talking about. I am hopeful this review will show we are on the right path. We need to do more and this is the way we should be going.

We were not slow in the last four years, as Mr. Treacy has already said, to adopt the recommendations from the Rio report in 2016. We adopted all of them. We have zero outstanding issues. We followed our strategic plan to 2020. This is not an organisation that is in disarray at the top level. There are splits, difficulties, factions and strongly held views, but the organisation as a whole has been moving in the right direction. There is no way we could have achieved the success our high performance boxers achieved in Tokyo if our organisation was as dysfunctional as some people try to portray in the media. The committee members are all politicians and they all watch the media. They must bear in mind that all of those stories, almost bar none, are emanating from the same source.