Micheál Carrigy (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I apologise to our guests for being late; I had sent word of this. I welcome them and complement them on the work they do in their sporting organisations. The amount of work they do with the youth of our country is massive, especially throughout Covid in that it has been a difficult couple of years. I have young kids and it was great to see them get back onto the sporting field. It is an outlet for kids and has been over the past 18 months in what has been a difficult time.

I welcome Mr. Ryan who I know very well from Croke Park. I served at an administrative level throughout the GAA from club level - I am still involved in my club - to serving on the central council in Croke Park until about two years. I am very aware of the Give Respect-Get Respect initiative within the GAA in particular. I served at an administrative level for a number of years but I only ever refereed one game, and I umpired for probably ten years at national league level. It was an under-12s match. I will not say who were involved. I did it on an occasion when the referee had not turned up. I said to myself afterwards that I would not do it again because of what was said to me from the sidelines. I have to pay tribute to all those who don the referee jersey across all codes. It is important that we support them.

I have a couple of questions and I apologise if I repeat ones that have been asked already. Counselling services was just mentioned. Do all organisations have that service in place to work with referees who might have suffered both verbal and physical abuse? As regards games and the loss of referees, what number of games are we losing in the various codes due to the difficulty of getting people to take up refereeing?