Jack Chambers (Dublin West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chair and appreciate her comments. I echo what she has said around the huge achievements by Irish sportswomen over recent months. She has outlined them all and I will not repeat them.

We are concerned about the report from the third quarter of the year and the gap that has emerged. We will have a dormant accounts programme announced in the next two weeks. There will be a central focus there around female participation. There will be direct programmes through sporting organisations nationally, as part of the specific programmes that they run, and also through local sports partnerships, which will try to get collaboration at local level on specific targets where there is a participation gap. They run many programmes in the Chairman's own county and across the country. They are focusing on where there is a participation gap. For example, one of the areas of focus will obviously be on female participation and narrowing that around the dormant accounts funded programme. There will also be a focus on people with disabilities. We are focused on participation among people with disabilities, which is around 30%. There is a big focus on that area as well. The dormant accounts funding will play an important role on strengthening that.

These figures were obviously collated around the third quarter of the year, when there was a huge amount of return to sport. Many indoor sports were only returning at that point. Obviously, there would have been displacement in certain areas. Sometimes there would be higher levels of participation in certain indoor sports for women and girls and that would have affected the figures. Obviously, we have seen them all return in the fourth quarter of the year. I would be hopeful that we will see that gap narrow again in the figures for this quarter and the first quarter of next year.

As I have said, we are anxious to support female participation through our dormant accounts programme and also through our winter initiative. The committee has probably seen the Let's Get Back campaign, which was progressed by Sport Ireland in the autumn. We will build on that with specific winter initiatives in the period from January to March. We will encourage as many people as we can to get active and get back involved in their local sporting organisations. I am conscious of volunteer fatigue, which is there as well. We are trying to support volunteers and local clubs. The Covid package we announced this week will help with that too. That is some of the outline on the dormant accounts funded programme.