Mr. Miche?l ? Conaire:

I will go through them from the top.

With regard to the sports capital programme, we were a bit below target at the end of 2021.

This reflects the impact of Covid. In essence, two things happened: the restrictions on the construction industry related to what was happening generally with Covid, and the fact these grants are paid out after the work is done. The works have to take place and all the terms and conditions have to be adhered to before the Department pays out. The sporting sector in general had to look at where it was due to what was happening with Covid. Maybe priorities changed for many clubs and sporting organisations. It was more about keeping the show on the road and the books balanced as opposed to any expansion plans for the development of facilities and so on. That is reflected in the drawdown of the sports capital grant scheme.

This is also what happened with the large scale fund, which is the second fund. The large scale sport infrastructure fund was only launched in 2018. It is a new fund. The first allocations were announced just prior to the start of Covid in January 2020. It is a similar situation. Those allocations were announced just before we headed into this period of uncertainty. Again, there was a lot of pivoting. That ties neatly into the third source of funding, which were the Covid-19 supports for the sector.

The Department initially assisted the sports sector in 2020 with €88.5 million in Covid-19 funding. In December last year, there was another allocation of €73.6 million. That money was to maintain operations within the sports sector to make sure organisations remained solvent and were ready to return to sporting activity once that was allowed. It was about protecting the existing physical and operational infrastructure that was already there. Many NGBs only have a few full-time members of staff. They would have been in danger of having to lay those people off if there was not support. The larger NGBs, what we call the big three, namely, the GAA, the IRFU and the FAI, are heavily dependent on gate receipts to supplement their income and meet their ongoing costs. They were very much hit by there being no matches and by low attendances when matches returned. We had five streams in that Covid-19 funding. One was specifically for the big three field sports. There were also resilience funds to support the NGBs of sport and the clubs. There was a dedicated swimming pool and facilities fund that was administered through Ireland Active and, finally, a resumption of the sport and physical activity fund.

Those schemes were quite successful because they have maintained what was there. We are now looking to how we can get the sports sector back up and running. The Minister of State launched a winter initiative in January to try to get people back into sporting and physical activity. We will have another this year. The push is on. Many people are back to sport but we see from the figures coming through the Irish sports monitor administered by Sport Ireland, and it is also in the second set of figures, that there is an issue around getting everybody back. We are not back at the level we were pre-pandemic. That is an issue. It is something we and Sport Ireland will look at, particularly in the different gradients, for instance, female participation as opposed to male participation. Are the same numbers coming back? If not, why is that the case? These are questions that will be interrogated.