Dr. Una May:

I am grateful to Deputy Devlin for the question. Sometimes I come here wanting to talk about the great work we are doing and I do not always get the opportunity to do so. These are areas where we feel very strongly that we are actually performing at a very high level in providing supports. We have a women in sport policy which identified four key pillars that required attention to ensure that we had more women participating in sport and more women in leadership positions. We have done a lot of work on leadership programmes and development and supports for young leaders. We give encouragement to try to ensure that we have a pathway and as that gender balance is being addressed, that there is a future pool of individuals who will be able to serve and provide the support to the governing bodies from the women in sports side.

We are also interested in the area of officiating and refereeing and in ensuring that women who have reached the end of their sporting career may choose to give back to sport as a volunteer or a paid official. We want to ensure that through coaching and officiating, there are opportunities and pathways for those women, with women-specific initiatives. We have done a huge amount of work. We have also had a significant increase in recent years. We had a fund of €2 million that we have invested specifically into the issue of women in sport. I am very proud of the work we are doing for women in sport. We have been very proactive and I believe we have made a difference. We are currently reviewing the women in sport policy, which is a relatively short turnaround to be reviewing a policy like that. We are doing so because we believe that the landscape has changed significantly in recent years so would like to think that we have played a part in that.

Regarding disadvantaged communities, we have been very proud recipients of dormant account funding and that has increased significantly over the years.

We believe it has increased because of the success of the programmes that we have initiated. We have very targeted programmes. Our local sports partnerships were established specifically to target various groups. Without being in any way derogatory, I will refer to them as being more difficult-to-reach groups; be they people in disadvantaged communities or minority communities. We do a lot of work in that area.

In addition to that, we have been successful in acquiring new funding from Europe, which is very unusual. We were invited to a European forum to discuss the fact that we were able to tap into a non-sports fund within Europe, namely, the innovation stream of the European Social Fund, and how we can use that. The programme is specifically targeted at disadvantaged communities. As part of that we are going to be investing in a specific development officer targeting disadvantaged communities in every local sports partnership in the country. We are just starting out on the road now. We are piloting it within six local sports partnerships.