Ms Amina Moustafa:

It depends on what sport you are referring to. I will just give the case of myself and my lived experience of the sport. There was a time I was involved in sport when, as I am from a Muslim background, I was wearing the hijab. The example I gave was that the FIFA hijab ban was preventing Muslim women from playing sport and playing football at an elite level. If we are speaking about sport on an elite level, a policy was in place that prevented Muslim women from participating, which has a trickle-down effect to those at a grassroots level. "If you cannot see her, you cannot be her", is a saying that often goes around. The lack of representation in sport leads to a limited number of people going into a particular space, when they do not see people like them in that space.

SARI's work is at community level. We are not waiting for people to join our club or programmes. We do a lot of outreach looking at diverse representation and encouraging particular diverse communities to participate in sport. There is no monitoring or evaluation of diverse representation in sport in Irish Sports Monitor reports. There is monitoring of the participation patterns and percentages as regards gender and disability but there is no monitoring and evaluation of those from different backgrounds participating in sport.