Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

The appropriation account for Vote 33 records gross expenditure of €1.23 billion in 2022. Expenditure programme D, sports and recreation services, accounted for €213 million, or 17% of the total spend in the year.

Within the sports programme, the most significant area of spending relates to grant funding for Sport Ireland. In 2022, the grant funding provided under subhead D5, which provides Sport Ireland’s core funding, amounted to just over €147 million. A further €12 million was provided to Sport Ireland under subhead D6 in the form of dormant accounts funding support for sports measures.

The original Estimate for subhead D.5 anticipated spending of around €106 million in 2022. A Supplementary Estimate for €35.2 million was approved to provide help for sports clubs and organisations facing significantly higher energy costs, and to allow Sport Ireland to meet additional costs arising from the application of the Building Momentum pay agreement.

A number of the programme subheads relate to capital funding for sports infrastructure, disbursed by the Department. There was significant underspending in 2022 on subhead D7, which is a fund for large-scale sport infrastructure projects. In that case, only around one-tenth of the amount provided in 2022 was utilised, with the underspending being attributed to knock-on impacts of Covid-19.

Sport Ireland’s main functions are to encourage the promotion, development and co-ordination of competitive sport and to facilitate increased participation in sport by the population generally. Sport Ireland’s expenditure in 2022 was €147.2 million. Almost three-quarters of this was accounted for by recurrent grant payments to support sports bodies and individual sports persons. Nearly €21 million was paid in 2022 under the temporary energy resilience scheme, which provided financial support for the sports sector to alleviate increased energy costs.

Sport Ireland is almost exclusively funded from Vote 33. In 2022, its income from State sources totalled over €148 million, out of total income recorded of €150.7 million.

Members may wish to note that Sport Ireland treated significant funding provided from the Vote in 2022 as deferred income. The statement of financial position indicates that deferred income increased from €1.8 million at the end of 2021 to €15.8 million in 2022. The increase was almost exclusively related to €14 million being held over for energy costs support grants in 2023. As a result, Sport Ireland had cash balances of almost €31 million at end 2022.

Sport Ireland’s fixed assets had a net book value of around €153 million at end 2022. This reflects past investment in the provision of the extensive Sports Campus Ireland facilities. Depreciation on the assets, totalling €6.3 million in 2022, is reflected on the income and expenditure statement.

I issued a clear audit opinion in respect of the Sport Ireland financial statements for 2022.