Dr. Una May:

I am happy to answer that question. The Covid funding scheme was designed by Sport Ireland in consultation with the Department and with the approval of the Government. It was intended to offset the financial losses and any additional costs incurred as a result of Covid-19 to ensure that no viable sporting organisation would become insolvent. In recent years, Sport Ireland had been trying to ensure that major sports governing bodies were not as reliant on Exchequer funding and would generate a lot of their funding from commercial activities, including ticket sales and so on. During Covid the aim was to ensure that where there were significant losses, the funding could compensate for that in order to ensure that the organisations remained in place post Covid. We wanted to make sure that when sporting opportunities were allowed to reopen, there was a sporting offering available to people. The scheme had a number of different categories and I will ask my colleague, Mr. Califf, to go into more detail.