Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 22 February 2024

Public Accounts Committee

Appropriation Accounts 2022
Vote 33 - Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sports and Media
Sport Ireland: Financial Statements 2022
FAI: Matters relating to Governance and Funding

9:30 am

Mr. Jonathan Hill:

I can give the Deputy the top-line approach to that. It is a combination of scheduled repayment and a degree of unscheduled repayment. I will let our finance director go through the detail of it.

On scheduled payment, to give the Deputy an example of how that would work, in 2019-2020, when we were speaking to a number of our key stakeholders about that €63.5 million legacy debt we inherited from the previous administration, conversations happened with individual stakeholders. One of those was probably one of our most important stakeholders, which is UEFA. UEFA pays to us, as indeed it pays to all of its federations, an amount of money that covers a centralised approach to certain of our marketing and broadcast rights, in particular our senior men's national team. It was agreed as part of the wider approach to addressing that inherited debt that, of those already agreed payments on an annualised basis, an amount would be paid directly to the Bank of Ireland in relation to the debt that we had with the Bank of Ireland. That would be an example of one of those scheduled repayments of debts.