Mr. Ronan Corrigan:

It is refreshing to hear the Deputy. He hit the nail on the head. As we have said over and over, our biggest concern has been that the new constitution of HSI 2024 is designed to effectively protect HSI's existence. It is not accountable to the affiliates. It is accountable to its own members. The only members it has are its board, so it is, effectively, accountable to itself.

How do we fix it? We need the committee to help us to put something in place that will serve the sports and the industry, because they all link together. We all link together. The Deputy mentioned the two Ministries being in a power struggle. It is a constant thing. The Deputy perceives us to be in a power struggle with HSI. We are not in a power struggle with it. I will be frank in how I say it; we are trying to give HSI a kick in the ass to realise we want to look after our sport and our industry. We are all passionate about it. A lot of us make our living out of it. We have our families involved for generations. We are not going to harm this industry but we are going to fight tooth and nail to support it and grow it.

When HSI came into existence, it was a terrific idea. It was an umbrella body that was going to find funding to fund sport and breeding and grow both so that they would come together. It definitely did that for a while but, unfortunately, it started to deviate because the thing that was bringing them together took on a life of its own and it forgot what it was meant to do. That is still the case. There is no use in talking about reversing it. We have done that. We spent last year talking about that. We have given it a year. Reversing it is not going to work. This thing needs a mallet to land on top of it. The industry needs to be supported and recognised. Most importantly, it needs to be listened to properly, not just to let it talk and then leave the room and do whatever you want to do yourself. HSI needs to listen to the industry, as the Deputy alluded to - the people who know exactly what is going on. Mr. Madden referenced it. I know this first-hand because my wife works with Riding for the Disabled Ireland, and therapy with children and horses. She will tell first-hand that there is nothing better than to see a little child, or in some instances adults who have disabilities, come out of themselves for that one hour they get. The centres are run predominantly by volunteers who give up their time freely and get very little assistance from the big bodies.

We are obsessed with the Olympics, and rightly so. Medals bring us success and pride to the country. One feeds off the other. That is really important to see. We cannot have a board, whether it be nine or 17 people, who forget about that. That is the reality of it. They forget about the venues who put their facilities in place, the ECVOA venues, who spent hundreds of thousands on their venues so they are safe and suitable to help therapy children and to teach children how to ride so they are in a situation to deal with what the Deputy looked for, for example, the child who needs somewhere to put their pony because it will give them an outlet instead of hanging around on the side of a corner somewhere or getting into mischief. That is what we all work to do. The RDS is a foundation based on helping, supporting and doing those things. Showjumping Ireland does the very same thing. Our safeguarding policies, support policies and our training policies are all based on finding that child who is eight years of age, and we bring them all the way through to jumping in the Dublin Horse Show. Jumping in Dublin is the pinnacle for them nationally, and the RDS helps us every year in doing that. We plough our resources into it.

We want to join the 12.2 child up to the ones the Deputy wants to see lifting the Olympic medal. We cannot do that if the whole thing is not joined up and if they do not recognise each other’s strengths. We currently have a situation where there is an entity and there is, not a power struggle, but a distrust between the organisations, that we will do so much work and then it is taken away and you have no input into it anymore. However, when it fails or does not deliver what people expect it to deliver, who takes the flack for it? It is the people nationally, because they have lost interest in it. The sponsorship then disappears. The corporate support and the national systems disappear. That is what happens to us. We end up ploughing resources into rebuilding that for the for the next four years, and then the same thing happens.

We need it joined up. We need all committee members to drop that mallet on the table and say enough is enough, it is time to sit up, that you do not care how important you think you are, you are getting in a room and listening to these people. That is what we need, and it is all we want them to do. It is not about personalities or the people on the board all the time. I am sure they are very competent people. They were very able and capable civil servants in their Departments. However, the Deputy is right. Some of them have very little practical knowledge of what is wanted and that has to change. Put the people who have the best interests of the sport and the industry in places where they can influence and develop and do things properly. That is all we want, as well as transparency.

Transparency is the most important thing. If State funding is coming into this, every single person should be able to see a set of accounts that shows what the last penny was spent on. We have to do it for our organisations. We sit in front of them. We would be quite happy to give our accounts to members and they could go through them and see exactly what we spend our money on. Can the Deputy say they have the same thing from an entity that is in receipt of a large amount of State funding? We can and will do that. Can everyone else within the sector do that?