John O'Donoghue (Kerry South, Fianna Fail)

Carrying out an effective and comprehensive national audit of local facilities is a major undertaking in respect of complexity and time. The Sports Council for Northern Ireland embarked on a similar exercise in recent years and it took two to three years to complete the task. In total 1,900 individual sites were identified containing some 10,000 sports facilities. In the past seven years in this jurisdiction we have invested €386 million in almost 5,000 facilities. Many facilities existed before that, although there were not as many as we would wish. This audit will take time and although we will put resources into carrying this out it would be foolish to think it can be done overnight.

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