Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Keating for his comments. I was delighted to see sport featuring so strongly in a leaflet delivered recently by the Deputy to his constituents - he and I are neighbours.

Of the €30 million in the programme, €26 million is going to local clubs, including local soccer clubs, GAA clubs, community organisations and so forth, and only €4 million is going to regional projects. There is separate funding for the sports campus and national projects. It is the policy of Government to favour local grants heavily over regional and national grants, although there is also a strong argument for the opposite approach. Certainly, people in local communities very much favour spreading the funds as widely as possible to different sporting organisations, but often that means that facilities are duplicated, with two clubs not very far apart from one another getting the same facilities. The national governing bodies argue that we should split the money the other way and put more into regional and national facilities, which is an area in which we fall down quite badly as a country. However, for now, the split is €26 million to local clubs and €4 million to regional organisations.

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