Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

No, I am taking it all myself. I will leave time for questions.

I will make my contribution in two tranches. The Minister and Minister of State have already touched on some of the issues I wanted to talk about. I welcome the announcement of the sports recovery action plan. I ask the Minister of State to delve into it in a little bit more detail and outline a timeline for when he expects it to be set up.

I emphasise the importance of local clubs. The Minister of State spoke about channelling funding through national governing bodies, which is fair enough. However, I am most concerned about the local level, specifically lost revenue, costs that are currently difficult to cover, the need to train Covid-19 officers and the infrastructure local clubs will need to facilitate people in the new world we now live in.

I emphasise two issues, namely, small grants and speed. Small grants will open up a lot of clubs during the summer and will make their financial life a lot easier. Can the Minister of State tell me more about them? He praised the volunteers in various clubs highly and he is right to do so, but they would all like him to back those words with a few quid to help them out over the summer.

I also want to talk about the national sports policy 2018-2027, launched in December 2018. I flicked through it earlier. It is a very comprehensive document that outlines 57 actions. There was a plan to prioritise some of these. I understand the sports leadership group has not met since October 2019. Can the Minister of State say how that prioritisation is proceeding and when the priority actions can be published? That would be a good start. I will come back on another issue then.

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