Brendan Griffin (Kerry, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will try to address as many of the issues as I can. Under the sports capital programme, we want to be as flexible as possible to people who have already been granted funding. We know that the drawdown time might be slower than it would have been pre-Covid-19. There will be flexibility there.

The Deputy asked about repurposing grants within clubs. We ask any club whose circumstances have changed whereby a new priority has arisen, for example for other capital investment, to contact the Department directly. The Department will try to be flexible and to facilitate such requests within reason.

No decision has been made about the rolling out of the new round of grants. At the moment, our focus is on the current funding and ensuring that clubs remain in existence. I am not sensing a massive appetite from clubs to expand right now. I am hearing that clubs would be happy to survive in a lot of cases. That seems to be the general thrust of where clubs are at but we are looking at the review at the moment and will try to progress things as quickly as possible.

We have made contact at official level with the Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation about the restart grant. I certainly would have liked to see clubs involved in that and it is unfortunate that they were excluded. As there are 6,000 clubs on the online sports capital register, OSCAR, for sports capital loans, the demands from that scheme would have been significant. I would like the clubs to be involved and to get some sort of a grant back from what they have already paid in. We have made those approaches at official level.

The large scale sport infrastructure fund now covers swimming pools. The old local authority swimming pool programme is now covered by the large scale fund. In January, seven of the successful projects announced had a swimming pool element, so such projects did quite well, proportionately speaking. That is the appropriate avenue. No date has been decided yet for the opening of the next round of applications for the large scale fund but that will be a suitable avenue for those applications in the future.

The Deputy asked about fundraising mechanisms and their legality. I cannot answer him straight away. I will ask the officials in the Department to look at and explore that to see if they can remove any red tape or snags that are there to try and give clubs that option. I was talking to my local GAA chairman last night about the club lottery and now that people are going to shops again, there might be a chance to get that going. We know it can be difficult to get things going online. Some people tend to buy one annual ticket whereas if they were buying them on a weekly basis, they might buy two or three. There are difficulties there.

The Minister and I take the future of the League of Ireland seriously.

We worked so hard at the end of last year and the start of this year to get that package of supports in place for the FAI to ensure that there would be a future for the organisation and of course the League of Ireland as well. The supports that were provided to the FAI at the time ensured that the league would be able to continue. Right now in our engagements with the NGBs, any support that will be going to the FAI for this period will include the requirement to support the League of Ireland as well. I have not received a brief on how the meeting went today but I am expecting one later. We are fully supportive of the league and want to see it flourish into the future. A key cornerstone of rebuilding soccer in Ireland is that there would be greater emphasis on the league.

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