Marc MacSharry (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I do not wish to cast aspersions on the good name of the independent chairman of the FAI or anyone else but I am bound by my duties to the taxpayer. These are serious issues. Significant State funds are at stake and clearly the independent chairman of the FAI has significant questions to answer and so too does Sport Ireland.

The essence of the independent chairman's role is ensuring that decisions are made in a proper, open and effective way and in accordance with due process and good governance to the exercise of independence. However, the prior association of the independent chairman of the FAI to the interim executive team makes that impossible. A person cannot pretend to be independent. One is either independent or one is not. Further, the independent chairman has made no secret of his desire for the interim CEO to be put forward for a permanent role. How does that affect his independence when he is interviewing other candidates for the role as a member of the nominations committee?

I respectfully suggest to the independent chairman that he is best advised to do two things: he should recheck his facts and, having done so, he should resign. The Minister of State, Deputy Naughton, has confirmed to me this evening that the State has, through Sport Ireland, lent to the FAI a total of €1,386,480, paid up to date to New Stadium DAC. That has been done without the express authority of the council and without the approval of the board.

Have legal documents been executed in respect of these loans? If so, who signed them, what express sanction was provided by the FAI board and its council to sign such documents and when? These are very serious matters of governance. We were promised a new era in the FAI and, frankly, it is appalling. People are not being told what is going on. As far as I am concerned, the State and Sport Ireland are complicit in an effective coup d'etatwhere people at the top - so-called independents - are dictating what is going on without telling their own board. We have lent money, it seems, to an organisation that did not have the express sanction of its council. That is wrong.

It is inconceivable, in the greatest crisis there has ever been in the history of the world since the 1918 Spanish flu, that the Secretary General of our busiest Department, the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, seems to have spare capacity to go off and pad out his own CV for the exit strategy to the private sector and take up a position on that board. If he was working in the private sector, that would be fine, but the reality is it is a clear conflict of interest. He is not our man on the board; he is on it in a private capacity. A fiduciary-----

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