Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

As I said, Sport Ireland has allocated over €500,000 to the IABA. That is really the only avenue through which we fund boxing. It has increased and it is going to increase. We support it financially. Just to be clear, we did not offer financial assistance to the Katie Taylor fight this week. We met the promoters, and I have to say, the Deputy's own party was advocating very strongly for me to do that. We did meet them and talked to them, but there was no offer of Government funding arising out of that particular exchange. There is a very high bar for those major events as well. I do not know, but there may be funding available from the IABA, the Department of Foreign Affairs or local authorities. I urge the Deputy to look into it. We are happy to help. I can only answer questions for my own Department and it does not have direct funding available for this, but I am certainly willing to be of help to see what other sources might be there, and with the IABA. We recognise that these cultural exchanges are really important. There are lots of avenues available for funding, including EU funding. There is EU funding for town twinning, so there may well be EU funding available for this project. I do not know, but it is something that we can help to investigate.

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