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

First of all, I join Deputy Boyd Barrett in congratulating Jack Marley, our first heavyweight boxer to qualify. I saw him on the news last night and was really impressed to see that so many of our athletes are qualifying at the moment. The rugby sevens men and women have qualified, and boxers and others have qualified too. We provide a significant amount of State funding for sport. We provide funding through national governing bodies. In the case of boxing, that is the Irish Athletic Boxing Association. That funding is for participation to encourage everyone to get involved in sport. There is also dedicated funding for high performance, particularly to help those elite athletes who can win medals for Ireland. Funding is provided through the sports capital programme as well. Billions have been invested in sporting facilities all over the country in the past ten years, including boxing facilities. There is also the National Sports Campus, which includes the Sport Ireland Institute and has some very good facilities for boxers which they use very effectively. I am very proud to have been involved in making that happen during my term as Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport in the 2011-14 period. There are also individual bursaries that are paid to athletes. It is not a huge amount of money, but it gives them some financial support, recognising that there are real costs associated with being a high-performance sportsperson, and also that there is loss of income because you cannot do the work you would like to do, or you have to put your career or your studies on the back foot for a period. Perhaps what we give them is not enough. The stipends are quite modest. I would certainly like to see them increase over the years and into the next Olympic cycle.

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