Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

My point is this: football fills us with hope. It fills us with dreams. It allows us to think big things for ourselves and for our communities. My colleague, Deputy Aodhán Ó Riordáin, articulated so eloquently earlier on the place of football in our society and history, which has often been derided, scorned and sneered at through our State's history. Nothing that he said was wrong. For example, I played at the highest level of underage and youth football. Our Drogheda team was consistently in the top eight teams in the country, yet our Christian Brothers school, on the north side of Drogheda, denied us the chance to bring football success to our school by refusing to establish our own team in our own school. That did not happen until a lay principal took over and that was after we left. In fact, it was after we won a Leinster GAA title. The deal was that if we won a Leinster GAA title, the school would provide us with the capacity to set up a football team but we were denied that.

Thankfully in those 30 years, attitudes have changed radically. Ireland has changed, and our national policy approach to football must change too. Yesterday, the Labour Party met privately with senior FAI officials. It was a day, of course, when a phalanx of photographers gathered outside the gates. I mused that thankfully, and for a change, they were not there to snap FAI officials coming in, in crisis, to face the music before a committee in Leinster House. There is no need to have a recital of the FAI's crisis years here today. We are all too well aware of what happened. The new FAI team, and indeed the support received from Government to stabilise and reform the association, deserves great credit. We have now moved on from a permacrisis to a situation where our game has a world of opportunities opening up before us. We are at an inflection point, when we can finally talk less about the history of Irish football and more about the future of our game in this country.

From a funding and political point of view, we need the Government and the political system more generally to move away from "olé, olé, olé" to "okay, okay, okay" when it comes to backing our ambitions for our game. The FAI, as has been acknowledged across this House today, has got its collective act together, and it is now time that the system responds.

This has been a very good day for football and a good day for politics and for those who are watching in. It can be an historic day as well, and it is an historic day when we have got some high-profile senior football correspondents in the press gallery in Leinster House. That is very welcome indeed.

When we speak of the funding of football, which the Minister of State did earlier on, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the reality is that the sports capital grant system is not a panacea with regard to the kind of investment we need in our game. The kind of sustained investment needed to help fund the FAI plan and beyond frankly goes beyond the allocation that any Government would be prepared to make through a general sports capital grant allocation, and indeed the scope of the programme. I say this not because of any necessarily in-built obstacles for clubs that may be interested in applying, although we know there are obstacles there, like land ownership, lease agreements and so on. Given the historic and sustained underinvestment in our game, the need for a football infrastructure development programme is very obvious for all of us to see.

The FAI plan itself, which we have referred to repeatedly today, is not necessarily all that ambitious. It is important that we remember that it is simply designed to bring us up to what we might consider to be European Union norms and standards.

I am delighted to welcome here representatives of my club, Drogheda United Football Club. I am from a county that is lucky to have two League of Ireland Premier Division clubs. I also welcome representatives of Castletown Belles FC, a girls' team in Dundalk. Those two clubs really represent a microcosm of where we are at in football today. What we need over the next few years, for example, is a commitment to the Castletown Belles girls, and other girls playing football in Louth and across the country. They will be watching the FIFA Women's World Cup this month, and they have got the same ambitions to represent this country at the 2035 FIFA Women's World Cup. Let us give them the dignity of the dressing rooms they do not have. Let us make sure that we learn from the mistakes of the past, and make sure that we learn the lessons of the past, and make sure the stadium development is not exclusively developer-led, although Drogheda United is, thankfully, close to welcoming some significant investment in the club. As the Minister of State knows, as a Drogheda United supporter himself and with his family history in the club, that cannot be allowed to happen, because we have paid the price for that before.

I welcome the fact the Government is not opposing this motion. We need to build a consensus on football and the funding of football across this House, and if we can do that, it would be a good thing for this House and for the game that we all care so passionately about.

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