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

I will give as an example the Her Moves campaign, which is part the programme. This is designed to support, motivate and encourage more teenage girls to be active. Her Moves is being used by organisations at all levels, national and local, when rolling out physical activity programmes that target teenage girls using certain criteria. So far this year, 35 organisations have engaged with the Her Moves campaign. We had a brilliant launch for it at the Sports Ireland Campus. The website has had 57,000 hits and we will report on the campaign activity and how it is developed.

There are also other initiatives. The extra funding will allow Sport Ireland not only to develop initiatives, but to provide funding to sporting organisations that want to create initiatives to get funding through this. Recently, the GAA advertised a programme on encouraging women to get involved in leadership. The GAA has a course on leadership and people will take it up. It is funded through women in sport. In acknowledgement of the women's team qualifying for the World Cup, €500,000 extra has been provided to the FAI, separate from all of this, specifically for football initiatives for women in sport. There are also number of other initiatives and it is important to reiterate this.

We have brought in a new rule for sports capital funding that unless there is similar access for men and women, there will be zero funding. This will also apply to the large-scale sports infrastructure fund, LSSIF. Applicants for larger regional projects and LSSIF top-ups will have to produce access policies showing this to the public and to the users of facilities. In addition, there has been a long-standing commitment to have 40% of gender balance on NGB boards. I acknowledge some steps have been taken by NGBs. This will also change sport on the ground. If NGBs do not implement this by the end of the year, they will be subject to a 50% funding cut immediately. If an NGB does not have 40% of women on its board when organisations go to draw down funding from the current round of sports capital funding, it will be entitled to only 50% of the funding it has been awarded until the situation is rectified.

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