Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I have said nicer things about this Minister of State than about most other Ministers because of his considerable work on the European brief. The Minister should not spoil his good record.

I agree with Senator Mooney about false dichotomies. Some Members of the Opposition are too quick to make them by asking why all this money should be spent on a stadium when there is this or that other need. I believe, and the figures for January show, that the country is not as impoverished as the Minister for Finance would like us to believe. This country could absorb a significant increase in Government revenue through a variety of taxes. The capital gains tax rate of 20% is far too low. This tax could be used both as a revenue earner and an instrument of public policy to encourage certain forms of development and discourage others.

This country is nowhere near a position where it needs to make choices between apparently conflicting things. If one had to choose between a hospital and a stadium, nobody with a spark of humanity would do other than choose a hospital. However, these are false choices for which I blame the present Government. The fundamental fault of the past seven years of this Government has been the determination to pursue the private good at the expense of the public good. The fundamental difference between social democracy throughout Europe and the parties of the right is the belief in the public good and the need to use the resources of the state to advance the public good, be that in transport, education or leisure infrastructure.

Leisure is as important a part of life as work. This country has a hopelessly under-developed leisure infrastructure. Swimming pools are fast becoming the preserve of the comparatively affluent. They are becoming a privately provided amenity for which people are not charged by the hour but by the year. Anybody who cannot assemble the best part of €1,000 in a single payment has no access to these rapidly expanding and high quality facilities. Even as the number of private swimming pools in my home city is expanding, the public swimming pools are in danger of collapse. That is the choice we make between public and private good, whereby we leave people to deliver privately amenities such as good quality recreation.

The decision to invest in Lansdowne Road is a step in the direction of the public good. However, the public is entitled to look carefully at the provision of a stadium that will be used overwhelmingly by two professional sports in which a considerable part of the revenue raised will be used simply to pay players. That is the fundamental distinction between those two sports and the GAA. I am an enthusiastic supporter of the GAA. It is possible to be such a supporter and to have many reservations about some of the aberrant utterances of individuals in the GAA when they stray outside their sporting brief to pronounce on the nation, the future of the nation and so forth. Once they move into that territory, they are involving themselves in politics and are fair game. However, as an organisation delivering services to the people of this country, the GAA is unsurpassed.

This organisation teaches young people how to organise events. I remember participating, as a 16 year old, in the annual general meeting of the Athy gaelic football club and learning the rules of debate, organising one's contribution, getting motions passed and so forth. It has contributed enormously to teaching people the rudiments of administration. People learn it in the GAA from the people who were there previously. This experience moves on into the provision of facilities. There are extraordinary numbers involved.

There is also the expansion into other sports. I wish the GAA would use the term "women's gaelic football" rather than "ladies' gaelic football". Most of the women I know hate being called "ladies" except under certain circumstances. I do not know why the GAA does not call the game "women's gaelic football". There has been huge expansion into that area. There has also been an extraordinary revival of camogie, which 20 years ago liberal Ireland would have regarded as a leftover from the past. Now, it has become important. The GAA is an extraordinary organisation which has reinvented itself extremely well. It deserves support from the State and that support should not depend on whether it is prepared to allow Croke Park to be used for other sports.

Croke Park was an extraordinarily brave and farsighted undertaking. If the GAA had not undertaken the Croke Park project, neither of the other two organisations would have had the vision or imagination to think about something similar. Their view of what was achievable would have been far more modest without the example set by the biggest sporting organisation in the country. If the GAA had to pay its players any wages, no money would be available for such stadia.

One of the popular mythologies is that the GAA is loaded with money. The truth, however, is that there is no more transparent organisation in the country in terms of where money goes. It has always been so. If the GAA has a boom year with plenty of replays and so forth, every cent trickles back into every club in the country over the following 12 months. There is a false dichotomy, therefore, between Croke Park and Lansdowne Road.

I believe the GAA could take a hard headed commercial decision to let Croke Park be used by other sports when it suits the GAA. However, it is a matter for the GAA and is not related to any other issue. The organisation is entitled to take a view about competing sports. It is running a small sport in a tough competitive market and is in competition with sports, particularly soccer, that have saturation television coverage. To date, it has done a remarkable job to protect and preserve its identity.

The association's willingness to collaborate with TG4, which is not just about money but about a certain affection in the GAA for matters to do with the language and which allowed TG4, in turn, to let people have television access to matches that would otherwise not be broadcast, was an imaginative decision that was good for the GAA and TG4.

The next stage after Lansdowne Road must be a well focused public commitment to the development of good quality sporting facilities throughout the country. Clubs in small towns and parishes throughout rural and urban Ireland should not have to spend endless hours working to raise €10,000 or €15,000 for better dressing rooms. We have moved beyond that point. We should recognise the community contribution of organisations such as the GAA and, through the national lottery or taxation, match local fundraising 50:50 or even 75:25. Sporting facilities are for everybody. The facilities a GAA club or a good rugby or soccer club provides in any town are not just about sport; they are places with which the community can identify and where it can meet and grow. Therefore, they are an investment in all of us.