Martin Mansergh (Fianna Fail)

Senator McCarthy need not apologise about being parochial. If sport is not about the parish, I am not sure what it is about. Tonight, it is obviously about the country. A few Sundays ago, I had the pleasure and honour of presenting the Mansergh cup to my own town club, Clanwilliam rugby club. The cup was presented by my grandfather in the 1920s when Clanwilliam beat Thurles.

We are discussing, certainly for its scale, one of the most successful Government programmes in existence. I welcome the Minister of State and pay great tribute to the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, Deputy O'Donoghue, for his interest and commitment and the scale of what has been achieved. According to the motion, €17 million was spent on sport and recreation in 1997. I consulted the Book of Estimates for 1981 in my library upstairs where I discovered that £1.4 million was spent on sport and recreation in the days when Jim Tunney was Minister of State. He did his best in the context of the resources that were available at the time. The development of that project has been colossal. A total of €12 million has been given under the sports capital scheme in my county of Tipperary since 1997. In my experience, approximately 80% of the applications have succeeded and the 20% that do not succeed usually have a technical problem with their application in that their proposal does not have anything to do with sports or the 30% of local funding is not present. Most clubs are successful the second time around if they get their act in order. I compliment the Minister on the way this programme is run.

No speaker in this debate has suggested there are particular political motivations connected with the funding of clubs. It is sometimes said of certain clubs that they are run by a particular individual who is associated with a particular political party. This makes no difference to the success or failure of their applications for funding. I can think of one or two clubs that include people closely associated with Senator Bannon's party that have been successful in their quest for funding for two years running.

Money has also gone into intermediate facilities, which are large and ambitious projects. An example would be the Duneske Leisure limited project, which has received money from the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism and, I think, the Department of Education and Science because it is a complex of facilities. The Government has also supported the development of facilities at national level. The Opposition parties made heavy weather of a number of issues with regard to Government support for sports. Their message is neither one they would necessarily want to send nor is it to their advantage. At any rate, some of those at the leading edge of this criticism are not particularly interested in, or committed to, sport. This is by far the most sports-driven Government we have ever had, and that is of huge benefit.