Micheál Carrigy (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Like Senator Ahearn, I will never apologise for representing where I am from which is Longford. I also want to raise the whole issue of the CLÁR funding scheme which is very beneficial to community groups in my home county. I am aware that 15 applications have been submitted by Longford County Council to the Department and these schemes will be looked at over the summer months. I hope and ask that perhaps extra funding can be obtained to ensure that a high number of those applications will be successful. The reality is that this is where the money trickles down into the local communities, it is where our local school gets set up with projects and where our local community centre or our sensory garden is developed. A great amount of work has been put in by all of the organisations that have applied and it is very important that extra money would be put in place to ensure that, if not all of them, a significant number of these organisations are successful in their applications.

I understand that discussions in the Department will take place over the summer months on the rural regeneration scheme. A significant application has been submitted for Granard in County Longford through the Lus na Gréine family resource centre to develop childcare and after-school facilities in a growing town where there is a severe lack of such facilities. It is needed in the area, the figures stack up and the numbers are there. I hope the Department looks very favourably at this application and that it is successful.

I have referred to the issue of boxing on a number of occasions in this Chamber. An extraordinary general meeting, EGM, was held in Roscommon last weekend where nearly the entire executive of the Irish Athletic Boxing Association, IABA, was voted out of office. We had a vote in respect of recommendations that were put to the clubs, which were voted against unanimously. We should be supporting the clubs, the members, the volunteers, and the sports people but we are not. The CEO and chairperson of the IABA need to step away and step down if we are going to progress boxing in Ireland. The Minister of State and Sport Ireland should take back the threat of withdrawing the association's funding, should ask those people to consider their positions, and put the vote to the members. They will support it and will move forward. We need to have changes at the top.