Shane Cassells (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Last Sunday was an amazing day for Irish football with a record attendance of 44,000 people at the FAI cup final in the Aviva.Again, however, what was a momentous day for Irish football was overshadowed by events going on off the field. As the chief soccer reporter of the Irish Independent, Daniel McDonnell, put it yesterday, there are good people in the FAI who are being failed by their inability to present a coherent message of progress without some other wing of the organisation, be it the executive or the Luddite wing of the general assembly, blundering. The Minister of State has rightly said that there will be no discussion of an extension of State support to the FAI to 2026 until the matter that has erupted over payments to the CEO, Jonathan Hill, totalling €20,000 are resolved. The FAI, for its part, has stated that the CEO is not to blame for these overpayments and that it is, rather, a technical financial interpretation.

There is another institution of this country that was mired in controversy this summer because of one man's interpretation of technical financial arrangements. That controversy nearly sank RTÉ and it needed a €40 million bailout today. The last time there was a technical financial arrangement between the FAI with the CEO, he was loaning his employer a €100,000 bridging loan, and the resulting controversy nearly sank the organisation. Again, the State needed to bail out the FAI. This cannot be another exercise of sweeping it under the carpet.

I would like to know what the technical explanation is that the FAI is referring to, and whether it has offered that technical explanation to the Minister of State. Is that audit report going to be presented to the Minister of State? It is a report that Packie Bonner, a board member, is also looking for. I would also like to know why eminent board members, such as Packie Bonner, were not aware of the suspension of State funding to the organisation. Is it, as has been described in the papers over the weekend, a case of a board operating within a board? That is not what was envisaged when the memorandum of understanding, MOU, bailed out the FAI. Third, why are ordinary members and employees of the FAI being told by their employer that when it comes to holiday leave, they have to use it or lose it and they cannot carry it over to next year, when their CEO is receiving cash payments in lieu of holidays? Last night, SIPTU issued a very angry and strongly-worded statement about that carry-on. Will Sport Ireland, in its board meeting today, be probing - and I mean really probing - and seeking assurances that the FAI now has its house in order?

We cannot have a return to the days detailed in the book Champagne Football. The reason that there was controversy in the FAI back in 2019 was because the auditors, Deloitte, stated that the FAI did not keep proper accounting records. Now, we are back getting statements about technical financial arrangements. I have not even had a change to touch on the gender quota issues for the board, its failure in that respect and where that sits in terms of the Minister of State's Department making sure that State funding will be provided because of the board's failure to comply.

I have two main questions. What scrutiny is going to be applied to the FAI, given these failures? What timeline does the Minister of State envisage for the restoration of funding by the State to the FAI, given its importance to grassroots football in particular, to ensure that it gets its house in order?