Aidan Davitt (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I raise a parochial or county matter about an organisation that has come in for a lot of heat over the past few weeks. I am curious because the GAA gets quite a lot of funding from the Government. It came up in general conversation with some members recently in the Mullingar area how Cusack Park is constantly overlooked as a venue, particularly for certain Leinster games. We had teams from Longford and Dublin pass by Mullingar to go to Tullamore to play a minor final last night. Congratulations to the Longford team on their great, exciting win. However, it seems crazy that they would pass a venue that would have easily been able to cater for the crowd that attended the match. The round robins are coming up as the Cathaoirleach is well aware as Cork are going so well in both codes. With the next tranche of games coming - the qualifiers - perhaps Mullingar could be used as one of the neutral venues and for some of the other under-age games, going forward. I am curious what criteria the GAA uses at present. I know there has been a lot of discussion about the GAA recently and the fact that it receives a lot of funding from the Government. I know there has been a call to bring the representatives from the organisation into this House to debate the issues. We could do with some clarification as to when that might happen.