Tim Lombard (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I acknowledge the passing of former Deputy, Bernard Allen, who I believe is being laid to rest today. He was a great parliamentarian who served his constituency of Cork North-Central with great pride and distinction over a very long period. He was a former Minister for sport and was very well-renowned in his community. I acknowledge his passing and want to put that on the record of the House. I know that he was a good friend of the Cathaoirleach and it is sad to see that Bernard passed away so quickly.

I want to bring to the attention of the House my concern regarding sports capital funding or the mechanism through which this funding is delivered. I am not raising the traditional sports capital funding projects but the large scale sport infrastructure fund, LSSIF.. It is a significant scheme which gives funds of between €600,000 to €30 million to infrastructure projects for sporting organisations. Usually, it is done on a national basis. The need for a sponsor is required in some of the applications, whether that is a national hockey organisation or a local authority.

We have been involved in one of these projects in Kinsale to ensure that the hockey club in Kinsale can apply for such funding but we got great resistance from the local authority to be a sponsor of the project. In the end, Hockey Ireland stepped in to be the sponsor. There are issues here about ensuring that local authorities step up to the mark when it comes to supporting these applications to ensure we can have the capacity to draw down these very significant funds for sporting organisations. The system has now been changed by the Minister of State. Instead of a two-tier system it is now a one-tier system, with one project going forward and going all of the way through, where one does not have to look for a second phase of the money, which is very welcome.

I believe, however, that a significant pot of money was left available from the previous scheme because of the local authorities' inability to work with the Department of sport in delivering these projects on the ground. We need to ensure that the Department encourages local authorities to be more proactive. They had a workshop on this, which was attended by the majority of local authorities. Some have been very proactive and some have been totally unresponsive and do not want to deal with any applications at all from the communities.

It is an issue, in that we need to ensure that our local authorities work in conjunction with our sporting organisations to maximise the level of funding for sports in Ireland for communities which have done so much in pushing these amenities forward.

The Minister of State, Deputy Byrne, has done a great deal here but the local authorities need to do more. That is the big issue.