John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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1122. To ask the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport if the score allocated to a recent application for national lottery funding will be re-examined in view of the fact the club (details supplied) in question is located in a disadvantaged area and this fact was not acknowledged in the process; and if the matter will be expedited. [13817/19]

Brendan Griffin (Kerry, Fine Gael)
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The Sports Capital Programme (SCP) is the primary vehicle for Government support for the development of sports and physical recreation facilities and the purchase of non-personal sports equipment throughout the country.

The 2018 round of the Sports Capital Programme opened for applications on Friday 7 September and the application period closed on Friday 19th October. By that deadline, a record 2,337 applications were submitted seeking a total of €162m in funding. 186 of these, including an application from the organisation referred to by the Deputy, were for projects deemed invalid under the 2017 round of the programme that subsequently submitted corrected documents. These applications were assessed first and allocations to 170 projects including a grant offer to the club in question were announced in January.

This was the first time that previously invalid applicants were allowed to provide corrected documents without the need to submit a completely new application. Because these were corrected 2017 applications they were assessed using the same scoring system and assessment criteria as applied for the 2017 round. This scoring system was published on the Department's website in advance of any assessment of 2017 applications commencing.

With regard to the awarding of additional marks for the level of disadvantage, the relevant mark was determined based on the Pobal Deprivation Index for the location provided by the applicant. The scoring was designed to favour applications from more disadvantaged areas and only applications from areas with a Pobal score of -5 or lower attracted additional marks under this criteria for the 2017 SCP. The location of the organisation referred to by the Deputy has a deprivation index value of -2.

It should be noted that the level of disadvantage was only one of the matters considered when assessing projects with other factors such as the likelihood of increasing participation, whether facilities were being shared with other clubs and the amount of SCP funding received in the past also taken into consideration.