I welcome the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, Deputy Martin Cullen, to the House. I am glad he is here and thank him for coming in on such a bad night.
Last week he announced that he would not provide sports capital grants in 2009. This will affect many sporting and local community groups. It is bad news not just for sports funding but for the building of sustainable communities. Like many Senators, I am involved in my local GAA club and community organisation and know that the news has serious implications. Last night in many meeting rooms of GAA clubs, soccer clubs, community and voluntary organisations across the country there was devastation at this news. It may well have been flagged that Government was going to announce a freeze on the funding of the sports capital programme but animated discussions have taken place in many sporting groups. I bet the Minister’s office and the Department in Killarney have been inundated with calls from people asking where they should go now to help fund clubs and improve facilities.
I am the first to accept that since its inception the sports capital programme has done great work across the country. In some cases it was used wrongly and the Minister in question gave his own constituency preferential treatment and some clubs were left behind.
I have been chairman of my own club for six years and secretary before that and know well the workings of the sports capital programme. We were lucky to have Jim Collins in my club. He knew the system backwards and could liaise with the Department in latter years because it was a tedious process and one needed people like him to do that. It was a tedious process, and people like Jim Collins were needed to do that.
We are now at a situation where the development of facilities has stopped. In a November debate in the Dáil, the Minister stated that money from the National Lottery did not come to him, but rather to him via the Exchequer. However, many clubs that obtained funding for their development projects had to put a sign up stating their projects were partly funded by the sports capital programme and the National Lottery. Writing in the Evening Echo, Dave Hannigan wrote that, “It would be easy to summarise that this was an inevitable consequence of the ridiculously harsh economic climate.” He may be right, but why are we doing this now? Why are we penalising voluntary sporting groups? This is about the provision of facilities and the funding of sport, and the use of National Lottery money. Do we have to give a percentage of the earnings from the lottery to the sports capital programme and to the funding of sport? When the National Lottery was created, I believe the point of it was to provide funding for sport.
Date: Wednesday 11 February, 2009.
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