Mr Maurice Manning, Fine Gael leader in the House, called for an urgent debate on the proposal to give "an enormous amount of public money" to the Football Association of Ireland. He said the FAI was about to receive fairly massive injections of State funding.
"Yet we read very disturbing reports of the extraordinarily incompetent and shoddy way in which that organisation runs its own financial affairs. We read of massive six-figure pay-offs to people who have been clearly guilty of a breach of their duties, if not worse.
"We see a veil of secrecy surrounding the activities of that organisation, where cover-ups seem to be the name of the game over a long period of time. Yet, this is the same organisation which is to be entrusted with huge amounts of public funding, and I think it would be important and useful if we could have a debate on the whole question of the criteria which applied to the funding of sporting organisations and the accountability entailed in all of that," he said.
Mr Paschal Mooney (FF), who commentates on sport for RTE, said he was taken aback at Mr Manning's astonishing attack on the FAI.
Every major sporting organisation in the country had at one time or another been pilloried for its lack of administrative expertise of one sort or another. Mr Manning appeared to be indulging in yet another example of Irish begrudgery.
There should be a debate, but it should not be about an attack, veiled or otherwise, on a sporting organisation that was trying to do the best it could for the young people of this country, with the assistance of the Government.
Mr Jim Glennon (FF) said it was essential that in any debate a distinction was drawn between the commercial element of sport, which he would describe as show business, and real sport, with which they had all grown up and which basically entailed honest athletic endeavour on the part of ordinary people. Sport had become hugely commercialised in recent years.
"We tend to think of sport as what we see on television. That is not the case. There are still hundreds of thousands of people involved in honest amateur athletic endeavour and that is the sport we should be seeking to cultivate."