It takes a doctoral thesis to understand the minutia of how the sports grant allocation system works, who gets what and how criteria are weighted.
It seems, like the Irish tax system, it can be maximised if a federation or club has wealth, an organised administration with individuals who have skill sets or capital to invest into their projects. Those strengths will get you Government money. But not every sport has them.
This week millions were flying around, €230 million in all, with every niche sport and each governing body hoping the gods of the application system were winking down at them.
On Wednesday every blazer and alickadoo in the country was poised over their Smart Watch waiting for the wrist alert that told them what grant they did or didn’t get and in what category it was placed.
Even they probably don’t fully understand why Clonmany Shamrocks Sports & Athletic Limited are deservingly given a “New Mower, Defibrillator & Storage Container” worth €70,000 or the enlightened Carrigtwohill GAA Club in Cork are getting €17,285 for PV Solar Panels, while another club down the road gets nothing.
What people do notice is, when the dust settles, it seems to be to the tune of a few million euros here and few million there, disproportionate across sports. Socio-economic disadvantage, female participation, technical merits of the project and level of self-funding, they all come into play. Or do they?
Apparently, the possible bingo windfall also depends on how expertly clubs fill in forms to make the successful application and whether they own or rent their premises. In short, owning is good, renting is bad.
Either way, it has become a competitive event with some of the governing bodies and clubs at the standard of Olympic medal winners at doing it.
Unwieldy and skewed towards sports with a high level of capital holding said one sports official, in an unscientific poll. A nightmare, said another. A third said their organisation had to run a series of workshops on explaining to members how to fill in the forms and empower them about how to correctly apply.
You don’t need to be a solicitor said another, but it probably helps. A code breaker at Bletchley Park on the Enigma project might help too.
Whatever way it works, people look at the figures and the smorgasbord of subventions, grants and allocations across the sports and the perception is that there must be an inbuilt bias about the process. That’s the look, one of a process that delivers lopsided, unbalanced outcomes.
Sure, there is buttock-clenching awe over the fantastic sums some sports get and a general feeling of delight that at least the money is finding a good home. But there is also a familiar sense of dismay about the left behinds.
So, chapeau to the form fillers of the GAA and soccer, whose combined allocation of €138 million, 60 per cent of the €230 million, eclipses all the other sports federations combined. You square it off as okay because your sister is in a soccer club and all your cousins play hurling and sure you dabble a bit yourself across several sports, although your main one is not soccer or GAA.
Add in rugby’s €10 million and €11 million going to golf and four sports take a €159 million slice of the cake.
Journalist Sean McGoldrick highlighted one of the stark anomalies on Twitter/X this week pointing to boxing, which is the most successful Olympic sport going back to the foundation of the State. The sport has produced 19 medals since then and given us the likes of double Olympic champion Kellie Harrington. Yet.
Yet the sport gets €830,914 while the GAA gets €96 million. Again, congrats to the GAA, they have got the grants thing lit. Every time it comes around, they are bang on the bullseye.
Then people begin to do their rough mental arithmetic and work out that boxing has around 20,000 members while the GAA has more than 500,000 members. It is a bigger organisation and that’s maybe a reason for the disparity.
Except GAA is not 96 times larger than boxing. It is about 25 times the size. That at least rules out two criteria. It is not numbers that’s involved nor success at the Olympic Games.
A key criterion when applying for bigger regional projects is the level of self-funding available. It’s another inbuilt piece of bias that rewards sports with money to invest, and leaves you wondering how much other criteria, such as socio-economic disadvantage, are worth.
The question is whether the system is proportionate or evenly balanced. Boxing as a sport often tends to flower in disadvantaged areas, and it also reaches out to participants from diverse cultures and backgrounds, such as immigrants and the Traveller community. But boxing lacks investment capital and facilities.
On the flip side, tennis, for example, has facilities that can be upgraded and tends to own those facilities. Tennis clubs are also often found in non-disadvantaged areas.
With no player at this year’s Olympic Games or in any of the Grand Slam events, tennis received €6,579,430 in this year’s grants. Hats off to them, they have clearly cracked the code.
But allowing sports like GAA, soccer, rugby, golf and tennis to dominate the funding chart just compounds the chasm between the sports.
The system, while largely transparent, is far from satisfactory.
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