The Irish Sports Council is in a relatively healthy state but it's taken 15 years of hard work to get there. More cuts could prove fatal, reports MALACHY CLERKIN
ANYONE WHO follows the very funny Twitter account @Humblebrag would have smiled at Leo Varadkar’s casual trotting out of his road-running bona fides this week. For the uninitiated, humblebragging is the subtle art of telling the world you’re pretty damn good at something while at the same time dismissing it and letting on you’re embarrassed it even came up. So you can see how the Minister for Sport might have delivered a classic of the genre when informing the health supplement of this newspaper on Tuesday: “Last week, I did the 10k Run for Mark in the Dark. My time was 38 minutes, which is not athletic but respectable.”
By Thursday morning, of course, he was having to take to the airwaves to admit he’d confused himself with all the running he’d been doing. The Run for Mark in the Dark was over a distance of just under 8k and actually, he’d got it mixed up with a 10k he’d done recently in the Phoenix Park. “I assure you I wasn’t going around telling people I’d done 10k in 38 minutes,” he told John Murray. “My best 10k is about 40-45 minutes.”
This is just outstanding humblebragging. Anyone who’s run a marathon knows that a best of inside three-quarters of an hour for 10k would translate to somewhere in the region of three hours 40 minutes if Leo gave the big October race a go. Not a time to threaten the B Standard for London but still pretty impressive. A government minister – the sports minister, no less – who’s able to find time in his day to feel the burn and to lose over two stone since he entered the Dáil, well he’s an example to us all.
And in a week where all indications are that another hefty slice is going to be taken out of the sports budget – leaving it reduced by close on 40 per cent in the past five years – it’s obviously no harm for him to extol the virtues of a form of exercise that doesn’t hit the pocket overly hard.
Indeed, since they’re about to tax the actual roof over your head, going out for a jog will soon be one of the last things you can do in Ireland for free. No wonder we’re in the midst of a running boom.
When it comes to delving into government funding for sport, all the usual terms and conditions apply. Nobody’s taking to the barricades for a rugby club that didn’t get a grant when VAT is about to go up for everybody. And when child benefit is being zapped, the argument for high-performance grants can descend into whataboutery very quickly. Most public commentary has sport down as the epitome of low-hanging fruit, which is precisely how two successive governments can justify hacking so much out of it in such a short space of time.
In broad terms, government investment in sport breaks down into two distinct areas, both of which are feeling their tie-knot right up against their Adam’s apple just now. The Irish Sports Council takes care of current expenditure and the rest goes on capital projects. Between the two, the overall number has gone down from €144.83 million in 2008 to €86.4 million this year, with further cuts to come.
The bald truth of it is that the sports council will be worst hit. It looks certain now that despite already having lost 15 per cent of its budget since 2008, another 15 per cent is to go in 5 per cent tranches over the next three years. From a high of €57 million in 2008, the ISC allocation is set to fall below €40 million for the first time in a decade in 2014.
This matters because once you take that much away from a small, lean organisation like the sports council, you’re going far beyond just laying off staff and cutting back on expenses. You’re decimating programmes entirely. At the top end, it means the core funding that goes to the three biggest sports in the country – in the region of €3 million each a year to soccer, GAA and rugby – gets sliced and development projects throughout the country get shelved or shut down. High performance funding has largely held up over the past three years but nobody is confident that this will continue to be the case once the last medal is handed out in London next August.
The pity of it all is that this is investment that has been providing a return by any metric you wish to use. Show Us Yer Medals is always an unedifying game to play but if we have to, we can. At this point in the Beijing Olympic cycle, Irish sports people were completing a year in which they had won 19 medals worldwide at all levels across all sports. That number this year is 56, a result of years of smart investment at the elite end and targeted development of young talent at the nascent stage.
Of those 56 medals, 36 were won at junior or youth level. Right there under our noses is the future, young sportspeople in chrysalis over whom the ISC will have responsibility for sending out into the world fully formed over the next decade. The more we cut now, the less we will see later on. Simple maths.
“This is not something that we can just turn the tap off on now and come back to in five years’ time when we hope the situation in the country will be better,” says Sarah O’Connor, chief executive of the Federation of Irish Sports. “We can’t just turn the tap back on in five years and expect the same level of talent to flow out.
“The Irish Sports Council is in a relatively healthy state but it’s taken 15 years of hard work to get it there. That’s not saying we’re exactly where everyone wants to be with it but it is better than where we were when it started. But in order to maintain that success, in order to just stand still even, it can’t take this level of projected cuts.”
To get caught up in the elite side of things, however, ignores the far greater effect that government funding can have on sport. For every euro that goes to high-performance, three is spent on raising participation levels throughout the land. The money the ISC sends the way of the National Governing Bodies funds a network of development officers and coaches countrywide to supplement the huge amount of volunteerism that keeps all sports alive. This is how even in the face of rising childhood obesity, 83 per cent of all primary school kids are involved in some kind of sport outside school hours.
All of which makes the one positive development in terms of sports funding this year seem curious and not particularly well thought-out. For the first time in three years, the Sports Capital Programme is to have an injection of €30 million. In the good old days, this was the programme that Sports Ministers used to, among other things, get what John O’Donoghue called a “magnificent sports complex” built in their own constituency. When the crash came, any bucket going down that well hit nothing but dirt at the bottom.
This was done because it could be done. Whatever about the occasional feather-bedding of various ministers’ home patches down the years, the Sports Capital Programme had been a widespread success. Facilities all across the country are in a far better state now than they were when sport first came to the cabinet table in 1997. So when it came to lifting a chunk out of the sports budget and doing the least harm along the way, it made reasonable sense to do it this way.
The reinjection of €30 million in such straitened times is obviously welcome and yet it’s odd at the same time. Why the munificence in that area while at the same time cutting the sports council off at the knees? Why not cut it back to €27 million and leave the sports council untouched?
You don’t need to be the world’s blackest-hearted cynic to arrive at the conclusion that capital projects like sports halls and hockey pitches will one day need a ribbon cut and a photo posed for. This would be disappointing and in fairness to Minister Varadkar, yukking it up for the cameras in front of a new GAA clubhouse isn’t really his kind of scene.
(His Minister of State Michael Ring, however, is another story.)
The kindest spin put on Leo’s lack of interest in sport so far is that he can be a completely objective set of eyes when it comes to allocating sports funding. He has no baggage and nobody to take care of. If he can be convinced by facts like every €100 invested in sport brings in €149 and if he can engage with sporting bodies so that the dwindling funds can at least be pointed in the right direction, then there is a chance that sport can come to be seen as something more than a playhouse and a photo op.
Now that would be something to brag about.
Case Study: Cork Harlequins
Sports: Hockey and cricket Situated just south of Cork city, around half a mile from the airport, Cork Harlequins were once a club that took in €70,000 a year just from renting out their two pitches. These days, that revenue stream has slowed to a trickle. Club treasurer Murray Russell reckons the current figure is closer to €18,000.
What happened? The future happened and it overtook them. The first pitch was built 20 years ago, the second eight years later. Back then, GAA clubs used them in the winter but now those clubs have their own. Back then, they had night leagues but now there are better pitches with softer surfaces all over the city. Harlequins have been passed out as they've never had the money to improve on what they'd built.
"We went looking to the county council a few years back looking to upgrade the floodlights," says Russell. "The idea was it would cost about €30,000 to put them in but the maintenance of them could save us around €5,000 a year. More modern lightbulbs and newer technology could save us a fortune in energy costs. The council inspected the premises and the reply came back that the request had been rejected. Those grants have dried up."
Harlequins keep things going mainly through fundraising, which makes up over half of all their revenue now. Pitch rental and bar takings make up the rest. They have about 330 members, whose subscriptions only cover insurance and affiliation fees.
Every club member has to give a few nights' help in the bar to keep costs down. If and when they get out from under their €200,000 debt, they will try to get funding for a new pitch in an effort to bring back rental trade.
"We had a submission for lottery funding turned down a few years ago because we were in debt," says Russell.
"You have to be debt free and you have to already have raised a third of what you need from the fund."
Case Study: Terenure Sports Club
Sports: Tennis, rugby, cricket, bowls, soccer, table tennis. Funding woes take all sort of shapes and form but it's not often they get so bad you change the name of your club after over 100 years. That's where CYM Sports Club found themselves when dried-up funding and plunging membership led them to having to dream it all up anew. The name Catholic Young Men Sports Club didn't sound as inclusive as they'd like, nor did it inform people where their club was. So Terenure Sports Club was born.
Membership has held steady over the past few years and the club now takes subscriptions from about 470 regular users.
Everything is a struggle though. The place has a manager and a bar manager but can't afford a caretaker. The all-weather courts are sand-based and need replacing, there's roofing and fencing work that is long overdue. But as general manager Caroline Duggan explains, any money they scrape together goes not into the club but into the bank.
"People spent a lot in sports clubs when the times were good and that meant it was seen as a good investment. There was a lottery grant of about €200,000 that we got around eight or nine years ago and what the club did was take out a substantial loan against it to improve facilities, which the bank was happy to give.
"Where we are now is a situation where there is no funding apart from what we're able to generate ourselves and paying back that loan takes up every spare cent we have. But those facilities that were built eight or nine years ago are now fraying at the edges and there's no money to improve them."
Terenure SC is different to, say, a GAA club or a rugby club in that government funding won't find its way to them through a National Governing Body. Because it's across a range of sports, there isn't an umbrella organisation it can go to for help. The decimation of the sports capital programme since 2008 has killed off any chance of a club like Terenure moving forward. The scruffier the place gets, the more members they will lose. The more members they lose, the less money there'll be to improve facilities.
"It's a daily struggle," says Duggan. "Membership subs go to cover your running costs and whatever you make out of the bar will cover your capital expenditure at the end of the year. But we're having to use the bar receipts to cover our losses and we're not even breaking even every year. So there's nothing left to improve the facilities."
