TIPPING POINT:This Government's attitude to sport can be gleaned from the shortage of sporting representatives at last weekend's Global Irish Economic Forum

HERE’S A question: what is Ireland known for around the world? Actually, don’t worry about it, I’ll tell you: Black beer, U2, sectarian violence, horses and Roy Keane. Oh, and being on the hind tit of the western world’s financial system. And maybe being fond of claiming that a few select scribblers are better at using the English language than the English themselves. That’s about it, really. As reputations go, it could actually be worse, apart from the rancid sectarian history, of course. And the fact we haven’t a pot to piss in isn’t great either. But still. At least we’re not contemplating electing terrorist lunatics into state positions.

Sport plays quite a prominent role in that list. Keane hasn’t played in a while but his name still reverberates throughout great chunks of the globe. There’s a trio of Major- winning golfers that are immediately recognisable to polo-shirt wearing clubhouse types everywhere on the planet. We’ve a reasonable football team again and although the rugby team blew it at the weekend, there’s no getting away from the excitement they generated for a few weeks there.

But forever and always Ireland has been, and will always be, known for horses, both the quality of the animals themselves and people who look after them. Uniquely in a major global sport/industry, Ireland is regarded as a world leader. When it comes to impressing foreigners, there is nothing this country does better than the gee-gees. And at the top end of the horse game, that excellence is worth a lot of millions and about 15,000 jobs here.

So it was interesting then to see that among the 270 of the great and the good that trooped into Dublin Castle on Friday and Saturday for the Global Irish Economic Forum, there wasn’t one representative of an industry whose reach extends around the world.

In fact a quick scan down the list of worthies revealed a conspicuous shortage of representatives from any kind of sport. In even more fact, there was just one, GAA president Christy Cooney. To which the only logical response has to be – WHAT?

This forum’s stated aim is to encourage economic revival, job creation and to restore Ireland’s reputation abroad. So it’s hardly surprising a lot of suits showed up, plenty of them, as it happens, from the banking and investment sectors wildly discredited by what has happened in the last four years.

Other suits rallied to the patriotic call too, many of them cloaking in jargon an elemental business reality of “buy cheap-sell dear” which applies anywhere and everywhere, no matter how Irish you might or might not be.

But what starkly revealed the lack of sporting input was how many representatives of the arts were present.

Cooney could have turned for entertainment and cultural enlightenment in the Castle to anyone from Gabriel Byrne to Neil Jordan to Colm Tóibín and Moya Doherty. The place was heaving with representatives from the film world, theatre and literature, presumably all pushing the “reputation” line about how the arts are a reflection of Ireland internationally. Oh, and Dara O’Briain was there too.

Good luck to the arty types. They didn’t so much get a foot in the door as park an OB truck across Dame Street. And they were invited, by An Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore, as it happens. It was his department that organised the gig. And there appears to have been very definite ideas about the guest list.

The Irish Sports Federation not unreasonably wrote to Gilmore beforehand requesting at least some kind of sporting presence at such a wide spectrum of public life. The missive it got back contained more than a whiff of condescension and an inference that sport might lower the tone of such an august body.

All of which would be laughable were it not so serious. Far from being an aggrandising economic acorn, it’s hard to avoid at least the suspicion that such a trooping of national colour was little more than a massive photo-opportunity for the verbose and the vain. But what it did indicate loud and clear is this Government’s attitude to sport. And what is not funny is how that attitude may yet impact on sports funding come Budget time.

Fair play to the arts brigade and how they’ve played a hand that yields a rather intangible dividend to the state. But a helluva lotta boards will have to be trod in order to get anywhere near the very tangible €30 million last month’s Solheim Cup, for instance, was worth to this country, not to mention the estimated €60 million in advertising Ireland the whole tournament generated. And there wasn’t even a sniff of a hitch the whole time it was on, not a bad result reputation-wise one would have to conclude.

Any number of sporting events step up to the mark under the cultural and tourism banners the forum is supposed to be encouraging. This year there has been the Europa League final in Dublin, not to mention the regular major rugby and soccer internationals that create a popular excitement the arts lobby couldn’t even begin to approach.

On every level it is at once ridiculous and yet deeply worrying that sport got such a public and emphatic brush-off at the weekend: perhaps just as worrying is that at cabinet level, its corner is being fought by a conspicuously unsportif minister.

Leo Varadkar, Minister for Transport, Tourism Sport, is no doubt mad for transport and up for tourism. But what about the third part of his brief? It is commonly believed amongst the hierarchies of many sports bodies in Ireland that Leo could have been handed a green and gold jersey to wear at last month’s All-Ireland final and still have shouted for “the Duuuubs” without any sense of incongruity.

Now, not having a background in a certain area is hardly an automatic disadvantage. After all it’s hard to believe the minister is able to recite the Dublin Bus timetable or BB rates in Killarney off by heart either. But for him to stand up at a forum containing just the tiniest acknowledgement of the role of sport in Irish cultural life betrays an ignorance that has the potential to backfire spectacularly in terms of future funding.

John Magnier is the man who has built up Coolmore Stud into the most powerful racing and breeding operation in the world. Notoriously mistrustful of the media and any hint of personal publicity, Magnier is a figure who provokes strong opinions, both pro and anti. But no one can deny his business acumen or immense international reputation.

The idea of taking part in something as public as the Global Economic Forum would, in all likelihood, appeal to him about as much as a sponge-bath with Joe Higgins would appeal to Minister Varadkar. Racing is now back under the Department of Agriculture umbrella but a call to a Coolmore insider on Friday about whether Magnier had even been invited to the forum yielded an interesting response.

“The Global What?”