It was a rough day for Rowing Ireland on Wednesday when they poked their heads into the stocks down in Kildare Street. They were up in front of the Oireachtas Committee for Sport and Other Stuff, dragged in to explain themselves after Paul Kimmage’s forensic investigation into athlete welfare in the Sunday Independent before Christmas. Fair to say, it didn’t go well.
None of the board members present was involved with Rowing Ireland before 2023, which was no good to the committee since they wanted to examine the period from 2016 onwards. Though they didn’t contest the facts outlined in the Sindo, Rowing Ireland chairman Barry McWilliams swerved a couple of opportunities to apologise for what had happened.
“Will you apologise on behalf of Rowing Ireland for the hurt that was caused to some of these people?” Fianna Fáil TD Peter Cleere asked.
“We regret that those situations arose,” the Rowing Ireland chairman replied. “And we are clear that we really do not want that to happen again.”
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“It’s a yes or no question, Barry. Do you apologise to those athletes who have been so badly mistreated over the past number of years as part of the high-performance?”
“I don’t wish to frustrate you by repeating the same answer as was just given.”
“So you’re not going to apologise?”
“…”
That silence hung in the air like the stench from a capsized trawler. There have been enough of these committee hearings regarding failures in other sports for Rowing Ireland to know the drill by now. You turn up, take your beating, hold your hands high and promise to atone. As soon as the politicians get a whiff of you prevaricating or dissembling, you’re toast.
[ Sport Ireland criticised for slow intervention in conflict between athletes and Rowing Ireland ]
Sport Ireland are longer in the tooth at this kind of thing and they largely fared better in front of the committee’s questioning. When chief executive Una May was asked by Cleere and others whether they would apologise, she was able to dance relatively comfortably on the head of the pin.
Sport Ireland’s position was that they reacted, when complaints were raised with them, up to and including withholding a portion of Rowing Ireland’s funding.
Now you could pick plenty of holes in their argument.
Fine Gael senator Evanne Ní Chuilinn zeroed in on the similarities between this hearing and the one last September when the FAI were on the hook for historic failures to safeguard female footballers.
There was a through line here: if a footballer, rower, boxer or whoever wanted to report a problem with a coach, how could they do so without putting their career in jeopardy?
Sport Ireland were able to field these questions, ultimately agreeing with Ní Chuilinn that an independent reporting system was worth pursuing. They will no doubt be back in front of the committee at some point to give an update on what, if any, progress has been made. But, in all truth, they saw off the bowling on Wednesday without too much hassle.
Even so, it was notable that the very point that Sport Ireland were more practised at these kinds of appearances was zeroed in on by some of the politicians.
In recent years, they’ve had to present themselves in front of the committee when issues have come to light in boxing, football and now rowing. You don’t want to become the West Ham of these things, so used to skirting disaster that you presume you’ll always find a way to emerge unscathed.
“I am concerned about Sport Ireland,” committee chair Alan Kelly said at one point. “I’m concerned about your mandate. I think your mandate and what you can do within your mandate is more than what happened in this scenario.
“I don’t buy that your remit means you weren’t able to intervene. I think enough flags were raised from 2021 onwards and it took ye until 2024 to stop funding. That’s very concerning.”
It’s never that simple, though. As high performance director Paul McDermott said on Wednesday, Sport Ireland tends to try to avoid weaponising funding – and with good reason. It’s all very well a TD saying you should cut funding to a sporting organisation, but what that means in reality is taking support away from athletes.
For all its outsize success, rowing is a tiny sport here. Nobody in rowing is living high on the hog because of Sport Ireland money.
More to the point, cutting funding is likely to affect the very athletes whose complaints prompted the intervention. Not only would that be self-defeating, it isn’t exactly encouraging for the next person who feels the need to come forward.
These are the details that can sometimes get lost in the grouchy whirl of these Oireachtas committee meetings. As an exercise in holding the feet of sporting bodies to the fire in public, they can be useful. This is particularly true of the current committee, which is commendably less given to quite as much notice-box showboating than some of its predecessors.
Now the format is still far too harum-scarum to get deep enough to the nitty-gritty of the issues to be satisfactory. And with a few obvious exceptions, these are not sporting experts, so there is a fair amount of spoofing going on when you turn up in front of them.
But if you’re a sporting body in receipt of taxpayers’ cash, staying on the right side of the committee is important. Getting in and out without making a headline is vital.
Rowing Ireland didn’t manage that on Wednesday and it was a pretty miserable experience for them. The last thing Sport Ireland needs is for the guns to turn in their direction.
