Athletics Ireland has core budget withheld

ATHLETICS IRELAND is to have its core funding for 2009 withheld until the appointment of several key positions are agreed with the Irish Sports Council. This was the scenario the governing body had feared in recent months as conflict with the Sports Council had developed over these and other matters.

All the remaining governing bodies of sport are due to have their core funding allocated tomorrow, thus allowing them to plan for the year ahead. But it could be several more weeks and possible months before Athletics Ireland get a grip on their actual finances for 2009 – and the implications of that are self-evident.

John Treacy, chief executive of the Sports Council, said yesterday that Athletics Ireland did face some critical issues that needed to be sorted, and until then funding was being withheld. The most critical of those are the appointment of a new director of athletics and also a director of coaching.

The director of athletics position has been vacant since Beijing, when the term of Max Jones expired, and while Athletics Ireland had put forward a candidate in November, there still hasn’t been any agreement on who should take over. In the meantime, there have been other in-house conflicts, chiefly the fall-out between the chief executive, Mary Coghlan, and director of high performance Patsy McGonangle.

“We are still negotiating with them at the moment,” explained Treacy. “There are some critical issues that need to be sorted, so we’ll be sitting down with them. There are some critical positions that need to be filled. We need to ensure we get the top quality people in the right positions.”

On the matter of sustaining Government funding for the governing bodies of sport, and particularly their high-performance elements, Treacy was confident the recent panic in the economy shouldn’t prove too detrimental.

“We’ll be doing everything in our power to ensure we invest in the high performance side as much as we can. While we’re down eight per cent, we can cope with that. There will be some adjustments to governing body grants, let’s put it that way. No massive cuts, but we will be spreading the pain a little bit.”

Treacy also agreed it was necessary to narrow the focus of Ireland’s Olympic sports, which exist now as boxing, athletics, rowing, sailing, equestrian sport, and to a lesser extent, swimming, badminton, and canoeing: “One of the sports that didn’t achieve their target was rowing, and there were all sorts of issues there.

“But they had achieved world championship medals in between, so we’ll be looking again at what’s happening with them.”