Sports plan to end talent drain

Little BY little and bit by bit normality creeps closer. Anywhere else but here, last week's news that £18 million will be spent over the next three years on the establishment of a new Northern Ireland Sports Institute would have merited only scant attention and a few paragraphs buried away at the bottom of the sports pages.

But in the context of the many barren years that have come and gone, this new institute is a genuine feel-good story because it will be proof in bricks, mortar and manpower that sport here is about to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

The plan is revolutionary in its outlook. The Sports Council for Northern Ireland will enter into a partnership with the University of Ulster with a view to setting up the Northern Ireland end of a broader UK Sports Institute at the university's Jordanstown campus just outside Belfast. The proposals lack little in ambition. Among many other things, the institute will include a 50-metre training pool, an indoor training centre, an athletics training track and sports medicine facilities.

Three levels of sportsmen and women will be targeted at elite, international and national standard and the emphasis will be on giving them access to top-class facilities and support services all on the same self-contained site. This will then remove the current drift of the better athletes and swimmers towards either Britain or the US in search of adequate training facilities. This draining away of talent has produced a talent deficit which has eaten away at the fabric of sporting life here. But now it looks like the new sports institute will plug the hole in the dyke.

The potential impact is immense. At the very highest level it means that a culture of excellence and achievement will be created right here. That in turn will remove some of the "dependency culture" mindset which has traditionally dictated that progress and success are goals that can only be obtained by leaving.

The proposals are also a powerful statement of intent by the Sports Council here. In the past it has fielded widespread criticism resulting from its seeming inertia and inability to effect sporting change where it really mattered. Now it looks like that has at least partly changed and it may be time for just a little humble pie.

The Sports Council chairman, Don Allen, had made the sports institute one of his priorities and he lobbied hard to ensure that Northern Ireland didn't miss out in the reorganisation of facilities for elite athletes throughout the UK. A substantial proportion of the £18 million budget will be made up of the Sports Council's share of National Lottery funding. This can only be positive news because too often it appeared that the potential boon that lottery money represented was being squandered in schemes and projects that said very little to people here about their sporting lives.

There are also some entertaining little titbits to be gleaned from the way in which the sports institute plan has been presented. For generations, Gaelic games here have been cocooned away from the sporting mainstream and football and hurling have tended to develop in splendid isolation from the other sports around them. Government funding was a particular bugbear and most of the ground development programmes that did take place were financed from the GAA's own coffers. This self-sufficiency had many positive spin-offs in terms of creating a vibrant Northern GAA culture, but the downside was that it fostered an isolationist attitude and led to a "them and us" situation with clearly-marked boundaries.

The substantial public sector financing of the regeneration of Casement Park was a first indication of a sea-change in attitudes and now comes an unprecedented prominence for the GAA in the pre-publicity for the Northern Ireland Sports Institute. A picture of Derry's Ulster championship-winning captain, Kieran McKeever, dominates the glossy brochure and Gaelic football is given particular prominence as one of the major team games that will be targeted by the new institute.

To an outsider these minor shifts may not seem exactly like seismic change, but the significance for the wider sporting culture is potentially immense. The GAA is inching in from the margins and one inevitable spin-off from that will be that it will be much more difficult for its potential detractors to demonise it. Better the devil you know and all that.

Equally, though, the GAA's assimilation into the sporting establishment may present its own little difficulties for the association. There may be a price to pay for new-found acceptability and that could be a sacrificing of the GAA's stubbornly held independence. There are interesting times ahead.

But the heartening thing has to be that there is now forward movement. If everything runs as smoothly as the Sports Council and the University of Ulster hope, within three years there will be tangible proof that Northern Ireland need not always be a sporting backwater. Symbols are more important here than in most other societies and a new state-of-the-art Sports Institute will represent a potent indication of what can be achieved with a little vision and foresight.

The next test for all concerned is whether the institute represents a new start or a full stop. The much-vaunted national stadium for Northern Ireland is thought to be the next item on the Sports Council's shopping list. Much of the talk surrounding it has laudably been about the need to create a new neutral space for sports of all hues and shades here. But it has also been accompanied by a worrying world view that regards a fantastic new structure rising out of the reclaimed land alongside Belfast Lough as some kind of miracle panacea for all our sporting ills.

As the FAI and the IRFU have readily shown, the Sports Council is by no means unique in this great stadium preoccupation. But its effects here are potentially more damaging because it ignores some of the much more fundamental work that a body like the Sports Council needs to become involved in. Can it reinvent itself and become a facilitator and agitator for real change? At a time when local football is enduring a slow, lingering death should the Sports Council not have some input into any root and branch reforms? Can it be a more pro-active force in addressing the shameful situation where support for what is supposed to be the national football team is made impossible for many by the poisoned culture that surrounds it?

This new sports institute is a step in the right direction, but you do not have to scratch too hard to find more difficult questions lurking just below the surface. The next challenge is the search for some lasting solutions.