To the national parliament, where the heads of the country's three biggest sporting bodies got a demonstration of how not to run a committee meeting. The Joint Committee on Tourism, Transport and Sport invited John Delaney, Philip Browne and Páraic Duffy to Kildare Street yesterday and laid on a depressingly unfocused inquisition that held precisely nobody to account for anything. It's a good thing the GAA, FAI, and IRFU only receive €8 million a year from the public purse – you'd hate to see how handy they'd get it if we were giving them real money.
"Thanks very much," said Fine Gael's Peter Fitzpatrick as they finished up. "It was a very good meeting, wasn't it?"
And either everyone agreed with him or nobody had the heart to break it to him that the afternoon had been a shambles. Neither is good.
Actually, that's unfair. Catherine Murphy of the Social Democrats and Sinn Féin TD Imelda Munster both used their time to asked informed, obviously well-researched questions, and it was only in answering these that any of the three chief executives had to shift at all uncomfortably in their seats. And if anyone thinks it's a coincidence that the most useful tool in evidence was the probing curiosity of female TDs, you only had to listen to the schoolboyish blather of some of the male deputies to be convinced otherwise.
The broad headings for this session were governance, funding and gender quotas. Obviously, a certain amount of latitude is baked in, but what we ended up with was a farcically broad range of questioning that covered everything from concussion to mental health to the GAA’s Sky deal to ticket touting to rural decline to the CPA to the Genesis report . . .
(Deep breath, go again . . .)
. . . to mechanisms for keeping Irish soccer players in Ireland to the strength of the provinces and the effect on clubs to the expansion of the Fifa World Cup to 48 teams . . .
(Sip of water, clear the throat, onwards . . .)
. . . the need for fan embassies, whether or not kids are playing too many codes at school, obesity, child protection, special needs provision, the FAI’s election process, salaries, Thierry Henry and the €5 million (!), crowd trouble, dual nationality, the need for a two-thirds majority at GAA congress . . .
(Nearly there . . .)
. . . funding for the Dubs, Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, the rugby presence in Abbotstown, participation drop-off, performance-enhancing drugs, how Dundalk’s Europa run can benefit the League of Ireland, and the efficacy of a sledgehammer to crack an egg. Apologies, the last one might have been a metaphor.
Ludicrousness
And so the ludicrousness of the committee system was played out for all to see. Hidden in plain sight on that list are any amount of serious issues, plenty of them worth genuine, forensic debate between the people paid by the public to represent their interests and the sporting bodies who receive most public funding in the State. But because everything was asked, nothing was answered.
The screaming truth of the session was that most of the committee members patently came into the room figuring they knew plenty about sport already, and used their time to underline the point. The dangers of a little knowledge were never so obvious. What they lacked in command of their brief, they made up for with the force of their grandstanding.
Kevin O'Keeffe, a Fianna Fáil TD who'd be thrown out of D'Unbelievables for laying it on a bit thick, used his time to ask Delaney was he happy with Fifa's decision to expand the World Cup to 48 teams "and does he think it will dilute the quality of the finals?". He was about to launch into a lament that Thurles The Home Of Hurling didn't get the nod as a possible rugby World Cup venue before chairman Brendan Griffin reminded him there'd be a committee meeting about the bid in March.
Robert Troy, also of FF, took his opportunity to have a dig at junior minister Patrick O'Donovan for floating his gender-quotas idea without consultation, before stressing that in his local GAA club in Westmeath, "some of the best people on our committees were the women".
Senator Frank Feighan hailed our fantastic summer at the Euros and talked about a double-decker bus he'd brought to Germany in 1988 and how the Evening Press pull-out was their only guide and how things are very different now with iPhones and what have you, and did John Delaney think that fan embassies would be a good idea going forward?
Merciful hour.
By the time any of the three chiefs got around to answering any questions, all they had to do was skip through them at will. They hopped lightly past any they didn’t like the look of and talked at length on any number of the lollipop ones that took their fancy. And then they got out the gap, the afternoon wasted, the rest of us left with one lingering, scary question.
If this is how uninformed our lawmakers are on sporting issues that are broadly familiar to most of the population, what sort of rings must bankers, businesspeople and lobbyists run around them?
