McGonagle: Now is time to change

IRISH team manager Patsy McGonagle admits that Athletics Ireland chiefs “need to take a hard look at ourselves” after the national team’s disappointing performance at the European Indoor Championships in Paris.

McGonagle expressed dismay at the country’s poor showing in the French capital – where Derval O’Rourke was the only finalist – and has called for unequivocal backing for the new high performance director Kevin Ankrom. He warns that if the new man “isn’t supported sufficiently and sensibly and without any old silliness we are going to have negative conversations for time immemorial .”

McGonagle accepts that Ireland’s failure to garner a medal will attract criticism.

“People sitting on the fence will say this wasn’t a very good performance by the Irish team and I would say they are right. If you take it in a team perspective and you are honest this wasn’t a good performance.

“There is no good in bluffing it – that is the reality. Osaka was a great championships for us and Berlin was a great championship for us. If we got a medal here we’d be grand too.

“When we go to the Olympic Games we are still going to have to trot out the same story which is Robert Heffernan, Olive Loughnane, David Gillick and Derval O’Rourke in terms of medal or final possibilities.

“There continues to be exciting athletes coming through – these two boys from Letterkenny, Mark English and Darren McBrearty, and Ciara Mageean – and there is a duty of care on the association to support them, to put structure in place for them and all of that.

“We need to take a hard look at ourselves. A performance director will come in on April 1 and he has a big task on his hands.”

McGonagle highlighted the development of Norwegian athletics over the past decade as a template which Ireland should have followed.

“They (Norway) had money to spend and they spent it very wisely. They also must have very goodconsistent leadership.

“Unfortunately in Ireland that has not been the case. There’s been somebody else, and somebody else – it’s been very fragmented.

“We had a great opportunity for a number of years that didn’t happen. There was money in the country – everybody was spending money – unfortunately we didn’t end up with even a proper structure.

“I remember talking in Sydney and I made a hullabaloo about performance directors and aboutperformance units.

“In fairness to Jimmy McDaid (then Irish sports minister) he supported me but the reality is we got the review and we got the performance thinking going but we didn’t take advantage.”