Green shoots starting to appear

BASKETBALL IRELAND chief executive Bernard O’Byrne is hopeful that the majority of the country’s international representative teams will be back on court by 2014.

The organisation made headlines for all the wrong reasons when it pulled the plug on its entire international programme in February of last year in response to a financial crisis which had left it saddled with debts of €1.2m.

The decision was particularly hard on the senior women’s squad which had missed out narrowly on promotion to Europe’s ‘A’ division the season before and whose members pleaded unsuccessfully to fund their own way through the next year’s calendar.