Sport squares up for second epic struggle inside a decade
The last recession was still digging its teeth deep into the country’s economy and it’s very soul when the Federation of Irish Sport peered into a crystal ball and imagined what the landscape would look like eight years down the line.
“It is the year 2020,” the piece began in that year’s annual review by an organisation that represents over a hundred National Governing Bodies (NGBs) and Local Sports Partnerships.
“The Olympic/Paralympic Games are just around the corner. So what does sport look like in Ireland?”
Well, how could any of us have known?
You’d have been ridiculed back then had you suggested that the financial crash and its consequences would pale into comparison with the existential crisis that sport and society in general is facing now.
The very idea that the Olympics would be uprooted, like a 200-year old oak tree, and replanted 12 months down the line would have prompted derision and disbelief.
That same Federation document explained in plain black and white just how damaging the recession had been to the sector up to that point.
Total funding for sport in 2012 was just €80m, down from €230m in 2008.
A dramatic falloff in capital funding up to that point — it was halted completely at the height of the downturn — was the main culprit but core grants to NGBs, described at one point by Sport Ireland CEO John Treacy as the “lifeblood” for sports here, didn’t escape the shears.
You only have to go back to 2017 when Brendan Griffin, not long installed as Minister of State for Tourism and Sport, was admitting that the inability to give more government funding was disappointing but that, hey, at least they weren’t making cuts anymore.
The sport sector had been saying that theirs was a branch far too easy to prune mere months after the economic crisis first began to bite 11 years ago.
It was only last year that core grants would finally reach and exceed the levels recorded back in 2008.
That’s a decade playing catch-up.
What’s maybe most remarkable looking back now is how Irish sport blossomed in the meantime.
The last decade was this country’s most successful ever in terms of Olympic and Paralympic success. It was a bump in fortunes that was reflected further down the pyramid where Irish teams and athletes flourished like never before.
The very landscape here has changed utterly too. The National Sports Campus is, after years of inactivity and empty promises, a repository of state-of-the-art facilities and excellence.
Other top-class facilities — 50m swimming pools, indoor tracks and sports hubs — are sprinkled about the country where none existed before.
All of which may beg the question: Just what impact did the last recession have?
“What impact did it have? The sports became more adaptable,” says Treacy who was in the same post then.
“We encouraged them to get other sources of income, which they did from the commercial side. They are stronger organisations from a corporate governance point of view as well. That’s all good.
“The Government has come in and developed the Campus, the Institute of Sport and continued the funding for the athletes.
"All those pieces happened in parallel, even through the recession. Sport took a hit of about 25% in funding at the time but they dealt with it and the investment in the infrastructure continued and that was critical from a capital and a sporting point of view.”
That was then, this is a very different scenario.
Epidemiologists will say otherwise but no lay person was able to foresee the spread of a virus that would paralyse the global economy and wedge sport behind the black ball.
Even in the darkest depths of the recession there was never a time when local clubs weren’t opening their doors and ushering people in to take their minds off lost jobs and financial concerns.
Volunteerism numbers actually jumped 10 years ago as people found themselves with more spare time.
Now, over half-a-million people who had been giving their time free of charge on a weekly basis are restricted, like players and spectators, to their own four walls and trying not to climb them.
This is like nothing none of us have seen before.
Sport may be in our DNA as a nation but it is the lifeblood for 40,000 people in this country who depend on it directly or indirectly for their income.
There are over 14,000 clubs and association in Ireland and plenty of them are run as businesses.
Emerging from this deluge of economic turmoil with their heads above water is a very real concern for many.
“Let’s put it this way, the organisations that we fund, we have encouraged them down through the last few years to build reserves and a lot of them have built reserves that will definitely keep them going for the next three or four months,” Treacy explains.
“The employment scheme run by government has been a huge benefit for sport and enabled people to stay in positions so that when the green light is given they can kickstart straight away.
But if it gets into the autumn time it will be a struggle then for organisations. That is the critical point.”
The problem for sport is that it has for decades been deemed as dispensable to the body politic. There are always bigger issues.
The first round of recession cuts in 2009 came on the same day that 1,350 people lost their jobs here in the aviation industry.
The priority now is saving lives, clearly. Nobody needs lessons in perspective here but economic questions still require answering.
The ‘Big Three’ of soccer, rugby and Gaelic Games, face different challenges than most of the others given the numbers we are talking about and issues surrounding TV deals. Cricket is the same.
Added to that is the headache of how to actually play team and/or contact sports in the absence of a vaccine and there are very clear causes for concern.
The lines of communication between Sport Ireland, the various NGBs, and their federations have been buzzing for weeks now.
Treacy’s organisation, having compiled information on where the respective sports bodies stand and what they deem to be possible pathways back to play, was due to deliver a brief to Minister of State Griffin this week.
Opening doors again is the priority but Cricket Ireland warned earlier this month that the long-term consequences of this crisis could outstrip the short-term shock.
We’ll still be left with a global economy picking itself off the floor when sport does hear a whistle again. What will that mean for government funding for the next 10 years? Is another period of austerity on the way?
“I’m not the minister. Government policy will dictate that down the line,” says Treacy who has seen his fair share of recessions in his time as an athlete and an administrator.
“I would be optimistic that we could rebound from this fairly quickly. It’s not a problem that is unique to Ireland, the world has been affected by this.
“We need to support our sports and our NGBs and I feel government believes in the benefits of sport.
"This lockdown only underlines the importance of sport in terms of a way of life, the quality of life. Sport has shown its resilience in the past.
"It will deal with whatever is thrown at it in the coming years. It will continue and it will continue to benefit Irish society. Sport will adapt.”
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
