‘Delighted’ Treacy says all targets were met or exceeded

John Treacy has expressed his satisfaction with the performance of Team Ireland at the 2012 Olympics and welcomed sentiments from Minister of State for Tourism and from Sport Michael Ring that results in London will help augment the sector’s budget.

“We set targets and all the targets were met or exceeded so we are delighted because we got a return on investment,” said Treacy who is chief executive of the Irish Sports Council.

“The money was put in, and we got the return on that investment – the fruits of which we are seeing here now.”

Minister Ring’s claim that the government “can’t but give me more money for sport now” met with loud cheers from the athletes and their families at Dublin Airport yesterday but past experience demands that judgement must be reserved for the next budget announcement.

The fact remains that further cuts are inevitable – as they are across all sectors – which will make the job of the Sports Council, individual governing bodies, coaches and athletes all the harder as the four-year road to Rio begins.

The Sports Council is due to announce the findings of its review of it’s carding system, which is used to award grants to high-performance athletes, in the coming months but there will be no all-encompassing review of the Olympics as there was after Sydney, Athens or Beijing.

The general consensus is that those documents addressed fundamental issues universal to all Irish codes and so this latest postmortem will entail one for each sport involved as bodies make their case for the ever-shrinking pot of monies available from the public purse.