Neasa Hourigan
Question:14. Deputy Neasa Hourigan asked the Taoiseach the policy in his Department regarding the use of the Government jet. [30916/23]
View answerTuesday, 4 July 2023
Questions (14, 15, 16)
Mick Barry
Question:15. Deputy Mick Barry asked the Taoiseach the policy in his Department regarding the use of the Government jet. [32131/23]
View answer
Paul Murphy
Question:16. Deputy Paul Murphy asked the Taoiseach the policy in his Department on use of the Government jet. [32543/23]
View answerOral answers (6 contributions)
There are two speakers for these questions and we have run out of time. With Members' agreement, we will give 12 minutes to this slot.
I propose to take Questions Nos. 14 to 16, inclusive, together.
Requests for the use of the ministerial air transport service are made by Ministers' private secretaries to my office and are dealt with, in the first instance, by the staff of my office. Requests are examined by staff with regard to the need for and the purpose of travel, the destination, the availability and the suitability of other travel arrangements and other logistical details. Any necessary clarification or further information is then sought at this point. All operational matters are settled directly between the office of the Minister in question and the Department of Defence or the Air Corps.
I am slightly off topic here.
Get slightly on topic again, Deputy.
I will make a tangential connection. The group of people I am talking about here are not making a request for the use of the Government jet, but they deserve a bit of support from the State. I commend Jack Marley, who is the first Irish amateur boxer to qualify for the Olympic Games in the heavyweight division. He is from Monkstown Boxing Club in my local area. I also congratulate Seán Mari, who is from the same club. He did not qualify at the weekend but has a couple of other opportunities to do so. It is a tremendous achievement. The boxers are not looking to use the Government jet to get to the Olympics or some of the competitions they engage in. I attended the celebration in Sallynoggin last night, and was talking to Jack, Seán and their coaches. The thing that came across again and again, from the coaches and the boxers themselves, is that in order to reach a level where they are representing Ireland in the Olympics, they have to give up a huge amount of their time. Jack is 20 years old and there are lot of costs involved. The boxers have to give up time working and so on. Often, they are not offered great financial support to do that. In many cases, they have to train in very poor facilities. Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council is finally moving towards giving them their own purpose-built facility, but many other amateur boxing clubs around the country do not have those sorts of facilities. I just think that as a tribute to the sort of success that Jack Marley has achieved, we should look at ways to support our young talent in boxing and other areas of sport who are reaching that very high level but often do not get the kind of financial support from the Government that allows them to continue at that level.
First of all, I join Deputy Boyd Barrett in congratulating Jack Marley, our first heavyweight boxer to qualify. I saw him on the news last night and was really impressed to see that so many of our athletes are qualifying at the moment. The rugby sevens men and women have qualified, and boxers and others have qualified too. We provide a significant amount of State funding for sport. We provide funding through national governing bodies. In the case of boxing, that is the Irish Athletic Boxing Association. That funding is for participation to encourage everyone to get involved in sport. There is also dedicated funding for high performance, particularly to help those elite athletes who can win medals for Ireland. Funding is provided through the sports capital programme as well. Billions have been invested in sporting facilities all over the country in the past ten years, including boxing facilities. There is also the National Sports Campus, which includes the Sport Ireland Institute and has some very good facilities for boxers which they use very effectively. I am very proud to have been involved in making that happen during my term as Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport in the 2011-14 period. There are also individual bursaries that are paid to athletes. It is not a huge amount of money, but it gives them some financial support, recognising that there are real costs associated with being a high-performance sportsperson, and also that there is loss of income because you cannot do the work you would like to do, or you have to put your career or your studies on the back foot for a period. Perhaps what we give them is not enough. The stipends are quite modest. I would certainly like to see them increase over the years and into the next Olympic cycle.