The Executive Committee of the Olympic Council of Ireland met last night at 6pm in Howth to discuss the next chapter in the scandal that has engulfed the organisation since President Pat Hickey’s arrest in Rio in August.
Their number was reduced further from where they stood at the start of the week with John Delaney and Kevin Kilty having resigned in recent days from their position as first Vice President and Honorary Treasurer respectively.
Last night was to have had as the main order of business a first sight and discussion of the Deloitte Report commissioned by the Committee to look at its own standards of governance.
Statement
A statement issued just before 10pm notified media that “The draft Deloitte report into governance arrangements under the OCI’s current constitution, which was circulated to committee members for the first time this evening, will over the coming days be reviewed by committee members for factual accuracies. Deloitte will then finalise its report and the report will be published soon after.”
It makes eminent sense to be careful over such a report which will have marked implications for confidence in the group among stakeholders going forward and potentially for the trial of Mr Hickey in Rio at some point in the future.
Unfortunately in light of the need for care, but not surprisingly after the same thing happened with an initial Arthur Cox Report, the main findings of the Deloitte report are already circulating this morning in the Irish Times.
Draft
This is only a draft report and perhaps the authors have made innocent mistakes in understanding but surely within such a small closed group there could have been a commitment to either publish in full immediately or hold fire on wider distribution until agreement had been reached.
According to the Irish Times report, the findings of Deloitte are critical in terms of areas ranging from dealing with conflicts of interest to ethics, behaviours and roles and responsibilities.
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It reportedly recommends limited terms of office and this is supported by 96 per cent of the stakeholders questioned for the report. The reality of that statistic is that there are 36 constituent sporting bodies that are represented on the OCI meaning that, with rounding taken into account, 35 believe in four year terms. Who the one in opposition is could be anybody’s guess.
Federation
Those bodies, through the Federation of Irish Sport issued their own statement last night, before the meeting, “demanding that the OCI make the report available in full to its 36 member federations immediately after the meeting has concluded and that the report also be published in full.”
“The OCI has been in crisis since the Rio Olympics and has severely damaged its relationship with Irish sport,” said Federation CEO James Galvin.
“This report will provide the first insight into what went wrong with its governance and how it can begin to be repaired.”
“We believe that without open, honest and timely communication from the OCI, rehabilitating the organisation cannot happen. This first step needs to be transparency with its stakeholders about the Deloitte report.”
Transparency
It will emerge over time whether having such timely communication through a leak to the Irish Times is seen as satisfactory by those in Irish sport but out of the Olympic Council inner circle.
There are genuinely good people at the Olympic Council. Their motivation has always been to provide Irish sport with a pathway to shine on the biggest global sporting stages. They must be tortured by the way in which the process of managing that pathway is being scrutinised and found to be so shaky.
With an irony that would seem more ‘Waterford Whispers’ than sports governance, the second element of the OCI statement read that “Once the independent Grant Thornton report into ticketing arrangements in Rio is complete it will be sealed and passed by Grant Thornton directly to Judge Carroll Moran to consider as part of his non statutory inquiry. At no point has the OCI Executive Committee had sight of the report. It is expected that the completed report will be with Judge Moran by 15 November.”
Perfect treble
There is no mention of that yet in the Irish Times so maybe they will miss out on a perfect treble of broken stories about broken governance.
Reputation can be a fragile enough commodity. Trust in making honest assessments of strengths and weaknesses; acceptance of mistakes when they occur; and honest effort to make things better in the future are three elements that give it strength.
We have written regularly in the past three months about the importance of Governance and reputation. It is an importance that goes beyond sport and has an impact on the view of Ireland in international circles.
Reputation
There will always be those who look on sport as merely a frivolity and of little real importance. They are wrong to be dismissive and they would be wrong to discount entirely the damage being done to Ireland’s overall reputation by what is happening within the Olympic movement.
The Deloitte Report should be wrapped up straight away, published and openly debated. The Grant Thornton report being sent to Justice Moran means it will not now be published until Easter of next year at the earliest. If it contains material that would influence the trial of Pat Hickey then the delay of immediate transparency has some logic.
It is just sad that it needs to be almost sealed in a lead lined box for it not to appear straight away in the pages of the national media.
