The FAI and Sport Ireland will appear before the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport and Media today with proceedings being shown live on Oireachtas TV from 13:30.
The session was originally scheduled to discuss the FAI’s ambitious Infrastructure plan which outlines a 15 year plan to put €863 million into Irish football facilities all the way from the grassroots to the League of Ireland.
We can only hope that that still remains the main focus of discussion, not least because it is a programme that would transform the sport and impact on hundreds of thousands of citizens, if not many millions over time.
There is a significant ask of public investment which will require close scrutiny and management and this should be the start point in public following months of discussion in and around the corridors of power.
Instead though, and proportional representation democracy being what it is, stoked by media obsession having allowed the scandals of the John Delaney era go largely undiscovered for too long, (mea culpa on that front as well for full disclosure), we will spend much of the time discussing the €20,000 payment made in error to CEO Jonathan Hill, approved by the Chair at the time Roy Barrett, but subsequently apologised for and paid back in full.
To put that sum in context that is €20,000 under scrutiny taking time from the diving deeper into plans to invest €863 million.
To save the use of a calculator or the scribbling on a notepad, that is an amount of public expenditure 43,150 times greater being pushed back on the agenda.
Put another way it is 0.005 percent of the overall facility investment plan, on an amount that has already been paid back and apologised for as an oversight, which the CEO did not ask for in the first place and even then is only one item of the Memorandum of Understanding between Government and the FAI from 30th January 2020 that has now in all material aspects been implemented.
It took a few steps more than ideal but the FAI also voted at Saturday’s AGM to become compliant with the Government’s requirement for 40 per cent gender balance on boards by the end of this year. there are still 31 sporting bodies and local sports partnerships about whom that is not yet the case.
It may be for optics but no harm nonetheless that the majority of FAI Board members attending today’s session are likely to be women and independent members.
There is no question that the FAI, for the sins of the past, need to be held to a higher level of scrutiny than other sporting bodies. There is also no question that it needs to ensure that a belt and braces, gold standard, take your pick of descriptors, approach to governance has to be adhered to.
That didn’t happen in this one instance of remuneration but the mistake was owned, and the organisation has apologised and is now compliant.
Scrutiny has worked, now poring over the detail in a public forum, where opportunities do not come along every day of the week, needs to be proportional.
We can only hope that the three hours scheduled for today’s hearing are taken up by the most important matters, even if they do not grab the headlines.
We will report in today’s PM Bulletin on whether that hope is fulfilled or not.
