David Courell
speaker
622 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 21 May
David Courell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But there was a sheer scale of 163 governance items and changes that we needed to bring about.
And quite frankly, it was the biggest transformation program that happened.
Irish sport has ever seen.
And it was important to us and it was important to me that we actually delivered on that because that was the first step in, I suppose, rebuilding confidence with government that we would uphold our end of the bargain.
So for the first maybe 12, 18 months, a lot of energy went into securing the progress we needed in that space, which I'm delighted we did.
The next biggest thing was around facilities and we invested a huge amount of energy in
trying to address
the chronic underinvestment that had been made into facilities in years gone by.
At every level.
Don't get me wrong, we're blessed to have the Aviva Stadium, which is a world-class stadium between ourselves and the IRFU.
It's a fantastic home for us, but it's also a huge economic generator for the government and for the state with about 4.5 billion of socioeconomic benefits since it opened in 2011.
But really, the chronic underinvestment,
took place at the grassroots and League of Ireland level.
So we invested quite a bit of time and energy trying to, for the first time ever, actually give a very frank account of the scale of that gap that needed to be closed.
So we identified an overall investment requirement of £863 million.
I think some of it is self-inflicted.
I don't think we necessarily mobilised in the way that we could or should have.
I think some of it is system-based as well.
So there are certain barriers to entry to investment vehicles that maybe football aren't always best placed to access.
Sorry, I'll just put that into layman's terms.
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