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
it has but you know we we have delivered a lot of positive things as well and i think there's a huge amount of support for the football pathways plan in its entirety like the broader piece that's a 12-year vision that i know one element of it has you know come in for a degree of divisiveness but the reality is the broader plan is widely well received and so we want to continue to build on that we now have a new director of football in john martin who
is out extensively covering the country to try and build those relationships and hopefully the combination of John and Shane and the rest of the team, we can further embed our relationships with every level of the game and make sure we're headed in the right direction.
Sure.
So the Football Pathways Plan is a 12-year vision for Irish football.
It is quite wide-ranging.
It covers everything from women's and girls' football to...
playing formats to ensure that we have the right coverage across the country so right now if you live in one county you might only get 20 weeks of football if you live in another you might get 40 so there's a massive disparity about how we're delivering and it's unfair on those kids just based on a postcode that they're getting more opportunities than others so there's an underlying base around participation then you can move as high up into kind of international and how
We want to have a consistent philosophy of how we approach our development age groups that will obviously then culminate in when hopefully they put on the green shirt for the senior teams.
That's called the green line.
So that's just a sample of kind of the broader football pathways plan that I said has been really well received.
But you referenced the line calendar, which is only one of 11 actions.
So that one obviously has been well talked about over the last couple of years.
And I was actually very intrigued to see it organically come back up, particularly on OTB in recent months, as the weather was so poor again through January and February.
Sure.
So if I go back to what the challenge is, we have identified that there's an 863 million need to ensure that Irish football facilities reach the level that we feel is requisite for a country of our stature.
That's across grassroots, League of Ireland and international.
The government have absolutely started to recognise that.
They invested £112 million in 2024 alone.
And the upcoming rounds of investment, we will hope to secure that and some again.
The reality is, though, that we can't expect everything to come from government.
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