Eoin Sheahan

is with us here in studio.

Minister, thanks for coming in.

How are you keeping?

So give us the top line on all of those figures.

What's given you the most encouragement?

What's worrying you the most when you go to the sports monitor?

Looking forward, there was an interesting line in your Irish Examiner op-ed today about Ireland aspirationally looking towards 2040 and trying to become the fittest nation in Europe.

Why have you set that as a target?

Is that the metric that you're looking at to get the highest level of sporting participation in Europe?

Does that mean fittest?

What sort of work are you talking about with the education sector in particular?

Because that to me seems like the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to increasing that number, physical education and what's available to children in schools.

We might come back to that point in just a moment, because I think it's in one or two of the questions that we've had from listeners.

But as you mentioned there, there's an upcoming round of the Community Sports Facility Fund.

So this was previously known as the Sports Capital and Equipment Programme, which in 2023 delivered €277 million for more than 3,000 projects.

So what's going to happen before this

fund closes and before applications closes that you're going to do a selection of community sports facilities fund information evenings.

Because I think it's fair to say that there might be certain misconceptions out there about the application process, what you need to have, what you don't necessarily need to have.

So what do you think, first of all, are the biggest misconceptions out there for anybody involved in clubs who are curious about applying for funds having not done so before?

One of the misconceptions out there is that if you don't own your own land, you don't own your own facility, you're not entitled to the sports capital grants, which isn't true.