Eoin Sheahan

Now, there is a difference between the amount you're entitled to if you've got a long term lease or you own your own facility.

facility, for example, compared to a short-term lease or if you don't have any lease at all or you're paying rent to a landlord or whatever the case may be.

Can I ask you, is there any intention to close that disparity or why that gap does exist between those two situations?

Who does own the facility, obviously, but the application is possible.

One of the criteria that you judge on is the level of your own funding available.

And there are, I think it's six main criteria.

For example, when you look at the 2023 round, I look at two of them and level of own funding available is one of them.

Another one is level of socioeconomic disadvantage in the area.

For me, when I look at those two things, I see a bit of a contradiction.

If you are trying to reward clubs in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas and also trying to award clubs that have a flow of cash that they can rely on, they kind of go head to head in this application process.

Even when it comes to the point that you made there about you don't necessarily need to own your facility in order to get funding, it does feel that those who are in areas with a good bedrock of sporting facilities

are in a much more advantageous position.

And you mentioned that the public index that's used for a lot of these areas.

I'm sure if you look at the likes of Dublin 1 and Dublin 8, they would score very highly on the public index, for example.

But it seems close to impossible for them to get the required funding to have a transformational impact

on those communities, for example.

And I bring them up kind of because we've done lots of work on the show with regards to the situation in Dublin 8.

And if we take D8 and D1, even just like looking through the last awarding of sports capital grants,

Dublin 1 got €81,976 in 2023.

Dublin 8 got €210,542 in that grant as well.