Sports funding biased towards team games

GOVERNMENT FUNDING of sport is inefficient and biased towards traditional team sports, especially Gaelic games, according to the ESRI.

A new study has found that public expenditure is skewed towards elite sport at the expense of grassroots activity.

The report, Getting Out What You Put In: An Evaluation Of Public Investment In Irish Sport, was compiled by ESRI economist Dr Pete Lunn.

He said the Government's current position on the allocation of public investment in sport was difficult to justify, and needed to be re-examined and updated.

Dr Lunn found that the "lion's share" of public money went to traditional team sports, including soccer and rugby but especially Gaelic games.

"Yet these are not the most popular sports, nor the fastest growing, and they suffer from very high rates of dropout in early adulthood compared with individual sporting activities, many of which receive little or no public support," he said.

"It is not at all clear what rationale is responsible for this distribution of funds, which is not in keeping with the stated aims of policy."

Dr Lunn said levels of funding seemed to be dictated not by estimates of participation levels and trends but by other concerns.

He noted that while the GAA had an unparalleled degree of social organisation that other sports might aspire to, levels of non-active participation in Gaelic games were higher than in other sports.

"More generally, team sport accounts for the large majority of spectating," he said.

Dr Lunn said a case might be made for the funding bias in favour of Gaelic games on cultural or historical grounds. However this argument was difficult to evaluate.

The report also found that current policy devoted almost twice the amount of public money to "elite" sport, such as national leagues and international competitions, as was spent on "grassroots" sport played recreationally at a local level.

"This places a very high emphasis on the social benefits associated with spectating and with national pride in the achievements of top players.

"It is hard to see how these benefits can be judged to be greater than the health and social benefits associated with mass participation."

Of the funding that is allocated to grassroots sport, the large majority is spent on facilities.

However the report argues that provision of more facilities is not the best way to increase levels of participation.

Communication with non-participants, through targeted programmes and the organisation and marketing of events, was more likely to raise levels of participation.