Another great Irish sporting achievement; another unseemly row about the lack of Government funding for sport. The splendid achievement of 17-year-old Emily Maher from Kilkenny in taking the 100 metre and 200 metre gold at the World Youth Olympics in Moscow has, regrettably, become obscured by a rerun of the familiar feud between the Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI) and the Government. The OCI applied for £147,000 to help fund the full Irish youth squad in Moscow but when the Government pledged one-third of this figure, the OCI declined the offer. According to the OCI, Emily Maher was able to compete in Moscow only because of the generosity of the Russian government, which supplied air tickets and accommodation for the squad.
It may be that the current controversy is not unrelated to old battles between the Government and the OCI. It may involve some territorial battles between the OCI and the new Sports Council, chaired by the former Olympic medalist, John Treacy. For all that, it is a very embarrassing state of affairs - an elite group of young athletes from the land of the Celtic Tiger financed by the hard-pressed Russian government. By now, the people of this State should have become accustomed to such embarrassments. Millions might be invested in once-off events like the Tour de France or the 2005 Ryder Cup, which are designed to catch the eye of potential tourists, but this glides off the grim reality: this State continues to muddle through with a sporting infrastructure that would scarcely be tolerated in some of the poorest countries in central Europe.
Lack of suitable facilities means that Dublin is the only city in the European Union which has still to host a major European soccer final and it is many years since the city hosted a major international athletics event. Tenders for the 50-metre swimming pool - which has acquired a kind of mythological importance in Irish sport - have only recently been invited. The situation at community level is still more bleak. In some of the poorest regions of our major cities - in areas where the threat of crime and drugs is omnipresent - there are still schoolboy soccer teams who must change in container trucks and simply make do because of the woeful failure of successive governments to provide any kind of decent fundings for sport. Most recently, the Tour de France winner, Stephen Roche was criticised when he said he might move to France because of the lack of sporting and recreational facilities for young people. But the parents and guardians of young people will understand what he means. Compared to Northern Ireland, Britain and the rest of Europe there has been little investment in swimming pools, all-weather facilities and leisure centres for young people. The decision to give sport a presence at the Cabinet table with the nomination of Dr McDaid as Minister for Sport and the arrival of a noted sports enthusiast like Mr Ahern as Taoiseach, was supposed to change all this and give sport the political attention it has always lacked. To date - aside from the £25 million awarded to Croke Park - there is little sense that anything has changed. As the Emily Maher fiasco shows all too vividly, sport remains in the shadows.