Tipping Point: TDs fumble the ball at Dáil committee on sport

Last Wednesday's meeting of the Joint Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport was into its third hour by the time Philip Browne got to answer a question so it's understandable that he might have been getting a bit tired of it all. If he was, he wasn't alone.

Imelda Munster of Sinn Féin, whose list of questions to Browne, Páraic Duffy and John Delaney had stood out for being both pertinent and free of any effort to impress the three chief executives (imagine!), wasn't actually around to hear Browne or Duffy supply the answers. By that time, a couple of hours had passed and the TD had somewhere else to be.

You wouldn't have found many in the room who blamed her – though we all held it against her, quietly seething that she'd found an escape hatch. Browne and Duffy sat patiently, waving off the occasional apology from committee chairman Brendan Griffin and jotting down brief answers to some of the avalanche of questions, no doubt thankful that the day's one saving grace was that nobody was going to chase them up on the trickier ones.

Not rocket science

That said, when it came to gender quotas, Browne did get a bit snippy at being challenged for evidence – by Munster and Catherine Murphy – for his contention in his opening statement that it would be "difficult to find suitably qualified female candidates with the accumulated rugby wisdom and skill sets to fill such quotas without retreating towards tokenism". It came across as a bit dismissive and, as Munster and Murphy had both asked for an elaboration, Browne addressed it when he finally got a turn.

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“The skill sets I was referring to were actually rugby skill sets. Understanding the game, understanding how clubs work, how they fit within the structure of Irish rugby. One of the key issues that we have is that we have very few women actually involved in coaching or in administration. We have some and they do very good work.

“But the problem for us is that over a three-year period, which is what the Minister has suggested, it is highly unlikely that without changing the laws of the union, our structure, going back to our clubs and branches deciding to tear up our governance and starting again, it’s unlikely that we would have the numbers in the club game to come through the branches and progress to the required level. The average committee member in the IRFU has probably been involved for 10 to 15 years at various levels of the game.”

On another day, in another context, Browne might have had his feet held a small bit closer to the fire over this. It’s entirely possible to think gender quotas are a bad idea without sounding quite so sniffy about it. Understanding the game? It’s rugby, chief. It ain’t astrophysics. And as for understanding how clubs fit into the structure of Irish rugby, many, many people know how to read a tree diagram. Some of them are even women.

Pie in the Sky

Duffy, too, got away without having to go into detail on the stickier questions sent his way. Ludicrous and all as it was for the Sky deal to come up in such a setting – John O’Mahony complaining that four of Mayo’s games last summer were on Sky only was a particular low point of the day – Duffy’s answers on the issue were at times disingenuous.

He highlighted the success of GAAGo but didn’t explain that people in the UK can’t access GAAGo games that are on Sky. He claimed that over 100 games a year are available free to air but didn’t explain that not all of those are championship games – which, given that the Sky deal is a championship-only concern, would certainly have been relevant.

The point is, none of the three chief executives were made to answer properly for anything, which made the purpose of the committee a total mystery to an outside observer. It was impossible to work out what they were trying to achieve. In the press release, it was stated that the committee was meeting to “consider the challenges, strategies and governance of sport in Ireland”. In reality, the majority of the questions put to the three chief executives came under the heading, “What’s the craic with [insert broad subject], lads?”

Bemused

Griffin affected a sort-of detached bemusement when challenged on Off the Ball on Wednesday night, as if he couldn't quite believe the sports media took this stuff so seriously. And maybe that was the key disconnect – he thought they were bringing the chaps in to get a sense of the sporting landscape or some other equally indefinable buzzphrase.

Here’s the problem, though. All three organisations control the level of questioning they subject themselves to, for better or for worse. Delaney is far more paranoid about it than the other pair but if and when Duffy or Browne put themselves forward to be grilled by the media, they still do so on their own terms.

This was the one occasion on which all three had to do it on somebody else’s terms, specifically the terms of the representatives of the people who give them millions of euro every year. And look what we got out of it. Parish-pump yakkedy-yak and some slagging about Garth Brooks.

Such a lost opportunity.