Sports Organisations
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-20
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Charlie McConalogue (FF), Donegal

Sport Ireland sets the criteria. It has a strong set of criteria for child safeguarding compliance. It is a compulsory requirement for NGBs and a critical element of NGB funding. These criteria are reviewed twice annually. NGBs are required to submit their child safeguarding statements to Sport Ireland for review. Sport Ireland expects all funded organisations, as does the Government which funds Sport Ireland, to maintain those high standards of governance, strategic planning and operational delivery, including but not limited to coaching, development, anti-doping and safeguarding. Failure to meet these standards that are agreed to, whether through governance shortcomings, failure to deliver on strategic objectives, financial mismanagement or actions that are not supportive of the commitments to national programmes, such as safeguarding, may result in a range of consequences, including repayment, cessation of funding, suspension or termination of funding or of formal recognition. We have a strong oversight mechanism in place and we will continue to keep a strong focus on it.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-20/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:31+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-20