Sports Organisations
Dail Éireann — 2026-03-03
============================================================

Charlie McConalogue (FF), Donegal

Referees are absolutely crucial for the participation of teams. They often find themselves in roles that are not as respected as they should be. In terms of providing a safe environment for adults, the role of referees has to be central in the report and to how we provide that environment in sport.
Some sports have a much better ethos and culture than others. We have to work to get to a situation where that is uniform across the board in relation to referees. They have a very difficult role. It is one into which people put big commitment to step up to the mark and it is getting increasingly difficult to get people to do those roles. That has to be central to the respect and safe environment that they have as well. Whether in individual sports or team sports, we have to make sure that the environment is safe for them. That is why we are working with Sport Ireland. We have commissioned this report and needs analysis so that we can identify where the strengths are and also work together to make sure that where things can be strengthened, we do that and support all of our sports to do so.

---

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/2026-03-03/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:02+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-03-03