I will start on football by wishing our lads the very best of luck tonight. I will also stay on the issue of sport more generally because in that welcome, we see a disparity between those who have and those who have not in this country. One of the players carrying the hopes of the nation on his back tonight is Troy Parrott. Troy comes from Portland Place in the heart of Dublin's north inner city, a community that has produced extraordinary supporting talent, not because of what the State has provided but in spite of what it has not. We are very good in this country at celebrating our sporting heroes with the jerseys, the flags and even, I hope, the open top buses soon. What we are less good at is being honest about the gap between how loudly we celebrate these athletes and how we little we invested in the communities that produced them. There is not a single full-sized football pitch available to children in Dublin's inner city, north or south. That is something I have raised on numerous occasions in the House. The only full-sized pitch in the locality at all is Croke Park and that very much remains behind closed doors for most people in this Chamber. That is a predictable result of a funding model that was never designed to reach communities like Dublin's north inner city. The ESRI identified nearly 20 years ago that sport funding in Ireland is structurally regressive, flowing to clubs that already have facilities in communities that already participate at scale. Today, the Irish Sports Monitor shows a 19-point gap in participation between higher and lower socioeconomic groups. The main Government parties have invested over €1 billion in sport since 2018 and that gap has not changed in two years. Where is the money going? The Parliamentary Budget Office has answered that question clearly. Dublin received €26.50 per person under the sports capital programme. The national average is €54. County Leitrim received over €100 per head. This is not about urban versus rural; it is about fairness. The most densely populated county in the State with the highest concentration of disadvantaged communities gets less than half the national average per head and we know exactly why. To access the sports capital programme for capital work, communities need to own their land outright or hold a lease of at least 21 years' duration. The communities that already have facilities get more and the communities that have nothing remain locked out. That is exactly why golf clubs in this State apply at for this funding exactly three times the rate of boxing clubs, not because golf matters more but because golf clubs and the like have the cultural capital to access the system. The Pobal deprivation index was designed to weight applications towards disadvantaged areas but an application that has not been submitted cannot be weighted. A community with no land, no lease and no 21-year title cannot be prioritised. Tonight we will cheer on Troy Parrott and the rest of the team and tomorrow morning the Government will return to a funding model that makes the next Troy Parrot less likely, not more likely. When will the Government will commit to direct State investment in public sporting infrastructure in disadvantaged urban communities? A situation where Dublin's inner city, north and south, does not have an 11-a-side pitch is not sustainable.

Sentiment score: 0.12

The heart of this issue for me is not about the success. Very few children will ever reach the scale of Troy Parrott or Kellie Harrington. All too often I have to take a phone call from a coach who is dealing with kids who are oftentimes coming from overcrowded and disadvantaged backgrounds, to tell me that their pitch booking has been cancelled or they do not have playing facilities. The inability to play on a pitch has an impact on their ability to be inspired tonight by somebody like Troy Parrott and take up a ball and head out on a Saturday morning. There is a disparity in simply being able to access sport. That impacts in a way that will not only be felt in medals, trophies, buses or jerseys but in the way that kids will not have access to a role model, to be just able to go out and release the energy kids get to do in sport. This is not just about medals or world cups. It is actually about giving the capacity to young people in disadvantaged communities to play at a scale experienced by other kids in more affluent areas. That is why the sports capital programme needs to involve direct State investment into infrastructure. Anything else is a failure of the same people we will be celebrating tonight and those who will come after them.

Sentiment score: 0.05