The FAI are not good at this. Or at least, they’re not good enough at it to outrun the not-goodness of FAIs past. They tend to come to these Oireachtas hearings 2-0 down before they even open their mouths, a legacy of the incompetence and belligerence that was a feature of these visits in other eras. The stains of history are stubbornly hard to shift.
Still, they need to be better at it than this. The 48 hours preceding their latest appearance in front of the Joint Committee on Arts, Media, Communications, Culture and Sport were dominated by a protracted hokey-cokey over whether or not they were going to turn up at all. They were out, they were in, they were out again and then they were in after all.
Given that they were always going to have to come here eventually, it was a pointless dance. All it did was annoy the committee. “You said in your opening statement that you wanted to assure the committee that no disrespect was intended,” said Kilkenny TD Peter ‘Chap’ Cleere at one stage to David Courell, the FAI’s chief executive . “I accept that. But I can assure you that disrespect was felt.”
It meant that the FAI were on the back foot here from the start. No TD or Senator’s back ever went unclapped for sticking it to the boyos and girleens of the FAI. Moreover, the good graces of Government finance is a key part of the association’s funding model. This is not a good combination.
RM Block
It’s one thing having to play nice for the money people. It’s another when they not only don’t have to play nice back but in fact get kudos for putting the squeeze on you in public. There’s a blood sport element to it and it’s a long time since the FAI were anything other than the hare.
The crux of the issue this time around is, in fairness, a bit Kafkaesque. The committee asked for the meeting in the wake of last year’s Girls In Green documentary in which cases of historical abuse in the Ireland women’s soccer team were detailed. The FAI position was that they were happy to come before the committee and talk about the generic area of safeguarding, but since there are ongoing Garda investigations resulting from the documentary, they can’t talk about specifics.
And so you had a meeting called on the back of a specific – and very public – story that caused huge outrage across the country. But one in which any effort to drill down into the nitty-gritty of the safeguarding response to it was played with a dead bat by the FAI officials who were in attendance.
“I know it will be frustrating for you, as it is for me,” Courell said at one stage in response to a question from Pádraig O’Sullivan TD about a May 2023 email. “But our position remains consistent. I do apologise but we cannot answer a question about a specific ongoing case.”
O’Sullivan’s reply was a deathless reference that everyone in the room got. “The last time I experienced something like this, a former chief executive came in here and did the same as you. And that didn’t end too well for that individual. We’re in very familiar territory here. Are you willing to disclose any communication you had with anybody in senior management at any stage in relation to what is clearly being written about in May 2023?”
“Genuinely, I want to reassure the committee that our conscience is clear on this matter,” said Courell. “However, in order to make sure our conscience remains clear, we’re not willing to compromise an ongoing investigation. Having engaged with the individuals at the centre of this, we need to remember that these are real people seeking justice and we will not be willing to jeopardise that.”
[ FAI to attend Oireachtas committee hearing following U-turnOpens in new window ]
In that sense, it was possible to feel a little sorry for the FAI delegation here, as they sat in Committee Room Two for just short of three hours and got their hides tanned for them by various TDs and Senators. They must count themselves slightly unlucky that the era of this committee being filled with blowhards and notice boxes is largely gone. God be with the days of Michael Healy-Rae and Kevin O’Keeffe tickling their bellies.
Instead, the politicians were generally direct and informed. The decision to lead off with a former sports journalist in Senator Evanne Ní Chuilinn set an uncompromising tone and meant that there was very little grandstanding. But because Courell and his people couldn’t really answer a lot of what they were asking, it’s hard to say the whole afternoon achieved very much beyond making the FAI look shifty and uncooperative.
All of which might have happened anyway had they come before the committee without all the ducking and diving before it. But the fact that they had to be dragged there made everything look worse than it had to, as committee chair Alan Kelly pointed out to reporters afterwards.
“You can’t be bailed out by the taxpayer, be funded by the taxpayer, dependent on large significant sums being put forward in this Budget, and then say we’re creating conditionality before we even consider coming in front of you and answering questions,” Kelly said.
“So that whole, I suppose, deliberation by the FAI was ill-judged. They should have come before us the first time around. But even so, coming before us the second time around, creating conditionality and saying they wouldn’t come before us, was disrespectful to the people of Ireland, to the Oireachtas, to the taxpayers of Ireland.
“And I’m sure if the Minister feels the same way as the committee, well then, obviously, he’ll have to take that into consideration [for funding] – whether it’s in profiling funding, whether it’s in withdrawn funding, that’s really a matter for him. But obviously we’ll be writing to him on the basis of what we heard today.”
This won’t be the last time the FAI have to do this. They need to get better at it.
