FAI criticised for missing Oireachtas committee meeting on safeguarding

Heimir Hallgrímsson and his players emerged for their training session at Abbotstown on a brisk Wednesday morning to the clang of hammers, as a couple of workers assembled a high tarpaulin fence running along the length of the training pitch. Having spoken last month of needing to staunch an information leak, it seems the Icelander is going to great lengths to divert prying eyes.

Just over an hour later, beneath the soft and warm lights of Leinster House, Oireachtas sport committee members took it in turns to bemoan the fact they couldn’t see Hallgrímsson’s employers.

The subject of the meeting was safeguarding at the FAI. Present: representatives from Sport Ireland, the Department of Sport and An Garda Síochána. Missing: anyone from the FAI.

“This is like a wedding without the bride and groom,” said Brian Brennan TD, calling the FAI’s absence “disgusting” and saying the committee were being treated like a “rag doll”. Daniel Ennis TD said the FAI’s absence was “damning”; Senator Alison Comyn wondered whether the FAI felt “above the law” and drew a parallel with social media company X, which refused to show up to answer the same committee’s questions on online safety earlier this year.

The committee has been asking questions about safeguarding practices and standards at the FAI since the Girls in Green documentary, a joint RTÉ and Sunday Independent investigation that exposed historical allegations of inappropriate behaviour to female players by male coaches in Irish soccer.

A follow-up meeting on the subject with the FAI was held on September 30th, which fell right in the middle of the extraordinarily contentious games against Israel. With those games dominating proceedings, the FAI were invited back to talk again after the fog of Israel had cleared. The fixed date was Wednesday, but the FAI wrote to say they couldn’t attend as they are too busy with international matches. Given the FAI were willing to meet in the week of the Israel games, the committee gave this short shrift. “They were busy then too,” noted Ennis, wryly.

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This is why the committee went ahead with their production of Hamlet without the prince, where the chief contention was that the committee was the only body taking the issue of safeguarding sufficiently seriously.

In the September meeting, committee members quizzed the FAI about their database of registered coaches and referees, asking whether all had been properly Garda vetted and cleared to work around children.

After the meeting, the FAI analysed their database and found what they described in a letter to the committee as “inconsistencies”. The FAI say this was partly down to outdated registrations and duplicate profiles, and they deactivated the registrations of anyone whose Garda vetting credentials could not be established. The committee heard that this led to the abrupt standing down of 6,000 coaches, which caused “chaos” at clubs across the country.

The Gardaí acknowledged this number is “unprecedented”, while chair Alan Kelly insisted this is not a story about an IT issue, but about the importance of safeguarding. If the FAI’s technology was faulty, he said, then they stand accused of not taking the subject sufficiently seriously in the first place.

While criticism of the FAI is familiar Oireachtas fare, the fact Sport Ireland were also in the firing line was more novel. Generally, whenever a sports governing body ends up before the committee embroiled in controversy, Sport Ireland hold up their clean hands to explain they are merely a promotional body and not a regulatory body, and do not have statutory powers of investigation.

Senator Evanne Ní Chuilinn, however, pointed to section five of Sport Ireland’s funding charter with sports bodies, which gives them powers to “audit, inspect or investigate” a governing body. Lingering on the word investigate, she asked why they had not applied these powers to the FAI in this instance.

CEO Úna May replied that Sport Ireland pull this lever only in “extreme situations”, which usually results in the suspension of State funding. “If this didn’t meet the threshold of concern, then I don’t know of anything that would,” said Kelly, describing proceedings as “one of the most serious meetings” the committee has had. He told Sport Ireland they had to act on the FAI. In saying this, he stopped just short of telling them to suspend the FAI’s funding. This would have enormous financial and reputational ramifications for the FAI, but they were not there to hear about it.

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