Karate and camogie funding hit by governance issues
Irish karate hasn’t received a cent of Government funding this year, despite the fact that the sport is one of the new inclusions at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.
This has been blamed on a major split in its national governing body, with two bodies — ONAKAI and Karate Ireland ONAKAI — now arguing that they represent the sport.
ONAKAI received a €6,000 grant last year, but Sport Ireland has not given it any allocation yet for 2019, saying that the grant is dependent “on the successful closure of ongoing governance items”.
“We have tried to work with (Irish) karate but there’s been a very significant split,” said Sport Ireland’s director of High Performance, Paul McDermott, pointing out that Sport Ireland offered to intervene with a mediator last summer, but to no avail.
The row has now gone to the International Karate Federation and in the meantime athletes, some of whom have already written to Sport Ireland, have been left in limbo, with no funding for their first-ever chance at Olympic qualification.
“Athletes are suffering,” McDermott acknowledged, but he said that was not Sport Ireland’s responsibility.
“Look, we have extensive experience of the connection between [good] governance and performance. When we meet with a board of any kind and they say: ‘We’re having this absolute fight, but we’re going to make sure our athletes aren’t impacted’, our response is: ‘You cannot have open warfare at board level and think athletes won’t be affected!’
“It’s for that governing body to fix their own issues because you won’t have a performance or a system and you can forget about Olympic participation until you resolve that issue. You are not adhering to your obligations to your athletes. Simple as that.”
Camogie and table tennis are two other sports who may quibble about yesterday’s grants.
Both of them got the same ‘core’ funding as last year (€395,000 for camogie and €107,000 for table tennis), but virtually all other sports saw their grants increased.
McDermott said that camogie’s did not increase because it lost its CEO last year and has still not finished the process of appointing her replacement, saying: “We made a decision that we’re not going to support that until there’s a bit of strength and leadership there with the appointment of a new CEO.”
He said table tennis still has some governance issues to resolve after a new group took over the sport in the past year.
