Dodds: halve 2m distance for hotels and restaurants
HUGE sums of money are in the balance when it comes to restarting sport in Northern Ireland, an expert has warned.
Sport NI chief executive Antoinette Mckeown said it will be “incredibly difficult” to put a figure on how much the sector would need to survive the Covid-19 pandemic.
The potential loss of the Ulster GAA Championship this year alone would come at a £22m cost, she told MLAS.
Outlining the impact of the crisis to Stormont’s communities committee, Ms Mckeown also addressed the suspension of the Sports Hardship Fund — just 48 hours after it opened in April — admitting that she shared clubs’ frustrations.
The £2,000 grant had been made available to sporting organisations but applications far surpassed the £500,000 funding made available by the Department for Communities (DFC).
Addressing MLAS, Ms Mckeown explained that Ulster Rugby, the Northern Ireland Football League and Ulster GAA represent a “huge amount of money” and the suspension of all sporting events has hindered the organisations.
“The Ulster GAA Championship not going ahead this season will cost the Ulster GAA approximately £22m,” she stated. “We also know that the IFA is a salaried organisation and brings in a considerable amount of money to the Northern Ireland economy on an annual basis, but it also has a wage bill of £3m.
“That is particularly problematic when you don’t have any gate receipts as a result of games not happening.
“Sport NI is working to quantify that at the minute. This is right across 84 governing bodies of sport where they’ve had to cancel competitions so (they lose) income from those events, loss of third party investments through sponsorship and the volunteer workforce.
“One football club alone has identified their volunteer workforce is worth £1m a year so it’s incredibly difficult to put a price on it.”
Ms Mckeown added that Sport NI will be opening a £3m National Lottery fund at the end of June for sports clubs and is expecting it to be “heavily” oversubscribed, but the body is working with the DFC to find additional funding.
Committee chair, DUP MLA Paula Bradley, said she cannot get her “head around” why the Sports Hardship Fund closed just 48 hours after it opened.
Ms Mckeown said she understood the frustration from sporting groups. She added:
“To have continued to keep that fund open when we had surpassed the amount of money in the budget to deal with that would have been really poor governance practice. We were also very conscious of distracting local clubs from their volunteering work and stunting their attempts of survival. To distract them by filling in applications — even though it was a simple application — at a time when we knew we’d no money, we felt was unfair and actually disingenuous.
“Having discussed it with the department and the Communities Minister (Deirdre Hargey), we took the very difficult decision of actually suspending any new applications to the fund.”
Sport NI is now awaiting the approval of £750,000 worth of funding, which will deal with outstanding applications. It is also working with the Department for the Economy to allow sporting organisations to apply for grants that were previously unavailable to them.
IT would be more viable for the hospitality industry to operate under one-metre social distancing, the Economy Minister has said.
Diane Dodds said she wanted to safely reopen pubs and restaurants sooner rather than later.
Businesses have been devastated by the enforced coronavirus shutdown since March.
Hotels have enjoyed a “huge” increase in bookings since the Executive agreed to set an indicative reopening date of July 20, a tourism chief said.
Mrs Dodds acknowledged other countries had adopted one-metre social distancing guidelines — half that encouraged in Northern Ireland.
“What we do in relation to these measures is guided by the science,” she said.
“It is clear that it becomes more viable for restaurants and hotels to operate under the one-metre guideline rather than the two-metre guideline.”
John Mcgrillen, chief executive of Tourism NI, said hotels had enjoyed a huge rise in the number of bookings since the Executive agreed to set a date.
He added tourists would not want to come if they did not feel safe. “All of this will be driven by public safety being paramount and us being able to convince others that they can be content that it is safe for visitors to come,” he said.
Northern Ireland’s rate of infection, the number of other people one infected person infects, is just below one. More nuanced distancing advice could be prepared for the most vulnerable groups shielding from coronavirus, Stormont’s chief scientific adviser Professor Ian Young said yesterday. Fresh letters are due to go out in Northern Ireland over coming weeks to thousands of people with serious underlying health conditions.