No party nails it on sport, but there are actually some good ideas across all the major manifestos

PORT is the fun one right? The fluffy one? The largely speaking inconsequential one? Good for a headline, good for a photo op, but not really worthy of expending real political energy or capital on.

Sure it’s useful to be seen to be splashing the cash – money for Croke Park, money for sports grants – but as regards the nitty gritty of policy, sport has never really been anywhere near close to the top of the agenda.

Usually the only time that it does make its way to the top of a government’s in-tray is when something has gone terribly wrong like it has at the FAI. There hasn’t been anything fun about the news emanating from Abbotstown in the last nine or ten months since Mark Tighe’s initial bombshell broke in The Sunday Times.

There’s been nothing fluffy and inconsequential about that as the fate of an organisation, of many people’s livelihoods, hung in the balance. No brilliant photo-ops, no great headlines, no feel-good factor.

Even last week when the government (in the persons of Minsters Shane Ross and

Brendan Griffin) announced its rescue plan for the FAI, it wasn’t necessarily a political winner for them. Yes, the majority of people will be delighted and relieved that a way out of the impasse was found, but at least as many will be annoyed that the taxpayer will be on the hook for most of it.

The whole FAI débâcle has shown that sports policy can be deadly serious; it’s shown that it’s important; it’s shown that it deserves more than just lip service.

That the crisis reached such a critical stage during an election campaign is, perhaps, serendipitous. It allows us the chance to think about these issues and to assess, by looking at the manifestos of the parties in Dáil Éireann, just how seriously our political parties take sport, how much thought and consideration they’ve put into their policy proposals and, overall, we’ve got to say they’re not bad, not bad at all.

No one party knocks it out of the park (pardon the sports pun), but in pretty much all of them there’s something interesting to be gleaned. Regardless of how things turn out and what