What Ross’s cheerleading on €150k for private school tells us about Irish politics

THE TWO Irelands of reality and perception were on display again over the last week with the results of the appeals to the original Sports Capital Programme grant decisions for 2017. Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Shane Ross, of whom this column has been highly critical in the past, became the fulcrum of much online abuse when he tweeted to confirm that Wesley College, a private school, which has both boarding and day students, in his constituency had been granted €150,000 as part of Sports Capital Programme to ensure the resurfacing of their hockey pitch.

Wesley College’s initial application was deemed invalid but the school submitted an appeal in January.

Minister Ross also announced €150,000 for resurfacing of the allweather pitch at another fee-paying school, Loreto Beaufort.

We shouldn’t be too hard on the Minister this time around though. He’s simply repeating what every other politician in Ireland since the beginning of the State has been doing. When there’s good news for the constituency the local TD must be first into the fray with the congratulations. That TD must also give the impression that the award is in some way connected to them.

This was the way politics always worked in this country. The result was, more often than not, re-election.

To be fair, recent governments have made strenuous efforts to keep local and national politicians out of the selection of grants from government monies. And the monies are quite significant. In this case, a spokesperson for the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport said €60million was allocated to 1,800 projects under the 2017 round of the Sports Capital Programme. The 2017 round closed in February with a record 2,320 applications. In November it was announced that just over 1,700 were funded.

Grants are available to sports clubs, voluntary and community groups, national governing bodies of sport and local authorities. Third level colleges, Education and Training Boards and schools may only apply for funding jointly with sports clubs or organisations.

The 2017 Sports Capital Programme Scoring System and Assessment Procedures are easily available on the web. In fact there’s a whole web portal called Oscar (Online Sports Capital Register) which is used to apply for funding and manage the drawdown of grants.

And it’s all very transparent. A list of all successful local applications and a list of all local invalid applications under the 2017 Sports Capital Programme are available.

Lists of successful and unsuccessful regional applications are also available.

There’s a guide to registration and making an application. Also available is a blank sample application form for download, and there’s a copy of a Sports Capital Programme workshops presentation. There’s even a Sports Capital YouTube channel.

Most importantly, the scoring, weighting and assessment scheme is available and very detailed it is too. The third criterion is the level of socio-economic disadvantage in the area from where the application derives.

The scoring goes from 0 for not being in a disadvantaged area, to 3 for being in a very or extremely disadvantaged area. The score is allocated automatically according to the Pobal Deprivation Index.

What’s not so clear is the whole appeals process. In fact, it’s very difficult to find anything at all about appeals on the portal and your columnist failed to find any. But an appeals process there is. The department has said that 149 appeals were submitted prior to the deadlines and 35 of these appeals were upheld.

And Minister Ross was not alone among public representatives keen to associate themselves with the good news for the appellants. Notwithstanding all the rigour and transparency associated with the scoring system and assessment procedures of the Sports Capital Programme, the last line is the most fascinating in the whole 19 pages of the document. It simply reads: ‘Once the above process is complete, the list of recommended allocations will be sent to the Ministers for final agreement and sign-off.’ It doesn’t specify which ministers.

Moreover, once all applications in a county are initially scored, some adjustments can be made to take into account a geographical spread of projects within each county; an appropriate spread of projects between rural and urban areas within each county; and a spread of projects among different sports. It’s a bit like choosing a cabinet. It’s not all about merit and geographical considerations must be taken into account.

The reality in Irish politics is that TDs and Ministers always lay claim to influence when the decisions of independent agencies or civil servants go their way. And that crucial final line gives them that opening.

It doesn’t matter, in one way, if the decision reached by the independent assessors is agreed and implemented fully by whichever government happens to be in power. What matters is that politicians are associated with the decision when there is good news to be announced.

Our Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, stumbled into this whole farrago of decision making in the Irish State with his anecdote last Thursday in Washington DC. He said that, as Minister for Tourism, he had made calls to Clare County Council on behalf of Donald Trump, in relation to a planning application for a wind farm close to the Doonbeg resort purchased by Trump in 2014.

The planning application was ultimately refused and, in another twist to the story, Clare County Council said they had no representations from any public representatives on their file on this matter. All this was taking place on the same day that the independent TD, and former Fine Gael minister, Michael Lowry, won an appeal against the Moriarty Tribunal’s refusal to award him two thirds of his costs.

In its decision, the Court of Appeal ruled there was an absence of transparency in how a decision was reached and that he was not given an opportunity to address it.

This, of course, all relates back to the State’s decision to award the second mobile phone licence to Denis O’Brien’s company, ESAT Digifone, over two decades ago when Lowry was Minister for Transport, Energy and Communications.

The Moriarty tribunal found that ‘a cocktail of irregularities’ within the evaluation process for that licence was complemented by the ‘insidious and pervasive influence’ of Lowry.

Both Lowry and O’Brien rejected the tribunal’s findings as biased, selective and not substantiated by evidence or fact.

Any time governments make announcements about grant decisions, questions about evidence and fact arise. Enormous scepticism reigns right across the country about the outcomes and decision making processes involved, notwithstanding the efforts to make scoring systems available.

The rush by politicians to associate themselves with such announcements inherently brings with it much suspicion but that is outweighed by the value to be harvested at election time by votes from the grateful recipients of such largesse.

This is Ireland as it ever was, and no amount of transparency in scoring systems is going to change that.

The reality is that Ministers and TDs will always lay claim to influence when decisions go their way