Going for Gold

Mary Peters may remain one of the few locally produced Olympic gold medalists that you could name due to a chronic lack of funding into sports.
Sports NI were in Stormont today to impress upon the Committee for Culture Arts and Leisure the value of investing more money into this area. The committee had heard a similar presentation from the Arts Council last week so they were keen to hear how the amount invested into sport compared to the miserable £6.13 spent per person per year on arts.
Eamon McCartan, Chief Executive of Sports NI, surprised a few members by saying that sports were some 30 per cent worse off than the arts sector, with a mere £4.38 being spent per person, per annum. Mr McCartan was only warming up, as he was armed to the teeth with stats, the most impressive (and depressive) probably being that it is estimated that for an every Olympic Gold medal it takes some £1.6million of investment on top of a hernia enducing 10,000 hours of training.
Not to be outdone by depressing sports statistics Sinn Féin's Francie Brolly chipped in with some of his own, claiming that there are only seven publicly provided Gaelic pitches in the Belfast area compared to 62 soccer pitches, causing serious pressures on local teams, and stymieing the creation of new clubs. In response to his question about what they were doing about the shortfall, the Sports NI officials diplomatically said that they advocated the creation of multi-use pitches but it should be done as part of a community planning model.