NEWS

Michael Slavin

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Grants from the Department of Agriculture and the Irish Sports Council (ISC) will total just over €3m for Horse Sport Ireland during 2014. According to HSI CEO Damian McDonald, the Department grant will remain the same as last year at €1.82m. He also noted that HSI had faired fairly well at last week’s Irish Sports Council announcements.

“Between our high performance and core grants, we will be down by just 1% on last year,” he said.

The high performance will be coming in at €500,000 while the core grant will be €773,191.

The Irish Sports Council will distribute a total of €25m to 59 national governing bodies. ISC chairman Kieran Mulvey described the 2014 funding as a middle space between the two Olympics and expressed the hope that there would be an increase in 2015 in the buildup to Rio. In the present scheme of things, HSI’s core grant of €773,191 compares well with the core for athletics at €885,702 and boxing, which is on €366,713. An additional grant of €8,000 will come to HSI from the new half-million Women in Sport fund for this year.

From the Department of Agriculture, HSI gets a basic grant of €1.22m annually, while another €600,000 comes from the National Development Programme that is totally funded by the Government without any help from Europe.

Commenting on the funding, HSI chairman Dr Pat Wall told The Irish Horse: “We have enough for our basic activities at the moment but for anything extra like education and marketing, more is needed.

“We are not just looking for extra money but rather funding for purpose. We need seed capital for an education arm that will get out to breeders and producers. We also need something like Irish Thoroughbred Marketing that will spread the message abroad of Ireland as a place of horse excellence – not just for the top end of the market but for all levels of horse production.”