Paris results show country can shift from aiming to punch above its weight, says former Sport Ireland chairman
Swimmer Daniel Wiffen with the gold and bronze medals he won for Ireland at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. Photograph: James Crombie/Inphoin Brazil still rouses painful memories for Kieran Mulvey, the industrial relations troubleshooter who was chairman of Sport Ireland at the time.
Just eight years later Ireland has had its most successful ever Olympic Games. The target was to win five to seven medals and to be competitive - finishing in top 10s and making the finals in 16 to 19 events. The medal target has been hit, with an overall goal of taking 17 to 23 once the Paralympic Games have concluded at the end of the month. Ireland is aiming for 12-16 medals in that event.
“Time is a very important component in all this,” says McDermott, who joined the organisation’s first incarnation — the Irish Sports Council — at its inception in 1999. “You have to get your base structures right; maybe money was available but there wasn’t much of a system, there wasn’t much to invest in. You have to build the thing.”
“There has been a history over the years of internal disputes within governing bodies,” says Mulvey. “I don’t think a month went by without a dispute going on over the appointment of CEOs or coaches.” Hickey’s Olympic Council of Ireland was recast as the Olympic Federation of Ireland, under the leadership of Sarah Keane, the chief executive of Swim Ireland, who will step down as federation president at the end of this year.
Varadkar wanted Ireland to have a greater prominence on the international stage, with more embassies and a seat on the UN Security Council, but also through arts and sportsThere was also strategic cuteness, including targeting athletes resident in Northern Ireland and eligible to compete for Ireland and the UK, an approach that yielded two of Ireland’s four gold medals in Paris via Daniel Wiffen and Rhys McClenaghen, from counties Armagh and Down respectively.
“We have to consolidate with another four-year commitment now to what high performance would look like for the sporting bodies,” he says. “The greatest recognition we can give to our athletes is that they are funded four years into the future and they can concentrate without looking over their shoulders. That’s the best thing our Government could do for our athletes at the moment.”
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