Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)

Last year, I launched the Her Moves campaign to support, motivate and encourage teenage girls to be active. The Her Moves branding, including certain criteria around programme design, is now being used by organisations when rolling out physical activity programmes that target teenage girls.

We have also taken a number of other initiatives. Under the community sports facilities fund, which is the new name for the sports capital programme, we asked clubs and grassroots associations to come forward with projects that will help women to participate in sports, the provision of dressing rooms being a particular example. To be fair, a lot of the club representatives I meet know they have to upgrade their facilities and are looking for funding to do so.

We also insisted that there be gender balance on boards. We have moved from a situation where some of our national governing bodies had no women on their boards to one in which they now must have a minimum of 40% female membership. Quite a few of them have achieved 50% and more. That is important because it gives women a voice at the top table. The initiative has brought in a lot of new people. Some of the new directors have told me they really feel it is filtering down through the organisations.

In the case of the community sports facilities fund and the large-scale sport infrastructure fund, there will be no funding whatsoever unless women have similar access to facilities to what is available to men. The day is over of women playing a soccer match at 7 p.m. on a Sunday while the men get the 3 p.m. game. The Government will not fund that. Women must have similar access. It is a matter for the organisations to put their policies in place. To get national or regional funding, they must show their policies to us and put them on their website. We have a template sample policy on the Department's website from which they can get inspiration.

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