Last week Tom Kitt's Committee on Arts, Sports and Tourism had an opportunity to showcase its credentials.

It was being lobbied by Ireland's sporting organisations to play its role in protecting sports funding from the savage cuts that are anticipated in next month's budget and Kitt had promised that it would "discuss and evaluate the benefits of investment in sporting organisations and sporting infrastructure [and] question the representatives on the key issues facing their organisations".

What actually happened was a waste of everyone's time. One after another the sporting spokesmen and women stated their case for continued funding, extolling the benefits of sport and the role it played in making this country a better place. Cost and benefit did not form an equation: unchallenged, and unchallenging, the case was made that sport was good, so it should be funded. Case closed.

Some, like the IRFU's Philip Browne, made a stab at justifying investment in sport because it brought economic benefits, others like Matt English and Liam Harbison highlighted the immense achievements of the Special Olympics movement and the Paralympic Council.

The work of the Special Olympics and Paralympics deserves both recognition and financial protection, but English and Harbison were wrong to attach their cases to the special pleading of the major sports organisations who have benefited so disproportionately, and so wastefully, from the past 12 years of public largesse.

Kitt's committee members listened, expressed their thanks, but contributed nothing of substance. They fretted about school sport, talked about sharing sports facilities in small towns and got Browne and John Delaney of the FAI to confirm that there would be no return to Croke Park once the new Aviva Stadium opened. But on the fundamentals of sports policy and effective sports funding, there was silence.

We discovered instead that Kitt has backed Ireland to qualify for the World Cup (at odds of 11/5), that Mary White liked hockey, that Michael Kennedy went to the same school as Pat Hickey and that Michael Ring would provide a civic reception for the GAA in Westport, but not a word to suggest that any of the committee's members have studied, digested and understood the series of reports that have been published by the ESRI on Irish sports policy over the past five years.

The issues about sports funding are not whether sport is a good thing, which it clearly is, or whether it brings enormous benefits to society, which it does. The real issues, as we head deep into recession, are how and where to spend the diminishing amounts of taxpayers' money that will be made available so as to best achieve the policy objective of greater levels of participation. Sports funding will be cut because all spending has to be cut -- the critical task is to identify how to get the most out of the available money.

Last year the ESRI published its evaluation of our sporting investment in a paper called 'Getting Out What You Put In'. Its findings were stark. We have pumped hundreds of millions into the provision of sports facilities, even though virtually no one cites a lack of facilities as a reason for not participating in sport. We have poured a huge proportion of the available funds into soccer, rugby and the GAA, even though far more adults are involved in individual sports and children are far more likely to drop out of team sports as they reach adulthood.

The ESRI report said: "It is apparent that only a small fraction of the overall sport budget effectively targets new active participants", that "the logic of the current pattern of public investment across different sporting activities is hence difficult to fathom" and the government's strategy "states clearly that the aim of policy is healthier lifestyles and improved quality of life. Given the evidence presented here, it is difficult to reconcile this aim with the present funding allocation across different sports."

Sports funding needed to be re-examined, recession or not, and the cuts provide an opportunity to make scarcer resources work far harder. The previous 'policy' of throwing money at those who asked loudest and who enjoyed the most political support was, simply, wrong.

From now on money and clear policy must go hand in hand. Harbison and English have nothing to fear, but the big three should prepare for harsher times.

Sunday Independent