The position is for the General Manager of "Canoe Ireland", not the General Manager of "Canoe Ireland, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Irish Sport Council". Canoe Ireland's goals align with that of the Irish Sport Council, but only for a subset of the ICU's/CI goals. There is a lot more to Canoe Ireland, but the ISC has no interest in that. Given the current state of affairs the GM role might even be more at odds with the demands of the Irish Sports Council.leftism wrote:Can you elaborate on this Seanie? I'm not trying to have a go or anything, but don't grasp your logic here. If the Irish Sports Council are the ones paying this persons salary, is their judgement of the candidate not important? Its their money after all...Seanie wrote:Brendan wrote:It is funded not by the ICU, but by the ISC.
One more reason the ICU should be far better represent on the hiring panel.
At the risk of sending some people to sleep, I'd like to talk about how the Irish Sports Councils (ISC) has caused the implosion of many medium/small NGB's like the ICU.
Here's a snip-it of a submission to a "Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure", Dept. of the Taoiseach:
Badminton is a‘ good example of one of the medium-sized organizations and it has received praise from the ISC in recent years. It is a game with which I am very familiar. Twelve years ago it was run by a General" Secretary who was a volunteer and who received a small annual honorarium, a part-time assistant, and a State subvention of €70k.
The ISC has poured money into Badminton Ireland, €3.7 million in the 10 years l999 to 2008, and in €740kin 2008 alone, when it had a Chief Executive Officer paid €70k p.a. and a staff of l0. That was the year it became insolvent, having spent all the State money and its own reserve of During 2009 one competent person was recruited into the organisation who discovered that the accounts for 2008, certified by the Auditors, were inaccurate and the situation was much worse. By the end of 2009 the deficit was 15k. The CEO and three other prominent figures resigned. In the ultimate of ironies one of these was invited to join the Board of ISC. There was no fraud, just complete incompetence on the part of the CEO and the Board and the absence of financial controls.
Does that story sound familiar? In addition to Badminton, small ISC funded NGB's like Basketball, Boxing and several martial arts organizations have suffered issues relating to fraud or financial mismanagement. And we can now add the ICU to that list.
Why? Well if we look back over the ICU's history, the ICU started getting big money form the ISC about eleven years ago. The ISC looks for a healthy growing NGB's, that have organically grown to certain size. This requires a good core of members, the ICU's grass roots. With the addition of funding the ICU's resources and the ICU's focus and resources shifted hugely to Olympic disciplines. The ICU's grass roots no longer had a horse in the race, and soon ICU AGM's were barely meeting the minimum numbers, and two years could go by with out a single motion at the ICU AGM.
Now there was lots of money in the system and very few eyes. The outcome is inevitable. This happened to the other organisations also. To avoid this from happening small NGB's should always strive to maintain its heath grass roots, its base.
The current system for hiring the new Canoe Ireland General Manager is made up of one representative of the ICU, one representative of the Irish Olympic Committee and one representative of the Irish Sports Council. And the GM position is being financed completely by the Irish Sports Council. And everyone knows there's no such thing as free meal.
The ICU/Canoe Ireland has to see that its in it own best interest to also service the wider community and this needs to happen at the most basic levels. I'm not suggesting any radical change, I'm just suggesting that ICU board should be more assertive. A good start would be to add two or three more ICU board members on the recruitment panel. A beefed up job spec wouldn't hurt either.
Eventually I would hope that Canoe Ireland becomes more independent from the ISC grants and that it can eventually make its way back to serving all its members equally.