IRISH AMATEUR BOXING has seemingly been plunged further into what Minister for Sport Jack Chambers described as “a crisis of its own making” after Sport Ireland cut core funding to the Irish Athletic Boxing Association (IABA) for 2022 by 15% on Monday.

The cut was applied with immediate effect in the wake of the IABA’s failure to implement several recommended changes to the organisation’s governance structure at its EGM in Roscommon on Sunday.

These recommended changes had been detailed in the IABA Governance Review, an independent report into Irish amateur boxing’s governance which was commissioned last year and written by Brian MacNeice, an expert on high performance and business leadership.

In all, MacNeice’s report made 64 recommendations. Numbers 14 to 21, all of which pertained to the constitution of the IABA’s board, were brought to the table for last Sunday’s EGM to be voted upon by the IABA’s club delegates from all over the country.

The key motion at this EGM was the proposal to reform the organisation’s Board of Directors, with six new directors — including the chairperson — to be appointed by an external, independent body. It was also proposed that the number of directors on the IABA’s board increased from 10 to 12, splitting the influence equally between those democratically elected from within the sport and those elected by an independent body.

Because the IABA operates as a limited company, changes in its constitution require the approval of a 75% majority of its delegates.

Even with the looming threat of a 15% funding cut in the event that these constitutional changes would fail to be adapted, a reality which was reiterated to the IABA’s existing directors in advance of the EGM, it was hugely unlikely that a 75% majority would ever be achieved. Indeed, many boxing-club volunteers scoffed at the very notion, and many made it clear behind the scenes that they would vote against any proposed changes.

As it transpired, the motion to alter the composition of the IABA’s board which had been presented as an ultimatum by Minister Chambers were resoundingly defeated, by 80 votes to 25; club delegates destroyed it even in the knowledge that it would lead to an immediate 15% funding cut and, potentially, even harsher financial penalties further down the road.

Why did delegates vote against the recommendations?

While it would appear on the face of it as though they cut their noses off to spite their faces, this was in reality a protest vote by delegates.

For one thing, many IABA club members feel as though Sport Ireland and Minister Chambers have spent the last few months in dialogue with a number of IABA officials who simply no longer retain the support of the Irish boxing public.

As far back as November, delegates voted for a changing of the guard in several key positions on the IABA’s Central Council — the body which oversees the day-to-day running of the organisation — including president, vice president, secretary and registrar. However, this changeover was delayed by almost eight months because several candidates had seen their IABA memberships revoked for previously dissenting against the Council. Their ban was later overturned on appeal, and a new-look Central Council, led by president Gerry O’Mahony, was formalised at Sunday’s EGM.

As such, though, any dialogue or proposals for change between Sport Ireland, Minister Chambers and the ‘old’ Central Council in the intervening months were simply written off as illegitimate by many delegates: as far as they were concerned, they had already democratically voted for a changes which had not yet been implemented, and their democratic process was effectively being ignored by higher powers both within and outside of the IABA.

And that has been a long-running problem: many club members feel as though their own concerns have simply not been heard throughout this entire process; that they were not consulted in any meaningful way by either Sport Ireland or the minister for sport, who made their own plans for change in consultation with the wrong top brass.

Many feel that some of the measures proposed to fix the sport’s undeniably broken system of governance were superficial, while some feared that the introduction of six ‘independent’ directors would conceivably only further dilute the influence on the sport of the very volunteers that keep it alive in clubs across the country.

The 15% funding cut to the IABA, meanwhile, was not a sufficient deterrent because, as most members see it, the impact of state funding on the clubs they represent is already infinitesimal.

What happens next for Irish amateur boxing?

Sport Ireland and Minister Chambers have now given the IABA until mid-September to present to them “a comprehensive plan for real and meaningful governance reform,” as Sport Ireland CEO Dr Una May put it on Monday.

Should the IABA fail to do so, they will be hit by harsher funding cuts towards the end of 2022. Continued failure to make the requisite changes to their governance may result in the Association becoming entirely cut off from state funding in 2023, a year out from the Paris Olympics.

The proposals put forward at Sunday’s EGM are dead in the water. However, in Gerry O’Mahony, the IABA have a new Central Council president whose dealings with higher-ups will at least be seen as legitimate by the delegates who democratically elected him way back in November.

That he defeated outgoing president Dominic O’Rourke by 143 votes to 94 gives him a strong mandate to shape the future of the association to the will of the majority of the people who compose it. But achieving that future will now require immediate, comprehensive planning as well as engagement with both Sport Ireland and the sports minister.

Any further funding cuts will begin to interfere with athletes, likely beginning with underage teams travelling to international tournaments. This is a prospect which simply cannot be entertained when the IABA’s board of directors meet again in the coming days to plot their next steps.