Sarah Keane would be a product of a much-improved approach to all aspects of the sport brought about by the disbandment of the old IASA in 1999 and its replacement with Swim Ireland. The IASA was mired in controversy over its failure to deal appropriately with the problem of the abuse going on in certain sections of the sport – Gibney, O’Rourke and the rest of them were protected from within. The best thing that ever happened to Irish swimming – the disbandment of the IASA – came out of the worst thing.
In fairness, after a rocky start, the new organisation did two necessary things – it understood the need for development pathways and high-performance programmes and it also put rigorous disciplinary systems into the sport.
It took a number of years to build out the pathways and high dev culture and the eventual arrival of Rudd was the icing on the cake after years of hard work. You now have really strong national development programs at Limerick, NAC Dublin, and up in Bangor. Each of these regional centres has produced world-class swimmers in the past few years. Rudd’s structure and approach are far-reaching – he altered the entire Irish swimming calendar and has the same standardised development structure now implemented in all clubs. It’s a similar story to the rowing and it’s the type of thing that’s badly needed – but will never happen – in Irish soccer and in the weaker GAA counties.
The complaints and disciplinary system is a model for all sports to observe – every club must put an independent C&D committee in place – that reports outside the club, straight up to the lead C&D group at the top of Swim Ireland and to Sport Ireland. Rigorous codes of behaviour are in place for all coaches, parents and swimmers and these are policed regularly. Any of these, if they wish, can take a complaint up through the local system and can fairly quickly escalate all the way to the top if they feel they are not getting due process.
There would also be strong provincial groups of support officers, liaison officers, children’s officers, competition secretaries etc.
Having been CEO since 2004, Sarah Keane can take a huge amount of credit for all of this success. She is generally invisible – the way the CEO of a well-run sporting organisation should be – and John Rudd and his team are the face of swim Ireland from the competition side, while the support structures are what is visible to the club committees and leaders.
At a local level, the facilities are still appalling – any successful Irish swimmer succeeds against ridiculous odds. Parents of a moderately successful club swimmer will have stump up close to €10,000 a year in pool fees, travel fees, entry fees etc. God help you if you have two successful siblings. Swim Ireland can’t really do much there since they don’t build or own the pools. It’s the next step for the sport though – until facilities improve, international success will always be the exception.
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