The joint ESRI & Irish Sports Council study which was based on a survey of 3080 adults. The principal findings validated data collated in the 2006 Central Statistics Office ("CSO") study which sampled 30,000 people included the following:-

• Sport is good for health with regular participation in sport being equivalent to being 14 years younger
• There are more people playing sport in Ireland today than in the past
• More people participate in individual sports with 76% of adult sport being individual rather than in a team format

HEALTH & WELL BEING

The study establishes the long held belief of many that playing sport improves people's health, but also having played sport in the past means people are more likely to enjoy good current health too. Peter Smyth Research Manger at the Irish Sports Council ("ISC") stated that these findings had implications for NGBs that they needed to focus more on increasing participation rates in their sport. He stated that moving forward the strategy of the Irish Sports Council would focus on increasing participation and that the report's findings would drive future ISC investment decisions.

INCREASED PARTICIPATION

The number of people engaged in exercise activities has increased dramatically, particularly in the last twenty years. In particular, the study found that compared with older generations, current young adults played more sport as children and are continuing to play more as adults. The report indicates that the current generation plays more sport than its predecessors, while children are two thirds more likely to be active than their parents were. Young adults play much more sport than their parent's generation and are therefore likely to participate more as older adults.

THE SPORTS MIX

The mix of sports being played by adults is changing too, with particularly strong increases in individual sports and exercise activities (swimming, gym visits, jogging, etc.) relative to traditional team sports. The research found that many people drop out from team sports as teenagers and young adults while individual sports are played much more into adulthood. The rapid rise of individual sports, especially personal exercise activities such as going to the gym, aerobics, swimming and jogging is notable. Unlike with team sports participation in individual sports declines only very slowly with age and indeed, any such decline is in fact arrested by persons taking up new sports as they retire. As a result 76 per cent of all adult sport is individual sport, rather than team sport. Individual sport it would appear is therefore more sustainable than team sports.

The report also highlighted that both gender and socio-economic factors impact on participation in sport:-

THE GENDER DIVIDE

Adult women are as likely to take up sport as adult men with the gap in participation rates arising from different experiences of sport as children. The gender gap has its roots in childhood, where boys play much more sport than girls from a very young age. The divide starts at an early age with girls dropping out of sports at the age of fifteen. The data suggests that the different treatment of young girls opens up a sporting gender gap that never closes. Beyond the age of twenty gender differences are less striking, and given similar childhood experience men and women are as likely to take up or drop out from sport as adults.

SOCIO-ECONOMIC FACTORS

Less young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds engage in exercise or sport according to the study. These differences are critical given the analysis that health benefits accrue to those who play sport and to a significant degree are retained by those who used to play sport but no longer do. The differences endure and strengthen across a person's life. The research therefore recommends interventions with children as young as five to ten years of age, to tackle the problem.

FUTURE IMPLICATIONS FOR SPORTS POLICY

It remains to be seen whether the findings will have an impact on future sports policy although speaking at the launch of the report, Minister Martin Cullen did state:

"This analysis of sport over the lifetime of the current generation of Irish adults will make a useful contribution to the formulation of sports policy in the years ahead."

Indeed, Peter Smyth stated "considering the kinds of sport and exercise activities that we now know to be undertaken in Ireland, policy has too great an emphasis on traditional team sports. Policy relies very heavily on the provision of facilities to increase participation in sport, yet an accumulation of evidence now suggests that reliance on facilities is unlikely to yield the best results."

Any diversion in funds from hard capital to human capital projects would constitute a dramatic change in current sports policy which sees the lion's share of funds go to "facility projects". In confirming the projected outputs from his Department for 2008 on June 4th, Minister Cullen confirmed that a total of €336 million would be spent on sport. Of this only €56 million which is the allocation to the Irish Sports Council (being just 17% of the overall spend) can be said to be going to human capital projects. The remainder being spent on infrastructure and capital projects to include the redevelopment of Landsdowne Road, the National Sports Campus Development Authority and various projects under the auspices of the Sports Capital Programme and the Local Authority Swimming Pool Project.

The Federation of Irish Sports has been calling for some time for an improved balance in the distribution of the government's spend on sport as between capital and human capital funding. Both the results of the report and the ISC analysis of its finding would appear to suggest that such a change is necessary.

The strong trends identified in the ESRI report would suggest that sports policy needs to adapt if it is to keep up with the changes occurring in grassroots Irish sport. Sports Policy needs to recognise the trend towards individual sports such as swimming, fitness training of several different sorts) and jogging and devote a greater share of its efforts to promoting and supporting these increasingly popular activities.

The importance of participation in sport to the physical and mental health of people is also significant. One of the key messages from the report was that active participation in sport extends the quality of life by 14 years. The report estimates that the health difference between someone with low past participation and someone with high past participation is equivalent to being three years younger. This message is of particular importance to sporting organisations who in the current economic climate face ever-increasing challenges to secure the necessary funding to grow their sport and to reach out to those individuals with previously limited or negligible access to sport.

A copy of the Report is available on www.esri.ie