A significant proportion of the Pre-Budget submission from The Federation of Irish Sport, which represents over 110 National Governing Bodies (NGBs) and more than 13,000 sports clubs across Ireland, has been used to call on Government to provide increased core funding to support its work in fulfilling the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s).
In a section of the submission titled ‘Sport Matters to fulfilling our Sustainable Development Goals,’ the Federation notes that the policies and strategies outlined in the National Sports Policy and elsewhere have recognised Sport and Physical Activity as a “conduit to achieving many of the SDGs that Government has committed to, on such topics as sustainability and climate change.”
The Federation document goes on say that “In 2024 Sport Ireland published their report on ‘Mapping the Contribution of Irish Sport to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.”
The 17 SDG’s have been long been the source of significant controversy due to their promotion of efforts to ‘Ensure Universal Access to Sexual and Reproductive Health and Reproductive Right’s and the integration of ‘reproductive rights’ into national strategies and programs.
While the Goals themselves do not explicitly reference LGBTQ rights, campaigning groups such as the UK’s Stonewall organisation and others have concluded that Goal 5 on Gender Equality does support calls for “an end to all discrimination and violence against women and girls, which includes lesbophobia, biphobia and transphobia.”
This view is supported by a European Parliament evaluation of SDG 5 published in 2024, identifying ‘obstacles standing in the way of progress,’ including what it termed the “the rise of anti-rights movements.”
The EU evaluation links to a UN assessment that strongly supports Transgender and LGBTQ+ perspective.
However, recent Guidance for Transgender and Non-Binary Inclusion in Sport published by the National Governing Body, Sports Ireland, stated in its own study on these and related issues that “while many from the LGBTI+ community, transgender and non-binary people and their families, are supportive of inclusion through self-identification, this view is not shared by the vast majority of people working and taking part in sport who favoured protection of a female category (as assigned at birth).”
There is therefore an implicit conflict between the Pre-Budget submission of The Federation of Irish Sport and one of its largest National Governing Bodies, Sports Ireland.