The US Supreme Court judge Earl Warren once said that "the sports page records people's accomplishments, the front page usually records nothing but man's failure". These words are especially true here in Ireland, where sport and politics are major passions and entertain the nation daily. Selling papers and provoking debate, Irish life would surely be bland without them.

The two combined last week when politicians of all hues rushed to welcome the £40 million allocated under the Sports Capital Programme to 680 local, municipal and national sports projects.

This sort of financial commitment to sport is long overdue. I understand that over the lifetime of this Government about £100 million has been granted to sports organisations, large and small, in almost every parish and townland.

The level of sporting and recreational infrastructure in this country is still not good enough. As with health, education and the entire social front, it was frankly, neglected since independence.

Like many other policy areas, the dearth of State funds up to the mid-1990s and the shortage of political commitment over the years prevented the development of the necessary infrastructure.

Belatedly, that is changing. The shameful lack of a 50-metre swimming pool is now being addressed. The new pool at the University of Limerick should be opened later on in the year and about £5 million has been allocated towards its building costs this year. From 2002 on our swimmers should have decent long course training facilities.

Locally, though, we need more swimming pools. Minister McDaid's Swimming Pool Programme has been provided with about £45 million for 2000-02 to give our local authorities an opportunity to refurbish older pools and build new ones. I understand about 50 projects are under consideration at the moment.

At national and local, professional and amateur levels this country needs huge investment in sport. Plainly our sporting bodies need the concerted support and assistance of the State in catching up with the rest of Western Europe in terms of infrastructure and development. Back in 1999, the Irish Sports Council Act gave significant powers and functions to the Irish Sports Council to do just that.

The council acts to promote excellence in sport and to encourage greater participation in our various sporting activities. Using the same partnership approach which is the hallmark of this Government, the Sports Council has incorporated the creation of local partnership, as set out in the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness, into its modus operandi. Through these local partnerships, working from the ground up, the council will build and develop our sports infrastructure at a local level.

This is the kind of partnership approach we have already seen in the National Drugs Strategy and the Action Plan for Homelessness in Dublin. Indeed, in the development of the new Health Strategy and in the partnership agreements themselves we can really see how an alliance of stakeholders can effect real change far more effectively than the old top-down approach, in which a government decided upon an economic or social policy and imposed it upon the State.

The focus is not solely upon sports development at a local level. At the other end of the scale, Sports Campus Ireland is about helping us address the national sports infrastructure requirements.

It is only in the context of the huge commitment to sport at the local level that we can really grasp the vision behind the Sports Campus. It simply mirrors at national level what is being done at local level.

The measures already outlined above, and other measures, such as the £85 million allocated under the National Development Plan to assist community sports and recreational facilities, will do for sport locally what the Sports Campus will do for sport nationally. One without the other would be pointless.

The Opposition disagrees; that is its job, and more luck to it. As Aneurin Bevan rightly put it, "politics is a blood sport".

That icon of all sports, the great and late Dr Tony O'Neill, to whom we all owe so much, still remains to be commemorated. I placed a parliamentary question recently to the Minister for Sport on the subject and his response was positive. The Irish Sports Council apparently is to consider my suggestion in consultation with the relevant organisations and institutions associated with the late doctor. Some have honoured him with scholarships but really it is a building or a park which should be his monument in perpetuity.