The Irish government says it will cut all state funding for boxing next year unless the Irish Athletic Boxing Association (IABA) agrees to reforms in the next two months.
On Sunday, the IABA overwhelmingly rejected proposed reforms at an emergency general meeting.
Those proposals included an expansion of the body’s board of directors and a change in the appointment process.
The decision prompted an immediate 15% cut to government funding.
Sports Minister Jack Chambers told RTE’s Morning Ireland that in response to Sunday’s vote, the government has informed the IABA board that it must bring forward “positive steps on how they propose to reform and bring governance” or there will be no state funding for boxing in 2023, aside from those athletes in their high performance unit.
Among the proposals not passed at Sunday’s EGM in Roscommon was a motion to allow the IABA’s annual and emergency general meetings to be held in Northern Ireland, despite boxing being governed on an all-island basis.
“I’m really surprised to see the rejection of the motion to have AGMs in the north,” said Mr Chambers.
“It’s a 32-county, All-Ireland organisation and I cannot understand how this was rejected as well. It sends a terrible message. We’ve had many successful boxers from the six counties.”
The motion received 68 votes in favour and 35 against, falling short of the 75% required to pass. Meanwhile, the reform motion was emphatically defeated, with 80 votes against and just 25 for.
The IABA has been at the centre of controversy recently, with high performance director Bernard Dunne acrimoniously leaving his role in May.
“If there’s no reform we cannot continue to fund IABA in its current governance structure,” Mr Chambers continued.
“I’m being very clear to those who run IABA that they need to embrace the basic levels of reform. The proposed reforms are very practical and basic. We cannot have the ongoing dysfunction.
“We cannot continue with the status quo. We need to speaking about supporting and building grassroots boxing right through to high performance.
“I want to support them. The members themselves have decided to follow through with this. It’s a marginal cut in funding – 15% – and it is a crisis of their own making as an organisation.
“They have a clear choice of getting the threshold of funding they were allocated but even more this year – above and beyond what they got last year – if they embrace reform.”
