It's needed to keep kids busy who aren't interested in the usual team sports, says a councillor.
At their meeting on Monday, councillors for the north-east part of the city agreed to send a letter pushing for the recruitment – at last – of a boxing development officer for the area.
A big part of the role is working with the council in promoting the sport in schools and youth clubs, and making sure kids get a chance to try it out if they want.
For two years, the council's North Central Area, hasn't had someone doing this work, in the swathe of the city that includes Kilbarrack, Raheny, Belmayne, Clongriffin, Donaghmede, Coolock, Clontarf and Fairview.
"This is a matter of deep concern to me, at this stage," said Fianna Fáil Councillor Deirdre Heney, at a meeting of the North Central Area Committee on Monday.
Kids need to be kept busy, and there are lots who aren't interested in football, rugby, hurling, or other team sports, Heney said.
Given that, in extreme cases, vulnerable children as young as six or seven are being groomed by drug gangs and trafficked into criminality, boxing could be just the positive influence that a child needs in their lives, she said.
“Is anybody looking out for those kids, is anybody providing a facility for them to be able to get up in the morning, go down to boxing, and be with their friends, and feel important, and feel they matter?” asks Heney.
“I feel that the city council should be pushing really hard for boxing facilities for youngsters in our community,” Heney said by phone on Tuesday.
It has the added advantage that kids don’t need pricey gear to start getting involved, she says. “You don’t need expensive clobber.”
At the meeting, council senior sports officer Ciarán Farrelly presented a report suggesting there's progress being made towards filling the position.
And on the phone later, Clare McAuley, chief operations officer with Boxing Ireland, said a boxing development officer for this part of the city is hopefully on the way soon.
They are due to put out a job advertisement for the position “hopefully within the next week or two”, she said.
Boxing development officers work with the council, but are employed by Boxing Ireland – formerly the IABA, Farrelly told Monday's committee meeting.
McAuley said there are boxing development officers in the council's other four administrative officers, but she can't speak to why the position for the one in the North Central Area has been left vacant for so long.
“I've been in from October, so eight months, so I can't speak about historically why the replacements never happened,” she said by phone on Wednesday.
McAuley’s sights are on the future, however – and Boxing Ireland has a lot in the works, she said.
There is a new senior management team that has come into place over the past year, she says. “And one of the first things we did was reach out to Dublin City Council.”
In addition to the plan to hire a new North Central Area boxing development officer, there are other new appointments on the way too, she says.
Boxing Ireland is looking to recruit a new head of club support and participation and new regional club support and participation managers, she said.
The Leinster regional club support officer will be a key point of contact for Dublin City Council once appointed, she said.
“At the minute our aim is really to build our strengths and work together and have better systems with stronger governance and stronger working relationships on the ground,” she says.
“There's a lot of dedicated volunteers within the sport, and I think if we listen to them and harness their enthusiasm and their dedication, and we as staff then sort of come in and complement that and make sure that we're doing the right things for the funders [of which DCC is one], I think the world is our oyster,” she says.
The reason a job advertisement for the new North Central Area boxing development officer wasn’t put out at the same time as the other posts they are recruiting for, she says, is that she wanted to “refresh the job description” – and working with the council to do so.
While their boxing development officers have largely focused on schools in the past, she says, the youth club element has “probably been lacking”.
Going forward, that will change, she says. They want to reach as many youngsters across Dublin, and the country as possible.
The new development officer job spec and new development plan will make sure that youth clubs are a focus, she says.
Of course, she says, boxing clubs already embedded in communities have been doing trojan work on their own in terms of supporting their members and their local youth.
But Boxing Ireland now aims to support them even more than it has been doing – as well as reaching people who have never stepped foot in a boxing gym before, she said.
It can be a community-based tool to help with many issues, McAuley says.
“Particularly around drugs and like antisocial behaviour, so those are the areas that we will want to look at,” she says.
“Looking at the crime statistics in the area to see actually is there antisocial hot spots, and where could we really be doing a bit of community work, working with local community groups to redirect people into our clubs,” she says.
To make the sport even more accessible to young people, and to assuage any safety concerns from parents, McAuley says she is also spearheading a medical governance reform for the organisation.
Kids don’t start any contact until they are 11 years of age, she says. Before that, it's drills, pads, coordination work. “The training, the discipline and the dedication.”
But once they do start even light contact, each child has a medical card that documents how much sparring and competition they have been doing.
If a child has been active, coaches and officials can tell by the card that they need a break for a while.
Now, Boxing Ireland is working on digitising this system, moving past the pen and paper, making them even more efficient and ensuring they are monitoring the safety of their members, of all ages, as closely as possible.
After two years with no boxing development officer for the North Central Area, things need to shift soon, says Heney, the Fianna Fáil councillor.
"We need to get our act together and get this thing moving," she says.
"There's lots of new [housing] developments across the city," she says, "we need to make sure that kids are accommodated with sports, that includes boxing."
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