In that time, it has seen almost everything: gradual, grinding progress, then, in the 80s, an almost overnight boom, to bust. This time 10 years ago was probably the sport’s most testing time in this country.

The national governing body was found to be €1.2m in debt due to a misappropriation of funds. It led to the resignation of a chief executive, its full-time staff being reduced overnight from 27 to 12 and, most devastatingly, the withdrawal of our national teams from the international stage.

That was then. Now the senior national teams have been back four years and underage international programmes a few years more. The debt has been cleared.

The national league has expanded and is as vibrant as it has been in decades, as much to the work being done on the ground as how hip and popular the sport is on account of a global phenomenon like the NBA.

Yet still the sport here has its challenges. Our senior national teams reside on the margins of European competition. The national leagues, despite having one of the best in-house social media operations in Irish sport, rarely feature on national radio sports bulletins, and while the sport enjoys large participation numbers in the schools, kids and clubs still struggle to access and afford gym-time.

To ponder on all of the above and more, we listened to four people on the coalface across the land.

BERNARD O’BYRNE has been Basketball Ireland’s chief executive since 2011 in which time he helped clear that €1.2m debt, oversaw the restoration of a full international programme, and a large expansion of the domestic national leagues.

NIAMH DWYER is one of Irish basketball’s best ever players, boasting an international career which spanned over a decade as well as winning multiple Super Leagues and Cups with Glanmire. A secondary school teacher by profession, she is now on the coaching staff of fellow Super League club, Fr Mathews, having retired from playing at the end of last season.

PAUL KELLEHER has coached four different clubs at Super League level, including three in his native Cork, but is particularly renowned for developing young talent. A career guidance counsellor by profession, he has coached multiple underage national teams and is current head coach of the Irish U18 boys’ team.

JOHN CUNNINGHAM is another one of the country’s most respected developers of talent, having been one of the driving forces behind Moycullen’s success at underage level — the Galway club play in today’s U20 men’s final — and sustained competitiveness in the Super League for more than a decade.

THE STATE OF THE SPORT AND THE LEAGUE: ‘THERE ARE A LOT MORE SPECTATORS AROUND THE LEAGUE THAN THERE WERE FIVE YEARS AGO’

BO’B: I would say it has progressed well over the last five years. Our playing numbers have increased by 60% over that time. We brought the academies on stream and that has improved year on year. We set the goal of our international teams achieving A level when people thought we were just dreaming but we have done it twice in the last three years [with the success of the U16 and U18 national women’s teams].

We’d be now hoping that our senior teams this summer with the ladies in Cyprus and the men’s in Limerick will come up [from the bottom grade that is the Small Countries].

PK: People don’t realise just how extraordinarily popular basketball is. This week alone you had 12 national schools finals up in the Arena.

Twelve different divisions in one week! With teams from all over the country.

ND: It was interesting watching the two upsets in the women’s Cup [semi-finals] the other week, it means we’re going to have new Cup champions. Brunell have never won the Cup. Killester haven’t won it in 15 years and none of their current players were around then. So, I think that’s exciting, that the new decade is starting with the emergence of new teams. Don’t get me wrong, Glanmire are still very competitive and DCU will probably win the league, but the league has far more competitive depth than it had a few years ago when it was just Glanmire, DCU, and UL winning everything.

I had to step down myself [to Division One with Fr Mathews] a few years ago to appreciate it.

There’s a real drive and chase for promotion when for years it was stagnant at that level.

Every game is competitive, everyone can beat everyone, while there was a stretch there for five years when the top three didn’t lose a game to the rest of the league.

JC: There’s a good buzz about the game at the moment. Tralee are obviously leading the show in terms of crowds but even this year I’ve seen a big improvement around the country. We work hard to bring in about 250-300 a game.

We played Éanna two years ago and there was just the proverbial two men and a dog. This year they had the place full. UCD used to be a dead enough place to play but now they’ve got a good support.

And the league is really competitive. There’s only one game between first and fifth. We’re second from bottom but just above is [last year’s Cup winners] Killester. And it’s not as if we’re 3-12, we’re 5-10. We have to play well to win but we feel if we do, we can win. Even against a Tralee side that would have that bit of bulk on us, it’s not a case of damage limitation.

Every night we feel if we do certain things well, we can win. That’s a sign of how competitive the league is.

PK: I think in the men’s league we’re caught in limbo with the rules. I personally think with most clubs already having two Americans on their books, just let them play [currently only one can be on the court at any one time]. It definitely needs to be looked at again. I think it would raise the standard of the league and crowds even more.

JC: I’d be nervous about that. I mean, one of the big issues is always around how many Irish players are getting to play. I know [Moycullen] are a bit of an exception, we’d take pride in nearly all our lads having come through the club; any fella on the court has played underage for Ireland. But I look at a club like Killorglin.

They had a good batch of young players there, but where is the pathway for those guys to get on the floor when there are Americans and several Europeans ahead of them? I’m not knocking it, maybe they can’t compete any other way, but does it develop your own players?

PK It’s no coincidence that the most successful teams in recent years — Templeogue, Tralee, [UCD] Marian — have a lot of experienced Irish players and Europeans. And I think Moycullen will break through when their young players are more experienced.

They’re rooted in the community, they’re teaching the game the right way, the parents all know their role. For 10 years now they’ve had at least one team at every Cup semi-final weekend in Cork and been in a lot of finals. It’s a system you could model.

JC: There’s been a lot of good work done in Galway over the last 10 years, not just by us. If you look at schools basketball, there’s always a Galway team in the reckoning. You could say at underage level Galway is what Cork was. And that was because we were ready to travel to Cork, to Dublin, to wherever to get good games while some places remained a bit insular.

But it’s a constant struggle. This is my fourth year in the Super League and while we’ve been on the verge of being really competitive, it’s just so hard to hold enough of the better lads for long enough.

On one hand, we’re lucky in that about 90% of our underage male players go to college in Galway. But then after that, everyone with a bit of ambition either heads to Dublin or out of the country. And that’s a challenge we can’t really overcome. It’s not like we can pay them to play. So really we just have that five-year window when they’re doing their degree or maybe a masters.

PK: For a good while there the GAA, soccer, and rugby had it over us. They had more academies and pathways to being a provincial, county, or international player. But now with the introduction of the regional academies, there is a pathway to be a high-level basketball player: to play for Ireland, to go to the States on scholarship, to maybe play professional basketball in Europe.

ND: You now have to get your coaching badges and do your CPD. I know it can be a pain in the arse for people getting to some of these things but it’s important, because to improve skill levels, we have to improve our coaching.

PK: When I first started with national underage teams, there was a dearth of talent. We had about five players who had to play a ton of minutes, two others who could play a bit and then the other five hardly mattered because they were barely going to see the floor. Now [with the Irish U18s) I can honestly say we have 22 players who could play at European level.

BO’B: [The recreation of the role of a] Performance Director has been on the agenda but the conversations have developed a bit since.

PK: It’d be great in theory but wouldn’t work here. Why? Because this country hates too many people! We try to find flaws in everything and everyone, even if they’re just trying to better the kids and the game.

BO’B: The danger people saw with having a technical or performance director was that it would become a personalised issue.

If we were to appoint someone already within the sport here, he or she would encounter people who wouldn’t like them or wouldn’t value them, so there would nearly be opposition from the get-go.

And then if you were to bring someone from the outside, it would take them a long time to get up to speed with the Irish game. The one we’re now coming around to is having a forum of expertise that will drive the technical policies, so it isn’t any one individual. I think that’s the way to go.

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY: ‘I’M LOSING MY LIFE WITH THE FAI SITUATION AND SPORT IRELAND. IT’S DOUBLE STANDARDS’

JC: The cost of basketball is just a nightmare, especially for clubs like us.

One of the reasons basketball is so popular in schools is it because it’s largely free. But then when kids suddenly transition into a club, they have to pay to train late in the evening.

In Moycullen, we probably pay €40,000 a year in hall rental alone. Now you could say, ‘Sure well, over 10 years that’s €400,000.’ But we’ve been trying to build a community centre for years here in Moycullen and it’s very difficult to align so many groups.

So not only do we not have our hall in Moycullen, there isn’t a hall in Moycullen to rent out. We play Super League in NUIG but don’t get to train there. As a club we train in the Jes [Coláiste Iognáid], Oughterard, Killanin, St Mary’s, anywhere we can get.

We’ve been to so many tournaments in Europe in some small town somewhere, no bigger than Moycullen, and there’s a beautiful hall, central-heated, clean, neat, all state-funded and hugely affordable to the local clubs, a pittance to what we pay here. But in Ireland our infrastructural policy has been so political and ad hoc.

You end up with a bunch of gyms in one county because someone was the minister. Sport has suffered because of that. The lotto was supposed to be great for sport but how much of that went into golf clubs?

Almost every gym here has to be a money-making venture to balance the books because the schools or community have to make back the money they spent on building it. And then they need a big insurance policy to rent out their facilities. So there’s no kind of subsidy for clubs like ours to say, ‘Hey, you’re doing a great thing here, keeping the children fit and out of trouble.’

There should be some way the Government can make school gyms more accessible and help indoor sport be less expensive than it is.

BO’B: The approach we’ve taken is knowing that it’s not realistic that we’re going to get a batch of €500,000 capital grants for facilities for basketball. But the point we’ve been making for several years is that there are magnificent facilities and school gyms all around the country but the problem is they close at four o’clock and they won’t let us in. Insurance costs are always thrown at us. We don’t accept that.

Taxpayers paid for all those school gyms so surely it’s not beyond the school and Basketball Ireland and indoor sport in general to come up with something that means those facilities aren’t idle in the evening when there are young people clamouring to get in and play sport?

When you go to the Department of Sport about it, they say it’s an issue for the Department of Education, and then when you go to the Department of Education, they bat it away and say, ‘Oh, that’s a matter for sport.’

So we keep going back and forth to different ministers every few years. It’s a real battle.

The arguments are well known and made at this stage about health and obesity and the importance of kids staying in sport, so it’s something you’re constantly lobbying. I’ll be honest, making progress in this area is really difficult. But we’re not giving up on it.

What we do have is a strategic plan to establish four to six centres of excellence around the country, which would be in partnership with third-level education institutions. And we would hope by virtue of those partnerships, it would free up some time in their facilities. It might only help certain clubs within those catchment areas but it would be a real step forward.

PK: One of the things that has hurt volunteerism is that less people are working the traditional nine to five; there used to be more time for people to get out of the house and help out a local club in the evening. That’s changed now. So how can we encourage people to commit to giving their time? There’s a general election now: wouldn’t tax breaks for volunteers be an innovative idea to help?

Drugs are rampant about the place, the studies show how sports participation and retention can help counter that. New thinking and new help is needed.

BO’B: In the last round of [Government and Sport Ireland] funding, we got an 8% raise, so that will help a bit, but we still need to cut our coat according to our cloth. There can be a misperception there that just because we’ve cleared the debt, there’s now a pocket of money to be spent.

There are huge requirements within the organisation, be it something like increasing our media output. If you’re going to develop the game, you need to do that. But the issue of the funding of international teams is something we will be prioritising over the next two years.

JC: My stepson was captain of the Irish U18s but also plays underage football for Galway. Every time he goes away to train with Ireland it costs him at least €15 because most of the programme is self-financed.

Whereas with Galway, a new set of gear is coming into the house almost every week. He has to pay for nothing. Now, he’s probably a better basketball player, he’s just 18 yet starts for our Super League team, but he’ll likely opt for Galway football because it is better supported.

BO’B: At the moment it’s 30-70: we [the association] contribute 30% of the funding to a national team programme, and the other 70 is [self-financed through parents and players’ fund-raising and possible sponsorship]. It is not a ratio we are happy with. Personally if it was the reverse as soon as possible I’d be much happier.

PK: I’m losing my life with the FAI situation. When Basketball Ireland misappropriated funds and didn’t have its house in order, the money was cut off, no questions asked. We didn’t have senior national teams for six years, our U18 and U20 programmes had to be shut down.

And we only got them back up and running because they were self-financed. But you look at the FAI situation and they [Sport Ireland and the Government] are bending over backwards to accommodate them. What repercussions are they seriously going to have? It’s double standards.

BO’B: We have 75,000 people playing our sport in this country. Over 900 schools play competitive basketball. We have 232 registered clubs, 44 of which play in the national league. We have a 50-50 gender balance. We are the number one indoor sport in the country.

And I do think we are highly-regarded by Sport Ireland who give us €700,000 a year. But before the crash we were getting nearer to €1.5m. So we’re still way below what we were getting 10 years ago even though we have more numbers playing the game than then.

At the moment we don’t qualify as a high-performance sport. We’ve argued that’s unfair. We want to push for Olympic and Eurobasket qualification as well but it’s no point in us just waiting for the money when we get there; it’s now we need the money to build towards it.

I know other sports might claim something similar but Government definitely needs to do more. Sport Ireland can only give us what the Government gives Sport Ireland.

PK: Sport Ireland has to help us. We’re getting no money because we’re not seen as a medal prospect. But being supported meaningfully would help us compete meaningfully. Their philosophy has to change.

BO’B: We have more and more players now playing Division One US college basketball.

And in time, that could translate into an Irish player being drafted to the NBA.

That would be a game changer in how we can sell basketball. And if the 3x3 in the Tokyo Olympics is the hit basketball people think it will be, again that will be an extra way to market basketball and get more corporate sponsors in.

If the finance comes in, there’s no limit in what we can do.