FAI chiefs admit it could be another 10 years at least before the cash-strapped body clears its €29m Aviva Stadium debt.
And President Donal Conway has refused to rule out cutbacks within the association amid deepening staff concerns over the FAI’s alarming financial state.
“You’re right, it won’t be debt free by 2020,” he said yesterday. “It could be pushed out ten years and further.”
Former CEO John Delaney had previously claimed the debt would be wiped by 2020.
But he softened that stance in recent years to say the FAI could be debt free by then if it wanted to be.
As of last year’s FAI AGM, the association’s stadium debt stood at €29 million.
UEFA is pumping as much as €10 million into the FAI to keep it afloat amid this crisis, and the association is drawing up a ‘financial plan’ to tackle its problems.
Conway expects that to be completed within two weeks and said: “I referenced that matter with staff this morning.
“We are a lot of the way through devising a new financial plan, one that I would suggest would be a more sustainable financial plan.
“We are doing that in tandem with UEFA. There are a number of partners to this but I'm not really going to talk about that until the exercise is complete.”
Asked what exactly ‘a sustainable financial plan’ meant, Conway said: “Let's wait until the financial plan is finalised.
“We've put an enormous amount of work into that over the past couple of weeks and we are getting to the final stage.
“We tasked Grant Thornton with a complete overhaul examination of our financial department and operating financial model
“We work in tandem with them, with Uefa, and at the conclusion of that piece of work, we would have a new financial model.
“So when you say ‘when did the red flags first appear’ that’s probably not the exact way to describe it.”
There are another five separate investigations ongoing into the FAI and its affairs, but Conway refused to say how much they are costing the association.
“We don’t pay for all the reports but the reports are obviously quite expensive. I’m not putting an exact cost on what one of those cost streams is actually costing us,” he said.
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