The President of the Olympic Federation of Ireland has said Team Ireland are confident that they can surpass their previous record of six medals at this year's Olympic Games in Paris.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, Sarah Keane said they are going to the games with not just their biggest team, but their "best prepared" team.
"One of the important things is that it's a team across a lot of different breadth of sports, whereas traditionally obviously we've medalled in a couple of particular sports such as boxing and rowing and obviously they're very good contenders here again."
"Six [medals] has been our best and we are definitely aiming to be higher than that," she said, adding that in order to do so, "you have to create double the number of opportunities to medal."
"So, if you want to get let's say eight medals, you need about 16 opportunities to medal across those sports to really see if it can happen for you. We're very confident that we have those opportunities.
"We're going to going to need our team to perform at their best at the time that counts. And obviously we'll also need a bit of the luck of the Irish as well because that's sport for you."
Ms Keane said that in the last few years they have worked closely with Sport Ireland towards this year’s event, and that an increase in government funding has made a "big difference".
"There is a direct link between and direct correlation between funding and high-performance results," Ms Keane said.
The excitement in Paris "is something else" ahead of the opening ceremony tonight, she said, adding that Team Ireland has "a very prominent place" in the Olympic village.
"We're very close to food. We're very close to transport, very close to anything they need to get to and I think they feel a bit more important because we're in a kind of a prominent place, we're not far from the French team.
"So I think that's an important part of the belief, important part of us believing that we deserve to be there, we're confident to be there and we're going to perform on this world stage."
She said that many of the roads in Paris are closed down but "they're very organised and the excitement level is something else.
Unlike the last Olympics in Tokyo, which was impacted by the global pandemic, families of the athletes are able to attend the Games.
"They're just really excited to be part of this experience," Ms Keane said, as a lot of families and supporters could not get to Tokyo. Everybody's made such an effort to get to Paris."
Ms Keane is due to leave her role at the end of the year as part of the governance changes implemented in 2017.
"Governance reforms are important and term limits apart of that. So I applied the term limits and now I'm going to make sure I live them out.
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