Bernard Dunne says more needs to be done to highlight the work that goes on at grassroots level in boxing as the sport came under increased scrutiny in the wake of a BBC Panorama documentary programme on Daniel Kinahan and MTK, the management company he co-founded.
Kinahan has been identified in the High Court as a senior figure in organised crime who "controlled and managed" the Kinahan organised crime group.
The Kinahan organised crime group has also been found by the Special Criminal Court to carry out "execution type murders to protect its core activities" drugs trafficking and firearms offences.
Heavyweight champion Tyson Fury distanced himself from Kinahan last year following the public and political reaction in the UK and Ireland to Fury publicly thanking his advisor for brokering the heavyweight unification bout between himself and Anthony Joshua.
While the professional boxing industry has struggled amid the Covid-19 pandemic, MTK have been expanding their stable of fighters, including in the United States.
Kinahan is being sued in a civil case in the US by the boxing manager Moses Heredia after he and MTK allegedly signed the IBF Super Featherweight title holder Joseph "JoJo" Diaz while the boxer was still under contract. Heredia claims in 32 pages of court documents that Kinahan "continues to arrange boxing matches" which are "steeped in money obtained from drug trafficking proceeds".
In a statement, Daniel Kinahan's lawyers said he has no criminal convictions and that the allegations about him running a cartel are false and have no evidential basis whatsoever.
Dunne's world title victory over Ricardo Cordoba at The Point Depot in 2009 was a high water mark for professional boxing in Ireland, with no card of note being staged on these shores in the past five years, since the fatal shooting at a weigh-in at the Regency Hotel in Dublin, which sparked the Kinahan-Hutch gangland feud.
Former Super Bantamweight champion Dunne, who serves as High-Performance Director of the Irish Athletic Boxing Association (IABA), says he intends to watch the BBC Panorama programme but expressed a desire for increased focus on the positive aspects of the sport.
"I think we should be highlighting the excellent work that goes on in our sport," he said.
"There is just some fantastic work. If you look at every DEIS (Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools) area in the country, I think there's a boxing club within three miles of any DEIS area around the country.
He added: "If you look at what boxing's achieved over the last number of years, apart from Olympics success, people don't generally hear about it.
"Any other sport would be promoted from the rooftop and we need to be making more people aware of the good things that our sport does because it makes a huge difference in young people's lives. It gives them an outlet."
