Irish national performance director Jon Mackey has said that the three-medal haul at the World Boxing Championships in Liverpool needs to be built upon with an international flavour in 2026.
Patsy Joyce, Aoife O'Rourke and Grainne Walsh have all banked bronze medals, and could upgrade those colours in the coming days if results go their way.
Mackey, who was appointed to the role earlier this year, said that the success was a sign of what could be achieved, but added that it will require a much busier calendar for those hopes to come to fruition.
"It's been a long time since an Irish team brought home three medals from a World Championships – 2015, 10 years ago in Doha when Michael Conlan won the gold," he said.
"This event has been 10 years in the making, with all the ups and downs between that.
"The week has been a mixed bag with a team of 17 coming over and when you’re at an event at this level you have to take the good with the bad. The standard here has been the very best in the world and we’ve been mixing it up.
"Not one of our boxers looked out of place in the ring even though some decisions didn't go their way, and we’ve been on the end of some questionable decisions which we might talk about again in the future.
"I’d have no doubts about how the selection process went, they were all in the best shape and they all boxed really, really well."
Mackey was clearly frustrated by the lack of opportunities for the fighters in 2025 – describing it as a "shoestring preparation" - and said that it’s something that needs to be rectified with the LA Games in 2028 coming down the tracks.
"We’ll come back and review, we’ll review the preparations, we’ll review the bouts – we still have some work to do.
"There are some areas for improvement but it’s worth saying we had a really unusual year. We didn’t have our best year in terms of our ability to prepare for such a championship, not having competed for so long.
"The women had Serbia and the IBA World Championships and nothing in between and the men have had no internationals apart from Strandja (memorial tournament) at the very start of the year.
"We grabbed as many opportunities as we possibly could to jump into international sparring camps and whatnot, we made the best of those opportunities, and I think they paid off.
"But what stands out to me is that a team can pull off these performances, bag three medals based on the preparations we’ve had. Imagine if we were to have a full year of preparation in international events, travelling, competing.
"We’d do some damage, I think. That’s the plan, we have ambition to do better."
The Irish Athletic Boxing Association formally approved a proposal to join World Boxing at an extraordinary general meeting back in April and Mackey hopes to take advantage of the four World Boxing Cup events they will stage in 2026.
"It’s been an unusual year, we've had very little opportunities to travel and compete internationally and that’s (because) of the political natures of the decisions that were made to move from IBA (International Boxing Association) to World Boxing – we came in pretty late," he told RTÉ Sport.
"So next year my ambition is to travel at least two or three more times to World Boxing’s new calendar of World Boxing Cups and try and attend as many international sparring camps as possible.
"The training at the high-performance unit is outstanding, it’s world class, but you can never simulate real world competition environments without actually being at them.
"For us it’s about getting more travel, more preparation, more flight time – we spent a lot of time in the simulator this year, next year we need to be flying the plane, we need to be getting into the trenches and working out our tactics and strategies through that."
You can watch the World Boxing Championships live on Eurovision Sport
