"People just have to recognise that our sport was in a bad way, it still is in a bad way. It's broken, the system was broken. And we have to do something about it. Doing nothing was not an option."
That was verdict according to road racer and race promoter Niall Doggett of Navan Road Club at Cycling Ireland's presentation about new changes it is introducing aimed at boosting racing numbers.
Doggett was part of the road racing review group that studied recent trends - including the number of licence holders having dropped from 4,000 in 2017 to 1,700 last year - and which has formulated a new action plan.
He also offered a very detailed - if worrying - picture of what has happened in Irish road cycling as the bunches have gotten smaller for years. And, in his view, the implications are financial and also impact on the character of road racing, changing it for the worse.
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"Some of the pelotons last year were not pelotons, they were 20 riders, 30 riders, max," he said. "That isn't a brilliant image for the sport. It's a very different road race (compared to a race) with 60, 80, 100 riders in it.
"The race itself is totally changed by the peloton size. It actually makes the race a little bit easier, and I mean a little bit, for those riders who are at the weaker end of a category when the peloton is bigger.
"If you're in a bigger peloton, there's more room to hide, there's more riders to shelter behind, all of those things. The dynamics of the race are totally different. I don't see how anyone enjoyed racing (with) 20-25 riders… the race would split up very early and it wasn't much of a race for anyone.
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"That's the reason why we want a bigger peloton," he added, though acknowledging he had diverted from a question about road safety being an issue if pelotons were larger this year.
However, Doggett then returned to the road safety question, and gave a refreshingly unvarnished response.
"I don't think we're coming anywhere near 100 riders in a bunch any time soon in a separate category race; a C1, C2 or C3 race. I'd love if that was a problem we had to solve. But I don't think we have that problem, we actually have the opposite problem; too small of a bunch."
He said the only time he could envisage a bunch of 100 riders or more was perhaps in a stage race. Doggett added Cycling Ireland was very hopeful the overall number of riders racing would increase due to the changes now being rolled out.
He noted there was approximately 1,700 riders who raced last year. If that improved by hundreds initially, that would be a bonus, and was a core aim of the new Cycling Ireland plan. But the first challenge was perhaps to encourage those 1,700 to race more often.
"One of our big problems last year was that we had 1,700 riders with (racing) licences but we didn't have 1,700 riders who turned up to races regularly," he said.
The changes being implemented were aimed at giving riders an "incentive" and to "motivate" them to race again this year and to do so more often. This would, it is hoped, increase the size of the fields in races.
"That's better for the rider and it's also, crucially, better for the race promoters. A lot of us race promoters… we're barely breaking even at races, there's a lot of costs, there's a lot of difficulties - 10-20 per cent more riders, 10-20 per cent more income makes a huge difference to the race."
He said riders needed to give the changes a chance and try what the group feels are "good ideas" which were based on hundreds of items of feedback from the road racing "community".
