Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I wish to focus in particular on swimming pools, to which the Minister referred in his statement. I use every opportunity to raise the matter. The Minister said in his statement, "The capital envelope for sport also provides €4 million to meet all existing commitments under the local authority swimming pool programme." The original local authority swimming pool programme opened in about the year 2000. I know in many cases swimming pools have been completed, but many others were on the list but did not commence or the work on them was not completed. The programme opened again in a very limited way and there were applications from three areas that fell within the criteria, and two of the applications were included. The one that did not meet the criteria, unfortunately, was the one in north Kildare, and that was because of a fault on the Kildare side. The object is to get one swimming pool per every 50,000 people. My understanding is that that is roughly the standard. In Kildare there is one swimming pool for 110,000 people and there is no public swimming pool north of Naas. The population of, say, Leixlip, Celbridge, Maynooth and Kilcock would be well in excess of that of Waterford city and would approach that of Limerick city, so it is a big gap. Regarding the sum of €4 million, for a reasonably modest and good-quality, but not gold-plated, swimming pool, it costs somewhere in the region of €8 million. There is €4 million in the budget, there are the two applications that came through on the most recent programme and there is the residual from the 2000 programme. What does the €4 million fund?