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

I want to address my questions to the Department and I will start specifically on swimming pools, the swimming pool programme, and what metrics the Department uses. Does it have a wall planner about it? I know that going way back the optimum is one swimming pool per 50,000 people. I know swimming pools are costly to run, and they do not make money, but they are a necessary facility. For example, I know in Kildare where there is a population of 247,000 people, according to the most recent census, if the optimum of one swimming pool to 50,000 people was the case, there would be five public swimming pools but there are two. Kildare County Council has on several occasions tried to get matching funding. I think there is an application in at the moment. Funding was allocated for a swimming pool for Lucan in west Dublin but it has not been built. Very often, the difficulty is coming up with matching funding between the local authorities and Government grants.

Does the Department use that 50,000 metric? To be perfectly honest, looking at the way money was allocated in recent years under the more recent programme, the constituency of the Minister at the time ended up with one tenth of all of the funding over the three-year period in which money was allocated. It does not appear that there is a method of allocation that is about objective resource allocation. If we make an investment, what do we get for that? How is that measured in terms of the opportunity for people to have access to swimming pools in a fair way?

I will make a second point on rapidly developing areas, the likes of Fingal, Meath and Kildare, for example. They are probably in the arc that have experienced the most rapid population growth when it comes to numbers. They do not get the matching resources to go with that. Is that factored into the metrics the Department uses in terms of either Sport Ireland or the Department regarding the kind of criteria that is used for the allocation of funds, because new communities find it very difficult to come up with matching funding? Nearly everybody has a mortgage, disposable income is less, and there is not community development to the point where people are connected to each other. It that part of the criteria?