Alan Farrell (Dublin Fingal, Fine Gael)
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I cannot disagree with anything Deputy Catherine Murphy has said. It is an unfortunate reality that the viability of these projects is called into question. I have a legacy community based swimming pool in an affluent suburb, which has required consistent and continuous funding from local government and national Government to keep it going, and now we are proposing to put pools into communities which, quite frankly, really require them because there are no private facilities that offer the same service at a reasonable cost. However, the ongoing maintenance and the energy and environmental side of things have to be taken into consideration. I am all for these projects, but the reality from the perspective of the Committee of Public Accounts is we are spending huge amounts of money on projects and there are no criteria that I can see in terms of a capacity of a community to support it or a capacity of a community to have a sufficient number of residents within a reasonable distance to access the facility. I question the viability of continuing funding for projects such as these based on good value for money and taxpayers' money being put into projects.

Of course, I am all for these projects, but we really need an injection of reality into the conversation as to whether they can be funded. If we look at other community facilities that have been built, there is one, for instance, in Donabate which required €600,000 of taxpayers' money to keep it from going under a few years back, and that was before the crash I might point out. There are some serious questions that have to be asked as to whether the State can afford to run these projects and whether we might be better looking at public private partnership as an option to keep them running. This is not an ideological thing, it just relates to whether or not it is possible to afford these things. It is something I would certainly like to weigh in on, and I accept it would be a matter, in terms of policy direction, for the line committee and the Minister to look at, but we as a body have a responsibility to look at whether it represents good value for money.