Mr. Miche?l ? Conaire:

The national swimming strategy arose from a commitment in the national sports policy to develop one. It was in the sports action plan for 2021. Last year we set up a working group chaired by the Department, with input from officials on the sports capital side, Sport Ireland, Swim Ireland, CARA, which is the sports disability advocacy group, and a local authority representative. That group has met eight times. Last year, following setting up the group in July, we had a public consultation. There was a huge response rate, with more than 6,000 responses from the public which showed the level of interest there is in this. To put it into context, previous consultation the Department held had a response rate that was in the hundreds rather than in the thousands. It was a fair piece of work to gather and go through all of those responses. At the same time, we had a series of bilateral meetings with relevant Government Departments, Water Safety Ireland, the Olympic Federation of Ireland, other groups, etc. We have a draft and are meeting again in two weeks' time to hopefully finalise that draft and be in a position to publish the strategy itself later in the year.

As part of that, we identified a lot of the issues the Deputy mentioned. One of the things that has come through from the public consultation and from the bilaterals is the access to swimming facilities. Questions in the survey included: how close do you live to a swimming facility? Are you within 5 km, 10 km, etc.? How do you get there? It asked those kinds of things.