Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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I absolutely agree. Obviously, there are some good digitisation projects going on as we speak, including on the 1926 census. There is a larger large amount of material that cannot be provided properly because it is not catalogued owing to the issue with storage.

Could I ask about large-scale swimming pool projects? I just cannot get my head around this because projects certainly do not seem to follow population. The standard is supposed to be one pool per 50,000 people. That was the benchmark used and I believe it was taken from a Scottish model. In my county, County Kildare, the population is just short of 250,000 but there are just two public pools and none in the north of the county. There was one funded for Lucan, for example, but it has not been built. It is very difficult to come up with the matching funding, even in areas that are growing in population, because of the way the local government fund is structured. I hope that will change a little this year. Does the Department have a model that it can show us? If we are to invest, we need to see a return.

We need to have the ability for people to actually access these kinds of facilities. There is a perception that as you grow, the services grow with you, but that is not the case.