Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

I thank Deputy Murphy for sharing her time. I agree with the principle of a national sports campus. However, I seek many assurances on how it will be developed, run and managed, exactly to whom it will be available and on what basis. Any national sports campus must be open on an equal basis to all citizens with regard to sports and recreational outlets.

As we know, in most communities, sports and recreation, including football, tennis and other activities are largely driven and maintained by the voluntary effort of local people who put in a great deal of time and commitment for no monetary reward but to make a contribution to society, their neighbours, communities, their children if they are parents, and other people's children. Local initiative, effort, commitment and volunteers are critical to the maintenance and development of sports and recreation in Ireland. I want to see that tremendous cohort of people and organisations of ordinary people facilitated in the national sports campus. I do not want it to become merely a place for the elite of sport. There is a place for the training of those who will participate at a high level in this country and internationally, but the bulk of the resources should be for the development of sport and recreation for ordinary people and children.

I am concerned, indeed revolted, by the ongoing and increasing commercialisation of sports and sporting activities. In most sports now, well known sports people are bought and sold by private enterprises pushing products, whether useful or not, to make massive profits. This has been raised to an exploitative level in our society, with parents in particular feeling the pressure of this exploitation because of the methods of advertising and so on which induce their children to pester them to buy products related to a specific sport or sports person which are branded by particular commercial and capitalist enterprises.

The sports campus provided for in this Bill should be free from all that. It should be open on an equal basis to all groups and people to advance the idea of sport and recreation and should not be dependent on the commercialisation of sport. In particular, it should have no truck with companies pushing alcoholic products in our society or any other products damaging to health.

I am concerned about the framing of some of the provisions of this Act. Section 7, for example, provides that one of the mandates of the authority shall be to develop and provide on the site such facilities and services of a commercial nature complementary to the sports campus, including residential accommodation. What exactly does that mean? In regard to residential accommodation does it mean that once again the builder friends and the developer friends of the parties in government will be given lucrative contracts to erect expensive hotels or accommodation for which people will be forced to pay through the nose if they are to use the national sports campus. What is needed on a campus such as this is good quality affordable residential accommodation which the small clubs and people from around the country can utilise when the national sports campus is made available to them.

When it comes to the appointment of the authority, sadly we have the same old story with the Minister giving himself the full powers to appoint the chairperson and the authority. I have on many occasions in the nine years since I became a Member rallied against the practice of the political parties of the Government of the day appointing to such bodies individuals whose main characteristics and qualities are their level of loyalty and cronyism to the parties in power, rather than necessarily the expertise they can bring to the body to which they are appointed.

The board of the national sports campus should be democratically elected from grassroots organisations throughout the country, representing the different interests, the sports and the participants for whom this sports campus will be a facility. Certainly nobody should be in a position of authority, as a member of the authority or a chairperson, who has a conflict of interest. I mean that in a very wide sense. The Minister is in charge of another body, the chairperson of which uses that facility, which is hugely publicly funded, as a personal fiefdom, virtually as an adjunct to business arrangements. That should not happen in this case.

The establishment of the national sports campus development authority will mark the dissolution of Campus and Stadium Ireland Development Limited which, unfortunately, bearing the hallmarks of the Government, has been shrouded in shadowy deals which, even in the past few days in the High Court, have come back to haunt the Taoiseach and the Government. Anything of this nature that the Government touches unfortunately seems to finish up mired in controversy and in allegations and suspicions of stroke politics. The National Aquatic Centre is far from satisfactory. I will have to come back to that again in this Dáil. We need a facility that is far more open and transparent and can be utilised by ordinary people.

I wish to devote my last few minutes to what the Minister said about how the development of the national sports campus ties in with the Fingal County Council objective of a regional park for the people of Blanchardstown. When I became a member of Dublin County Council 15 years ago one of the main objectives of the council at that time was the creation of a regional park in Blanchardstown and these lands were to be the heart of that park. Despite many of our best efforts and struggles we were frustrated by the Department of Agriculture and Food and other bureaucracies. We have the spectacle of Blanchardstown designed to grow to 120,000 and probably 150,000 people if intensive developments continue to be crammed in, without a facility such as a regional park.

I welcome the fact — in fairness the Minister alluded to it — that a consultative process is to be set in train by Fingal County Council, which will include the local people, as to how this facility can be brought about and utilised for the people of Blanchardstown. In his statement the Minister said, in regard to this process and the local authority, that he will highlight where zonings may need to be changed to facilitate the optimum development of the site. He referred correctly to the huge growth of the greater Blanchardstown area but incredibly for 2,000 of those homes that have been built in the past four years the developers were allowed by the management of the local authority to provide on site not a single acre of class one open space in Tyrellstown. The developers were allowed to make a financial contribution towards the provision of open space in Timbuktu or somewhere else off site which has not been provided.

Given that the Government did not lift a finger to control profiteering and speculation in building land, the developer was obliged to hand over the price demanded by the landowners for a few square perches of land. This is in a development in Tyrellstown of 2,000 homes. That is incredible. The local authority and the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government — therefore the Government — owe a debt to the people of Blanchardstown to ensure some recompense is made in this development surrounding the national sports campus.

Fáiltím go bhfuil campus náisiúnta spóirt á chur chun cinn, ach caithfidh sé bheith ann do leanaí agus gnáthdhaoine na tíre seachas do mhionlach beag. Caithfidh sé bheith oscailte do ghnáthdhaoine ar bhonn réasúnta ionas gur féidir leo é a úsáid. Ar an dóigh sin, beimid in ann an dul chun cinn is cuí a dhéanamh maidir le spóirt agus caithimh aimsire do na dreamanna mórthimpeall na tíre a bhfuil an áis seo ag teastáil uathu.

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