Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the positive nature of the last two paragraphs of the reply, which refers to the acknowledgement in the programme for Government of the importance of swimming among other activities and the comments of the Minister for Finance. I do not have the time to go into the finances of both local authorities. I think it is accepted that they are the lowest funded in the whole of the country. That is a separate problem. In addition to that we have Covid. We had a Zoom meeting last Friday. Zoom meetings are never very good for interaction but it was good in the sense of getting a presentation. The manager conveyed to us that the financial situation in Galway city is dire. He said there has been no certainty at all from the Department in respect of the payment of rates and the absence of money.

I am not going to go into that but I am going to use my minute to highlight another irony. We are putting money into opening up pubs, and rightly so, as we need pubs and we need to ensure staff have jobs. However, the irony cannot be lost on the Minister of State that while we are opening up pubs with the help of public funds, we are closing down public swimming pools. There is something seriously wrong with that logic given the programme for Government and the essential nature of swimming pools. On the announcement of the stimulus package, in his last two minutes the Minister of State might clarify if that was specifically for private bodies such as hotels and leisure centres and not for public swimming pools. It is very ironic if we are going to keep private swimming pools open once they have some limited access to the public while we close down the public swimming pools. It was literally closing down. The staff were called in and told it was closing down the following week. It was simply as a result of pressure that we kept it open until Christmas. I still do not hear the Minister of State saying that we are making a commitment to keeping our public swimming pools open because they are an essential service on so many levels. I would like to hear that.

See this speech in context