Regina Doherty (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Today I wish to talk about swimming because in north County Dublin we are blessed with some of the best beaches in the whole country but for the two fastest-growing constituencies of Fingal East and Fingal West there is a massive population but not a single swimming pool for more than 100,000 people. The issue has been raised on numerous occasions here by me and elsewhere by our local councillors, particularly Tom O'Leary. In the Castlelands masterplan in Balbriggan there is a specific provision for a swimming pool by Fingal County Council. Standard swimming pools of the type we learned to swim in probably cost about €10 million to €12 million. It has never quite come to the top of the list and both the North Fingal Pool Campaign and Swim Ireland have come up with an ingenious plan in the past number of years that we should be putting modular pools in, which cost about €2 million. We could get three or four of them in the county as opposed to just one. The decision was made to put a modular pool in Castlelands because that is where the provision is in the masterplan. Lo and behold, we cannot find a site. We have a masterplan that designated this area because it is thriving with a great many houses, new schools and shopping centres. This was where this much-needed amenity was going to be. We got around all the hurdles of the €12 million to €15 million, and now we cannot find a site. I ask the Leader, genuinely, if she will use her good offices to ask both the Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, and also the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage to help Fingal County Council, and probably more importantly, to help all the people who have been waiting for donkeys years for this pool, to progress this project and to make sure that we get our swimming pool sooner rather than later please.