Tim Lombard (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State is more than welcome and I thank him for coming to the House. This matter is on the need for the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage to make a statement regarding the application for an exemption from commercial rates for community swimming pool projects. He knows where I am from. Cork South-West has a beautiful coastline. The need for our people to learn to swim is significant. We need to make sure we have all the tools that are available, including making all our swimming pools available to teach kids to swim. Getting lessons is a big issue.

I had the pleasure and privilege of going to a community-run swimming pool down in Baltimore. It is a lovely part of the world. The location of the swimming pool is very peripheral. The big issue is that even though it is community run, it has a rates bill of €6,700 a year. The pool is run by the community and is not for profit. The history of this complex is just amazing. In 2019, the community took it over after the previous owner went out of business. The community came together, fundraised, took the project on board and made the swimming pool open to the public seven days a week. It is an exemplary project, with community spirit all the way through. That part of the world now has a complex that can cater to the needs of young and old, from Cope Foundation and CoAction all the way up to swimming lessons for kids, schools, secondary schools are all using this complex. The biggest problem is that it is trying to survive in a regime where the local authority is levying a rates bill on it of €6,700 a year. The community owners have no way around it. The nearest competition to them is a council swimming pool in Dunmanway, which has no rates because it is run by Cork County Council. I am dealing with quite a bizarre situation here. We are trying to make sure people have the opportunity to learn to swim and get into the pool. It is a model we could look at across the entire country. We have had campaigns to get swimming pools into places like Bandon, the biggest town in the south west, which has no pool. We have a wonderful complex in this wonderful part of the world. It got through Covid and all the issues regarding energy bills, Covid restrictions and everything else. If it closes, it will be because the local authority is going to levy a rate of €6,700 on it. I could not make it up. It is an absolute joke in so many ways. It is far from the Minister of State's fault.

What we need here is an intervention. We need to make sure Government is going to look on community-run complexes like this in a special way to make sure they are viable going forward. The local authority needs to change its approach, particularly in respect of the rates element. At the moment they community owners are pushing the council to get re-rated and so on. They are going nowhere. It really will not happen unless the Minister for local government steps into the arena to say we need to more to protect community-run complexes like this.

My plea this morning is very clear. We need Government to look at these individual community-run pool complexes, and make them rate-exempt so they can be viable going forward and so we can have the benefit for the entire community. I would love the Minister of State to come down to Baltimore some day to look at this beautiful complex. It is community run and not for profit. It would not be seen it anywhere in the world. It is a wonderful example of what we can do in Irish society. He is more than welcome to come down and look at this. The more people I show this project to, the more people say it is something we need to protect.This is one of the really important elements of community involvement we need to protect if we possibly can.