Dublin city swimming pools heading for a watery grave

Three inner-city swimming pools are scheduled to close this year due to Dublin City Council cuts. Swimmers in Crumlin tell PAUL CULLENof their anger at the potential loss of an essential amenity

THE ROOF IS pitted and leaking, the tiles are cracked and the car park outside is potholed, but Crumlin Swimming Pool is a clean and bright facility and its customers on this Thursday lunchtime are happy. There are maybe 30 swimmers in the pool, but I’m the only paying guest as everyone else is a pensioner.

Length-swimmers move slowly with deliberate strokes up and down the pool, but most people are just treading water, chatting or doing some light exercise. Everyone knows everyone else and they have been coming here for years. Thomas Gaynor, a retired postman, has Parkinson’s disease and finds walking difficult. As a youth, he swam in the Liffey, but he’s now a regular at this pool, especially since the doctor recommended it for his condition.

“I’m very bad on the left-hand side and I need to do regular exercise. Funny, I can ride a bike, though I can’t walk, but the pool is great for a bit of exercise,” he says.

Another man, who walks constantly up and down the shallow end, is recovering from a stroke, while his friend has had a heart attack. Everyone is keenly aware that Crumlin, along with the pools in Coolock and Sean MacDermott Street, is slated for closure next August when the money in Dublin City Council’s budget runs out.

“It’s a scandal,” says James Neilan as he changes into his togs in the dressing room, where it costs 20 cent to use the hairdryer. “They’re going to save buttons by closing these pools, and when you think of all the billions they’re spending on fellas in the banks.”

Myra Kielty taught her daughter to swim here and is horrified that the pool she has been coming to for almost 40 years might be for the chop. “What am I to do?” she says. “I’ve no car, and you’d have to pack your flask and sandwiches to go by bus to the pool in Ballyfermot.”

This is one of only two public sessions in the pool each week, but the previous hour was allocated to a group of disabled young people. Other block bookings go to at least nine local schools, a variety of youth groups and homework clubs, a few swimming clubs and a lifesaving course. All will have to make other arrangements if the money runs out.

None of these people – the young, the old, the sick and challenged – has run away with money from a bank, or failed to regulate the economy, or scored a D-minus in the governance of the nation. They live in working-class areas which have few enough facilities as it is. They don’t have pools in their homes, like the Cork developer accused by a High Court judge this week of evading arrest over unpaid property loans. Yet they are the ones being made to pay for the failings of others.

This is why: the council says it has to make savings of almost €12 million from its culture, recreation and amenity budget, because of cutbacks and the need to fund new services, such as a new leisure centre in leafier Rathmines.

The three pools were targeted because they were older and more expensive to operate, in poor condition and suffering falls in user numbers. Last October, the bean-counters told councillors that closing the three pools from this year would save €800,000. They warned that “if this saving is not achieved by closing the pools it will have to be achieved elsewhere within sports and leisure”.

A fuss ensued, and €600,000 was found to keep the pools open for six months while other options were looked at. This money will now last until the end of August, officials told a council meeting last Monday. After that, as things stand, they will have to close, because efforts to get local groups to assume responsibility for the pools have come to nothing.

Meanwhile, the opening of the Rathmines pool, which has been ready since November, has been delayed, as the plan is to redeploy staff there from the pools to be closed. The 46 apartments built as part of the scheme have failed to make as much money as expected.

“It depends on where your priorities lie – with bailing out bankers or in supporting citizens,” says local councillor Joan Collins, who blames the decline of the pools on a 2001 decision by the council to move away from stand-alone pools in favour of leisure centres housing pools with gyms and other facilities.This policy resulted in the construction of a number of attractive new centres at Ballymun, Ballyfermot, Finglas, Townsend Street and Rathmines. To pay for these expensive facilities, the council generally teamed up with developers who were allowed to build and sell apartments as part of an overall deal.

All went well while the economy boomed, but with the economic collapse such projects have gone the way of the failed housing public-private partnerships (PPPs). Indeed, the new pool planned for Sean MacDermott Street was doomed as soon as developer Bernard McNamara pulled out of the PPP planned for the area. Another leisure centre planned for the Northern Fringe is also on hold due to uncertainty about funding. Crumlin was also slated for a new leisure centre, but the council wanted to sell part of nearby Pearse Park to help fund the project. Locals objected to the loss of green space, and the proposal died.

The council says residents in Crumlin, Coolock and Sean MacDermott Street can use other pools a few miles away, but for some it’s not as simple as that.

“They want us to use the private pool in Ben Dunne’s place , but that’s only open to over-15s,” says Maeve Dunne, a swimming teacher at Crumlin and member of Dublin Swimming Club, which was founded as far back as 1881. “And it’s not feasible to hire the whole pool in places like this; you only get a lane. Crumlin is ideal for school groups.”

The irony of the pools being closed in 2010, when Dublin is European Capital of Sport, is lost on no one. UCD is building a new 50-metre pool, while Trinity College recently opened a spanking new leisure centre. In Crumlin, meanwhile, some commentators fear a resurgence of canal swimming after the pools close this summer. Unsupervised, full of dangerous detritus and a breeding ground for infections such as Weil's disease, "the 'naller" always attracts hordes of kids on hot summer days – as the inquest reports in The Irish Timesduring much of the 20th century attest.

Councillors – the same ones who failed to guarantee the funding needed to run the pools for the year – are opposed to the closures. On Monday, they passed a motion backing stand-alone pools, which may help secure funding for the three locations for next year, probably at the expense of another service.

Bad as things are, they may get worse. Dublin City Manager John Tierney warned this week that local authorities could be facing a further €500 million in cuts after next December’s Budget. Further curtailment of services seems inevitable, and leisure and recreation facilities, such as libraries, playgrounds and pools, are seen as easy targets. In that context, the closure of a few pools might be just a drop in the funding ocean.