There are far greater needs in sport than 50m pool

"I'm only interested in winning, and TNT, my international sponsors, are only interested in winners." Michelle Smith's words in the radio ad that played all last week reflect the priorities of both elite athletes and multinational companies. Great champions dedicate their lives to the achievement of victory, and big business basks in the reflected glitter of gold medals.

But a society like ours, even while it hungers for such glory, can't just be interested in winners. We recognised as much this week in the way we reacted to Sonia O'Sullivan's traumatic defeats in the 5000 metres final and the 1500 metres heats. We felt sorry for ourselves, but more than that, we felt genuine sympathy for Sonia. And those feelings arc, in their own way, just as much a cause for national pride as are the vicarious thrills of watching an Irishwoman beat the world.

At a time when "winner takes all" has become the core value not just of sport, but also of economics and politics, we showed that we haven't entirely lost the capacity to care about the hurt and defeated. We grew up a little bit, edged a little bit closer to accepting that when it comes to embodiments of the nation, this week's images of pain and loss are no less appropriate than last week's images of joy and triumph.

If we really believed all the slogans about nobody remembering the losers, why do we share more deeply the anguish of Sonia's collapse than the pleasure of Michelle's triumph? Is it because the great champion becomes a person apart, while the sad loser is drawn back into common humanity?

When we come to talk about the place of sport in public policy - 50 metre pools and level playing fields - we should keep in mind the images both of this week and last, and remember that its importance to our society is not just about the production of dazzling heroes. We love, and need, winners. But they should represent a society's virtues, not mask its vices.

The aim of putting money into sport should be to help create proud images of a reality that we can be justifiably proud of, not fantasies to distract from the shameful state of a degraded place.

A 50 metre pool would be nice, but if it comes to hard choices, there are more urgent priorities in the queue for whatever public resources are to be devoted to sport. Just over two years ago, for instance, the Dublin South Inner City Community and Sports Complex Project was launched by the residents of one of the country's most deprived areas.

IT is a visionary plan for an area that desperately needs visions. It was developed by the community associations for an area that has the highest concentration of local authority flats in the State, including Fatima Mansions, Dolphin House, St Teresa's Gardens, Basin Street flats, School Street flats, and Oliver Bond House. Some of these flat complexes have unemployment rates of 80 per cent.

Their life blood is contaminated with heroin and its consequences. Of the 32,000 people lying in the area, about 1,000 inject heroin and another 500 smoke it. In one neighbourhood there are 185 people between the ages of 16 and 55, and 61 of them are known to be abusing illegal drugs.

Eleven per cent of that community's population in that age group has either died of drug related causes or is HIV positive. Not surprisingly, the crime rate in the south inner city is nearly twice, that for the city as a whole.

There used to be a swimming pool in the area, and in a sense there still is. The Iveagh Baths, which used to serve the local community, was closed and then reopened as an up market private facility, with membership fees well beyond the reach of most of the people who actually live near it. There is no substantial soccer or GAA club, and no hall large enough for indoor sports.

The district may well contain potential future champions, but as things stand no one will ever know. It is not only very difficult for any of them to play any sport, but also for some of them there is no future. It is vastly easier for them to score a heroin deal than it is to score on a playing field.

The local community groups are desperate for sports facilities, which they see as literally a matter of survival for their children, a way of keeping them out of the clutches of the drug dealers. They have taken the initiative for the conversion of the dilapidated old Wills cigarette factory, which they have been given by Dublin Corporation, into a multi purpose community and sports complex.

The idea is to integrate sports facilities - indoor football, basketball, volleyball, a gym, a weights room, a boxing and martial arts ring, a snooker room, and changing areas - with resources for education, community development and social life. To place sport, in other words, exactly where it should be - at the heart of a community's struggle for dignity and against degradation.

SO far, the community has raised £30,000 in private donations towards the estimated, £3 million cost of the development, and the Department of Social Welfare has given £45,000 to keep the project going. At the moment, though, development is stalled by two things - the lack of progress in securing some necessary extra land from Dublin Corporation and the absence of a firm commitment from the Government to a promised £1 million of funding.

From the point of view of people in the south inner city, and the many similar places all over Ireland, big talk about spending £30 million on a 50 metre swimming pool sounds like the same old story of warped priorities.

You don't create champions because you spend millions on facilities. Ireland did not have two of the best cyclists in the world in the 1980s because it invested in cycling stadiums in the 1970s. Conversely, even if we invested millions in cycling facilities now, we would be very unlikely to get a Sean Kelly or a Stephen Roche in 2006.

Elite sport is essentially about outstanding individuals, and public money should be directed towards those individuals. For much less than the cost of a 50 metre pool, we could give the hundred most promising athletes in Ireland access to the best training facilities abroad, the best international competition, and the best available coaching. We should, by all means, do so.

Capital investment, by contrast, should aim to provide a place for sport in the lives of as many people as possible. And it should start with those whose need for it is greatest. By funding projects like that in the south inner city of Dublin we could also help our elite athletes to feel that what they represent is a country that really has the right to strut its stuff on the world stage.

Such a feeling might also lift some of the burden of expectation from their shoulders. If we could begin to fill the terrible holes in our society, maybe the hunger for heroes that places such impossible demands on our few great athletes would not have such an edge of guilty desperation to it.