Queries latest swimming pool proposals

NAAS, 25 June, 2001: OPINION by John Kavanagh. We hear that Kildare County Council is making a great effort to try to redevelop the county's two swimming pools. In doing this, one would expect that the UDCs in the areas involved would be doing their best to ensure that the people they serve would be getting the best that they could get for them. The issue was raised at the Naas UDC meeting recently but unfortunately only two issues seemed to be on the minds of the councillors who raised the swimming pool issue.
 
It was proposed to the KCC reps present that the pool should be named after a deceased councillor. Calling the pool after a local politician who was involved in getting the pool to Naas is one thing, but what about the recognition due to the Naas businessmen whose philanthropic behaviour made sure that it happened? This was back in the lean ’70s - every £1,000 put up by the likes of Eddie Marum then is about equivalent to £20,000 today. Surely these people who put their money where their mouth was and didn't crow about it, deserve some recognition also?
 
The second proposal was that the pool be moved from its current location, close to the centre of the town where it is easily and safely accessible to all, to a new location on the outskirts of the town along the Caragh Road well out of the way of many in the town without a car.
 
That road has been the subject of much debate in the chamber with Cllr Egan repeatedly showing how dangerous the road is and bringing evidence of the repeated incidents on the bridge over that road. Cllr Egan has also been repeatedly told how the bridge has a preservation order and nothing can be done to deal with the safety fears. Yet this is the access route to the proposed location.
 
Moving the pool out to this site would move it outside the reach of many people in the town and county. Pedestrian/bicycle access would be eliminated for safety reasons and the site is well out of the way of the bus routes that others in the county use to get to the pool. The days of dropping into the pool for a swim on the way home from school  or while mother/father is doing their business in the town, would be over.
 
(I wonder what the town's Recreation Officer would have to say about this? The officer we are supposed to have under the Government's National Children's Environmental Strategy.)
 
Last year Cllr Pat O'Reilly, who proposed the most recent motion, championed the use of the swimming pool site as a car park ('to pave paradise and put up a parking lot'?). Initially he said that it would be 'temporary' to facilitate a developer's development of the town's main car-park into a shopping area, but as he was pressed further on the issue after protests by a variety of people, he admitted that once the car park went in it would never come out.

The fly in the ointment in his plan was the swimming pool, the county's asset for the people of Naas and environs. The pool's location and the need to provide safe access to the pool by its patrons (young and old) stood in the way of this as did the minor fact that KCC owns the land. Now it seems that, despite the protests of locals, he is off again.
 
In getting rid of the civic amenity that this space represents he will be acting to assist a developer during the development of what was the site of the main car park in the centre of the town (see KNN archives).
 
Has this the potential to be yet another site to be sold to a developer at half, or less than half of its market value - ie how the other two car parks in the town seem to have gone in the last two years?

Was this brought back on the agenda at one of the in-committee meetings with developers that the UDC seems to be so fond of ('in-committee' and so 'out of public eye/record')?
 
What happened to 'clear and open government for the people and of the people'? Do the people of Naas really count any more? Ask the residents' committees such as those from Kingsfurze,  Lakelands and Ashgrove and other action groups who are still waiting for responses to their letters to the powers-that-be.

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