In Irishtown, plans for a new sports centre with two swimming pools are taking shape

Rain drizzled down over Ringsend Park on Saturday afternoon, as a flock of wood pigeons roamed the grassy slope leading up to the old seawalls.

They pecked the wet ground, searching for the worms coming up to the surface, while nearby, on the all-weather pitch, a group of men were shouting and bantering as they booted about a football.

On the other side of the partially visible seawall, the Irishtown Sports and Fitness Centre had closed up for the day. The large heavy wooden doors were locked shut.

Some of the car park was cordoned off for construction works that were going on behind the white curving gym.

The council is doing up the Irishtown Stadium running track, which is used by the local club Crusaders AC, says James Cottle, the club’s head coach.

“It’s a state-of-the-art Mondo track being put in. Hopefully that will be in use for mid to late June,” Cottle said.

It’s not just the track that’s supposed to get an upgrade.

Dublin City Council is working on plans for major works on the centre too, demolishing it and replacing it with a new one, including two pools, a 100-station gym, three studios, and a cafe.

The stadium and sports centre aren’t particularly old, having only been built 21 years ago, Cottle says. “But the council wants to do more with it than is currently the case.”

Plus, this area is due to see a surge in its population, as there are plans for 3,800 new homes at the nearby Irish Glass Bottle site over the coming years, he says. “Certainly it’s going to increase the catchment area.”

And the council also needs to make up for the recreational facilities that it expects to lose due to plans for the Markievicz Centre, 2.5km inland on Townsend Street, to be demolished to make way for a Metrolink stop at Tara Street.

With consultations set to happen over the summer, the council’s plan is to apply for permission to develop the new Irishtown centre in October 2025, according to a presentation shown at the meeting.

They would then be expecting a decision towards the end of the first quarter of 2026, said Don Daly, the council’s project manager told the South East Area committee on 14 April.

“The plan is that the new centre in Irishtown will be fully completed before the Markievicz centre closes,” Daly said.

Vision of a more visible place

Irishtown’s leisure centre forms part of the Irishtown athletics stadium, which was redeveloped in 2004, says David Nolan, secretary of Sant Patrick’s CYFC, and who use a small part of the existing building.

“Before that it was the remnants of the old stadium that was there for many, many years, where Shelbourne played in the 50s.”

It was just a concrete bowl with a pitch, he said. “And an old cinder track that was disintegrated.”

But in the late 1990s, Crusaders received a sports capital grant for £500,000 to redevelop the stadium on the basis that the council would run and maintain the new stadium, says Jim O’Neill, the club’s vice president. “It was resurrected.”

The centre was earmarked for expansion in early 2023 when Dublin City Council was looking to replace the expected loss of the Markievicz sports centre on Townsend Street, to make way for the planned Metrolink.

With 3,700 people using the centre’s pool, while another 1,100 go to its gym, the council conducted a feasibility study to find an alternative location, council senior executive officer Donncha Ó Dúlaing told councillors at a meeting of the South East Area committee in April 2023.

That study couldn’t find any suitable public land in the Dublin 2 area, where the Markievicz pool is, Ó Dúlaing said.

But it did identify Irishtown’s leisure centre as a suitable site to create a sports hub for the south side of the city, said Daly, the council project manager at the South East Area Committee’s 14 April meeting.

Irishtown already had a good number of facilities there, like the running track and all-weather pitch, while Markievicz has a 25-metre, six-lane swimming pool, a gym, fitness studios and a sauna, he said. Markievicz is “quite a tight site. But it has been quite successful over the years.”

Plans for more homes and people at the Irish Glass Bottle site were taken into account in the Irishtown leisure centre redevelopment, said Aisling Cleary, a senior associate architect with FaulknerBrowns, the project’s design team.

“We’ve looked at future proofing for that increase in population,” Cleary said at the committee meeting.

The stadium runs parallel to the seawalls, which are a listed structure, but also aren’t that visible, so they were working with conservation architects to protect those, she said, “and also potentially reveal it at certain points”.

The designs also had to factor in that some of the land on the site was contaminated, she said.

In the 1940s, it was a dumping site for the council, and overtime that is how the seawall got buried, getting layered over with dumped materials, she said.

From groundwork investigations so far, they have been able to get an understanding of what these contaminants are, she said. “They will likely need to be relocated or disposed of.”

But the firm is in the process of procuring another groundwork investigation, so they will be able to form a strategy based on that in the next few months, she said.

No hall in the overhaul

Cleary and her team were weighing up whether to extend the existing centre or demolish the current one and build an entirely new one.

They were looking to see which would have the lowest carbon impact, she said. “The actual new build would be better in terms of carbon when you factor in the high operational energies of a pool and leisure facilities.”

Based on the firm’s research into pool facilities, a new low-energy facility would, after about 15 years, begin to produce lower levels of carbon than that of a deep retrofitted centre, according to the presentation shown at the meeting.

So they propose demolishing the old centre and building a new one, she said.

It would include a 25-metre, six-lane pool, a learning pool, and a cafe on the ground floor. Plus a gym and three studios on the first floor, as well as outdoor changing facilities, she said. “It’s on budget and it also has various revenue projections.”

The estimated cost of the project is €43 million, the FaulknerBrowns presentation to the South East Area Committee says.

This option that the council and design team are looking at doesn’t, however, contain a sports hall, Labour Councillor Dermot Lacey said. Why’s that?

Yes, said Labour Councillor Fiona Connelly, “I think it’s really important community asset to have a hall space.”

For example, a lot of schools in the Rathmines area use the hall at the Swan Leisure centre there, Connelly said.

Including a sports hall in the Ringsend project was looked at, said Daly, the council project manager.

Rathmines doesn’t have all-weather pitches though. But Irishtown already does, and they fulfill the role of what a sports hall can offer, he said. “We think we will be well serviced by the three studios that we’ll have in the facility.”

Early this summer, the council plans to hold a few open sessions for local residents to come to, and give their feedback on the plans for the new Irishtown centre, Daly said.

The council should then lodge a Part 8 planning application – meaning the council applies to itself for permission – in the autumn, and for it to get a decision on that around March 2026, Daly said.

Pricing

Independent Councillor Mannix Flynn said Saturday that when the Markievicz centre closes, the community in the area is going to be losing out on a fitness facility.

The centre is being taken away from a working-class area with a lack of sporting facilities and pushed out towards a wealthier part of town with a substantial amount of amenities already, Flynn says.

“A community in real dire need, on the verge of collapse, is being stripped of an asset,” he said.

They should at least consider bringing the name Markievicz over to the new centre, he said.

What was the Pearse Street area getting in return for this loss? Sinn Féin Councillor Kourtney Kenny asked at the meeting last Monday. “There’s very little in this area already.”

The closest pools were in the Spencer Hotel in North Wall and the West Wood Club in Temple Bar, she said. “All very unmanageable and very highly priced.”

There is also the Sean McDermott pool on Sean McDermott Street Lower, 1.2 kilometres north of Markievicz, and which reopened in July 2023.

Irishtown needs to be reasonably priced, and the centre needs to be a public facility, which doesn’t expect parents to pay for expensive coffee while they wait for their kids to finish in the pool, said Flynn, the independent councillor.

Connelly, the Labour councillor, praised the provision of a teaching pool in the plan for the Irishtown centre, but said it was a significant distance away from Markievicz – and shared Flynn’s concerns on the matter of pricing.

Was this plan for this Irishtown centre to be a profit-making venture? she asked.

It is really important that there are soft areas where people can sit and wait without feeling obliged to buy a coffee, Connelly said. “Just that they’re welcoming spaces.”The council will run this like any other centre, with a tiered pricing system, with student, child and unemployed rates, Daly said. “It will be a not for profit centre.”