Council outlines plans to upgrade three sports and fitness centres

Dublin City Council plans to upgrade its sports and fitness centres in Ballymun, Finglas and Ballyfermot.

Design teams for the three refurbishment projects are expected to be appointed over the course of 2026, says a report to a council committee. 

That’s welcome because a bunch of people who use the Ballymun centre have complained about facilities, like its steam and sauna room, being out of order, said Labour Councillor Fiona Connelly at the meeting on 26 May. 

“I just hope that something more robust is installed so it’s not always out of action,” she said.

Similarly, in Ballyfermot, there is a recurring issue with a moveable wall, which divides the pool, but keeps malfunctioning, says Sean Boland, a physiotherapist who uses both facilities. “The wall is now kinda just stuck.”

Swimming full lengths isn’t possible whenever the wall is stuck, he says. “It’s half the pool.”

The plan is to do an overhaul of these centres, Don Daly, a council senior executive officer, told the committee. “The first step is to get condition surveys done and then get a design team in, and their brief will be to look at the whole centre.”

There’s millions allocated for the three refurbishment projects in the council’s Capital Programme for 2025 to 2027.

Frequent closures

A lot of these upgrades are a long time coming, says Sean Boland.

Boland runs a physiotherapy clinic near the Ballymun centre, he said on Friday evening, while heading over to the facility. “I frequent there most days of the week, whether it’s for swimming or the sauna or steam room.”

The steam room, in particular, was a point of frustration, he says. “While it’s really quite good, often it just doesn’t work well.”

It has been out of action for months, he said.

A post on the Ballymun centre’s Facebook page, in January, said the steam room and sauna were closed for repairs “due to misuse”.

Similarly, they announced it was out of order in February 2023 and October 2022, again due to misuse by customers. 

One of the troubles is, they use an electrical heater with an exposed heating element, he says. “What people tend to do, even unknowingly, they assume that you throw water on it to make it hotter, so when they do that, the element breaks.”

There are numerous ways around this, Boland says. They could put in a heater that doesn’t have an exposed element, he says. 

“But nothing has been done,” Boland says. “These are just some basics that are needed. Not even a refurbishment.”

One, two, three

The council’s capital programme for 2025 to 2027 – its budget for big one-off projects during those three years – allocates funding for upgrading sports and fitness centres generally.

There’s €1.25 million for “Sports and Fitness Centre Programme of Works”.

That includes “routine maintenance and refurbishment of the facilities” like “roof and building fabric repairs, replacement of significant plant and equipment etc.”

There’s also €2.9 million specifically for the Ballymun centre, €1.7 million for the Finglas centre and €574,000 for the Ballyfermot centre “extension”.

The refurbishment programme is going to start with the Ballymun centre, Daly’s report to the committee meeting on 26 May said. 

The first step is to put a tender out and award a contract to a “technical team”, to have a look at the centre. 

That can then inform a council effort to hire an architect-led design team to draw up plans for the improvements, said Daly’s report, submitted to last week’s meeting of the council’s Community, Gaeilge, Sport, Arts & Culture Strategic Policy Committee.

The council hopes to have awarded the contracts in time for the design work for Ballymun to start in early 2026, for Finglas in mid-2026, and for Ballyfermot after that, Daly’s report says.

This is all a bit behind the council’s previous schedule, laid out in the capital programme, which said work on the Ballymun centre was expected to commence in 2025.  

“A range of improvements due to be delivered include new significant upgrades to the pool area, signage, plant room works, PVC cladding to the external surface, new seating, shower cubicles and improvements to the plaza area,” it said.

The capital programme does not specify planned works for the Finglas centre, but for Ballyfermot it says, “The works proposed include extension of the gym, improvements to the reception area and car park and repairs to the roof.”

Welcome news

People Before Profit Councillor Hazel De Nortúin, at the 26 May committee meeting, said the plan for refurbishments is certainly welcome. 

“We were getting an awful lot of complaints about the level of equipment, the steam room again, the sauna, the floor now is unstable in the swimming pool,” De Nortúin says. 

Independent Councillor Vincent Jackson said there is the recurring problem of the Ballyfermot pool being closed “at very short notices”. 

In the last few weeks, people in Ballyfermot were also emailing De Nortúin and Jackson about staff shortages at the centre, said De Nortúin.

There is a sports recruitment drive with a leisure-centre attendant competition out at the moment, said Simon Clarke, a council senior executive officer, at the meeting. 

“We would hope that there are a number of vacancies within Ballyfermot, and those vacancies will be filled from the competition,” he said.

If the council doesn’t have a required number of staff, for safety reasons, they would need to close the pool, he said. “But we’d hope to remedy that very soon.”