The latest plan is that the new swimming pool will go at Blackhall in Mullingar town centre.

Sports centre plan change to see new pool in Blackhall

Westmeath County Council members have been asked to agree to “splitting” the Robinstown Sports Campus project, by moving the pool element in to Mullingar town centre, the Westmeath Examiner can reveal.

The intention is to continue with the plans to locate the sport fields at Robinstown.

At a special briefing held last week, councillors from the Mullingar Kinnegad Municipal District heard from officials that the cost of the sports centre is likely to come in at a figure of approximately €75m.

The meeting was told that if the pool and the other indoor elements of the project were moved to Blackhall - which is targeted for regeneration - it would open the way to accessing grants other than just the Large Scale Sports Infrastructure Fund (LSSIF) to help meet the costs of the project.

The meeting was held early in the week as on Wednesday, acting county manager Barry Kehoe and director of services Deirdre Reilly, two of the most senior staff within the County Council, travelled to Dublin to meet with the Minister of State for at the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Deputy Thomas Byrne, along with Deputy Robert Troy and Minister Peter Burke to discuss the potential for grant aid from the LSSIF of €120m opened in recent weeks.

Applications for grant aid from this fund have to be submitted within the next eight weeks, and there is a consciousness that a 2019 application for LSSIF funding was unsuccessful.

Councillors were taken aback at the meeting to hear of the extent to which the estimated costs have skyrocketed: when first mooted twenty years ago, the cost was being estimated at €12m; then, by 2007 at €19-€20m. In 2012, a scaled-back version with an €8m price tag was on the table.

Some of the reason why the project has become more expensive is because of the determination to meet many of the desires expressed during a public consultation held earlier this year, which yielded over 600 submissions.

The executive of the county council is understood to be determined that this time around, the project will not stall: they are on the record as saying that they want a planning application submitted this year.

At the start of December, a multi-disciplinary team was appointed to take the project from concept design through the statutory planning process. When the appointment was announced, the council stated that the overarching objective was to develop a coordinated approach to sporting provision that engaged the sporting, statutory, community and education providers in its development.

“The vision of the project is to develop a sports complex that is an exemplar in accessible sustainable buildings, which must be designed to adapt to inevitable changes in society, work patterns and leisure over the decades to come,” the council stated, while then-county chief executive Pat Gallagher said the desire was for a “state of the art, cutting-edge, high-quality” complex.