When is a swimming pool not for swimming? When it is a multi-million euro renovation project to re-open an old tidal swimming spot in Salthill, obviously.
At the first full meeting of the newly elected Galway City Council this week, members heard that city officials have lodged a long-anticipated application to central government for €12m of funding to re-open the seawater swimming pool on Ladies’ Beach in Salthill.
Patrick Greene, Director of Services for Recreation and Amenity, Sports Capital, and Environment, outlined to councillors that a full design proposal has been put together to renovate at least one of Salthill’s two tidal pools which began to silt up in the 1970s.
“The cost is quite considerable,” he told councillors. “It will be a pool not for swimming. It is a ‘leisure pool’ – that’s my term – not for swimming lengths, more for swimming around.”
Any engineering project in a tidal area incurs extra site expenses, and the beach is in a designated Special Area of Conservation (SAC ) which will also add costs to mitigate ecological disruption during reconstruction. A large element of the renovation will be removing hundreds of tons of concrete used to partially fill-in the pools in the 1980s, and again in the early 2000s.
Mr Greene added that the National Parks & Wildlife Service, which has a remit to designate and advise on SACs, has communicated to Galway City Council that any reopening of the man-made tidal pools in Salthill must stay within the footprint of the existing, derelict structures.
Located opposite Quincentennial Park and the Salthill Hotel, the linked diamond-shaped pools once had sandy bottoms and filled twice daily with the incoming tides through jelly fish-proof valves.
The two tidal pools in Salthill were officially opened in 1930 when the disciplinarian Bishop O’Doherty of Galway declared they were for women and children only, and convinced the council to erect ‘men only’ signs at Blackrock. According to historian Tom Kenny, Bishop O’Doherty wrote to the Irish Times boasting that he had personally hunted men away from the boundaries of the new summer spots while women and children were bathing there.
“The Galway Urban Council, to its great credit, has uniformly resisted all suggestions that [mixed bathing] should be allowed at our splendid seaside resort in Salthill,” he wrote, ensuring that families holidaying at the family resort were forced to split up.
Generations of Galwegians learned to swim in the larger 22m tidal pool under the direction of Jim Cranny and Christy Dooley before Leisureland was built in 1973 with a ‘half-Olympic’, indoor, heated 25m pool. In recent years, a petition to have the ‘Ladies’ Pools’ reopened attracted almost seven thousand signatures.
This renovation application was made under the Large Scale Sport Infrastructure Fund (LSSIF ) ran by Catherine Martin TD’s Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport & Media. It is currently assessing a number of applications from around the country for funding of between €600,000 and €30m.
In response to questions from councillors Clodagh Higgins (FG ), John McDonagh (Lab ) and Helen Ogbu (Lab ), officials confirmed that any funds successfully drawn down under the LSSIF must be used for the specific purpose they were applied for.
In 2021 the City Council set aside €44,000 to fund a feasibility study on re-introducing tidal swimming pools to Salthill.
