Towards the end of our interview, Gar Holohan, mentions that he was diagnosed with ADHD six months ago. 

He says it casually and with a small chuckle at the thought of all the conversations he’s had over the years where the other person probably just thought he was bored. 

In a woollen turtleneck and chunky rectangular glasses, Holohan looks every inch the successful architect that he is, and his comfort in talking about his own diagnosis reflects the bigger picture of what he is trying to achieve.

Holohan owns and runs Aura Holohan Group, which has a long history of event management, including involvement in Electric Picnic, Bloom Festival and countless major concerts, but within that group is also Aura Leisure.

Aura has more than 400 staff, making it the largest employer in the fitness and health sector in Ireland. It runs 11 local authority leisure centres and swimming pools from Youghal to Letterkenny owns four under its Anytime Fitness brand and is building two more. 

With these centres, Holohan is trying to promote a social infrastructure that caters to the community as a whole, rather than to the myth of the “average person”. 

The centres run specific hours for people with autism, dimming the lights and making environmental alterations, but there are other careful considerations taken over how individuals use the sports facilities, how to attract and keep members of all ages and abilities, designing spaces where people will feel comfortable, and where they will be able to access each area of the facility with ease. 

Holohan’s message, and one that gets lost in rows over funding shortages and political inertia, is to recognise that investing in sports and swimming pools is never a loss-making exercise, but a long-term investment in the population’s health and well-being. 

While he consistently meets with the argument that pools are a drain on finances and too expensive for fun, he wants to flip that debate.

“Isn’t a government’s primary responsibility the-socio economic welfare of our society? Or is it only economic welfare?” Holohan told The Currency podcast. “What about the health benefits? Few people are even thinking about that and that’s what the problem is.”

Despite the Department of Education’s inclusion of swimming lessons as part of primary school children’s physical education, there is a drought of swimming pools in Ireland, and, in some areas, there are year-long waiting lists to get children into lessons.

Most public investment now being made into pools tends to be in maintaining them, rather than opening new ones.

And after the Clontarf Baths debacle (the lido-type pool in North Dublin which first opened only to club swimmers) and the Dun Laoghaire Baths confusion (the €18 million development that opened without an actual bath), there is a perhaps legitimate feeling that the national approach to swimming pool provision is a lot less than ambitious. 

When a politician calls

Gar Houlihan Ireland of the Aura Holohan Group.

“Somebody has to take on this vision for the future of Ireland,” Holohan said.

“Do we want a healthier society? Or do we want to keep treating the symptoms only and have more disease and more reliance on the healthcare system?” 

The problem in Ireland is manifold in Holohan’s view. First, the system for funding pools is disjointed; second; there is a lack of political will and leadership; and third, leisure centres and pools are viewed negatively as loss-making enterprises that need to be subsidised, rather than as positive long-term investments in the population’s health. 

The crux of the problem, he believes, is that while local authorities are tasked with funding pools and leisure centres, it is the central government that reaps the benefits of people being healthier and happier- so there is a misalignment in outcomes and inputs. 

“Unlike across Europe, in Ireland, the socio-economic benefits of healthier societies accrue to the central government,” Holohan said.

“So that’s reduced crime, reduced health care, greater integration of communities, there is a whole range of studies done on this. But the actual cost of funding facilities is down to the local authority at a local level.”

Holohan cites examples of central European countries, like Germany and Austria, where politicians campaign and get elected on promises to build leisure centres. However, in Ireland, a swimming pool is rarely going to be mentioned on a doorstep. 

“People are looking for housing, for health care,” Holohan said. “So when a politician calls, no one is saying we need a swimming pool.

“Is it Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? I don’t know. But certainly, this is where we need leadership and understanding.” 

The solution, he believes, is to take away the decision on whether to develop a pool or not from local authorities, who are already dealing with so many other things, and to make a collective policy across the local authority sector, which is aligned with government policy. 

“There should be an understanding that you don’t let the local authorities decide across the country, depending on their own views, of whether this is worth investing in or not,” he says.

“We need that balance of the joined-up thinking at central government level, who get the benefits long term, and the immediate costs in the short term for local authorities.”

Currently, funding for pools comes from a hotchpotch blend of local authority funding and the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport, without any one body specifically responsible for making sure the population has reasonable access to swimming lessons and a pool.

The most recent CSO figures from 2016 show that just under three million people in Ireland live within 5km of a swimming pool. The proportion of the population within 5km of a pool varied from a low of 28 per cent in Cavan to a high of 100 per cent in Dublin City. But the figures take into account private pools as well as public ones, where people often can’t use them unless they are members. 

Access is just as big an issue as supply, as there are currently around 400 pools in Ireland but up to 50 per cent of these are hotel pools, which vary in their accessibility to the public.

Treating causes

A part of the problem in Ireland, Holohan believes is that we don’t measure the outcomes, the return on investment pools and leisure centres in adequate ways,

“This is a political issue, we respond to symptoms, rather than treating the causes. You know, the campaigns are for more beds in hospitals but we’re not looking at the fundamental causes, which is people’s behaviours,” he says.

More than the here and now, Holohan is clearly focused on the intergenerational impact of people giving up on sports and fitness.

“We know from research that 82 per cent of children will follow their parents’ behaviours in terms of exercise and nutrition throughout their lives,” he said. 

“Now, we can’t guarantee they will all stay with it. But we do know that if they lead a more active life and understand food and nutrition that the likelihood is, in 50 years’ time they are far less likely to have diabetes, far less likely to have cancers, that far less likely to have depression.

“And by removing that, you’re not only removing it from the person, but their families around them as well, all that suffering. So we say we want to create a healthier, happier society and that’s how we do it.”

Listen to Holohan’s full interview with The Currency at the top of this page, or here.

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