The days when even Louth County Council could dream

THE architectural historian Emma Gilleece recently tweeted an aerial picture of the old sea-water swimming pool in Blackrock, Co Louth, along with a view from the apartments which replaced it. And since I spent most of my childhood holidays in Blackrock, I was plunged straight away into the pit of nostalgia.

I almost drowned in that pool when I was about three years old — my life saved by my excellent cousin Mary, who saw that I had somehow found my way from the steps to the bottom of the “babies’ pool”, from which she grabbed me just in time. Weirdly, I have still some sort of memory of sitting there for a long time wanting so badly to slide into the deeper water along with the bigger kids, of the fountain which seemed so magnificent, the beautiful blueness of the water, the irresistibility of it.

I don’t remember the coldness of the water that day, though it could be cold in the adjacent 50-metre pool which started at “3ft6”, then descended to “6ft”, and on to the fathomless depths of the “15ft”, into which I was eventually diving many times a day, still not much of a swimmer, but good enough to be able to stay alive.

There seemed to be any amount of reasons for staying alive, Travoltalike. The fact that the pool was not heated was an irrelevance — it was warm enough once you got into it, and anyway, the only heated pool in the region that we knew of was at Butlin’s.

Eventually, when the heated pool became ubiquitous, there was a natural decline in the popularity of pools such as that at Blackrock.

But for a long time, it was a glorious success — not just as a facility in itself, but for all the people it brought to the area, who on a fine Sunday would spend enough on chips alone to blow a considerable hole in the £20,000 which it cost to build in 1962.

So I was looking at these old pictures of the pool, my whole youth coming back to me, as it was bound to do — and then I started to see something else, something more than just these misty watercolour memories of the way we were.

This was not just about me, and my friends, and the generations who came here. I started to see something akin to a lost world, one in which such an extravagant facility could be imagined and constructed and maintained by what can only be described as Louth County Council.

That would be Louth County Council, the council of the smallest county in Ireland, which somehow in the early 1960s contained people who could envisage such a project, who could see the infinite amount of good it could do, in so many ways. How the hell did they do that?

Did they not know, as we know so well today, that government, and local government in particular, has no business embarking on such absurd schemes, interfering in matters of which they know nothing, supposing in their softheaded way that they are serving “the common good”?

Today, if they wanted to build so much as a public toilet, they would be urged to leave that kind of thing to the professionals, who would be able to make it commercially viable, ideally by turning it into a private toilet.

And what about this? It seems that there was a man on Louth County Council called Packie McGuinness, who had for years been advocating the building of a swimming pool beside the sea in Blackrock. He was assisted by locals such as Jim Malone of the Blackrock Swimming Pool Project.

“If you build it, they will come,” was their attitude. This was the Pool of Dreams.

And it seems that Packie died before the pool was finished. Which suggests that not only were there local representatives at the time capable of entertaining such a great notion, they could also imagine that maybe they might not be around to claim all the credit for it. But they went ahead and did it anyway.

Now we see senior government ministers almost weeping with fear at the heretical suggestion that they might see their way to building a few houses, like, just for people to live in. Such has been the baleful influence of “austerity” that it has become a kind of a fetish — so that there is now an instinctive reluctance on the part of public representatives to do anything that might result in any form of generalised human happiness... for certain humans, at least.

And even if they wanted to break out and go full Packie McGuinness on it, chances are they are so unaccustomed to creative thinking that they have forgotten how to do it.

Interestingly, I stumbled across this glory that was Louth County Council in the week of the Grenfell fire, a week when it seemed so clear that “austerity” is not just a vast failure of the imagination.

For in this part of world, we have now almost reversed the very concept of the “common good” — to the point where the well-being of a society is now measured only by how well it treats those who are most fortunate.

So there it stands, this monument to enlightened public policy that was the Blackrock sea-baths, to all the good times and the good money and the good memories made there.

There it stands — at least in old photographs.

‘I almost drowned in that pool when I was about three years old...’