Swim Ireland Secures Funding to Audit 100 Pools Nationwide in Landmark Disability Access Drive
Swim Ireland has secured government funding to conduct accessibility audits of 100 swimming pools across the island of Ireland over the next twelve months, in what the organisation has described as the most ambitious disability inclusion initiative in the sport's history. The Swim Access Project, developed in partnership with Active Disability Ireland, St. Michael's House, Dublin City Council, and Ireland Active, will use a disability-led, mobile-first audit tool to benchmark facilities and drive investment in inclusive infrastructure.
Background
Swimming has long been recognised as one of the most accessible sports for people with physical and intellectual disabilities, offering low-impact exercise, therapeutic benefits, and genuine competitive pathways. Yet for many disabled swimmers across Ireland, the journey from the car park to the pool remains fraught with barriers — inadequate changing facilities, inaccessible pool entries, poorly designed spectator areas, and websites that fail basic accessibility standards.
Swim Ireland has been working to address these gaps for several years, but the scale of the challenge has consistently outpaced the resources available. The Swim Access Project represents a step change in ambition: rather than addressing individual facilities on an ad hoc basis, the programme will systematically survey the entire swimmer journey at 100 pools, generating a national dataset that can inform policy, planning, and capital investment decisions for years to come.
The funding comes through the Disability Participation and Awareness Fund 4.0, administered by Sport Ireland on behalf of the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. The fund is specifically designed to support organisations that can demonstrate a credible, scalable approach to increasing participation among people with disabilities — and Swim Ireland's proposal, built around Universal Design principles and cross-sector collaboration, was judged to meet that standard.
Key Developments
The Swim Access Project will deploy a digital, mobile-first audit tool that covers every stage of the swimmer experience: from the accessibility of a facility's website and booking systems, through the external environment — car parking, pathways, signage — to the pool hall itself, including changing rooms, hoists, pool entry points, and spectator areas. The audit process is disability-led, with individuals with disabilities trained as auditors, ensuring that the assessment reflects lived experience rather than a checklist drawn up by non-disabled professionals.
The data collected will be used for facility benchmarking, allowing pools to understand how they compare to peers and to identify priority areas for improvement. It will also feed into policy development at national level, giving Sport Ireland and local authorities the evidence base needed to direct capital investment where it will have the greatest impact. Swim Ireland has committed to publishing the findings in a format accessible to the public, so that disabled swimmers and their families can make informed choices about where to swim.
The project builds on a broader summer of investment in aquatic infrastructure. In June, the Minister for Public Health announced €400,000 under the Healthy Ireland Outdoor Swimming Initiative, supporting accessibility upgrades at outdoor swimming locations across 17 local authority areas. In May, the government committed €3.25 million in additional support for the Galway Regional Aquatic Project, which will deliver a competition-standard 35-metre pool with an adjustable-depth floor.
Why It Matters
Ireland has a strong tradition of disability sport, and its Paralympic athletes have brought home medals from Tokyo and Paris. But elite success can mask the reality at grassroots level, where participation rates among people with disabilities remain significantly lower than in the general population. The barriers are rarely attitudinal — most pool operators want to be inclusive — but structural: facilities built decades ago to standards that did not account for wheelchair users, people with visual impairments, or those with intellectual disabilities.
The Swim Access Project matters because it treats accessibility as a data problem before it is a funding problem. Without a clear picture of where the gaps are, investment tends to flow to the most vocal or well-connected facilities rather than those with the greatest need. By auditing 100 pools and publishing the results, Swim Ireland is creating the conditions for evidence-based decision-making — a model that other national governing bodies would do well to replicate. For context, England's equivalent programme, run by Swim England, took nearly a decade to reach comparable scale; Ireland's ambition to achieve it in twelve months reflects a genuine urgency.
Local Impact
The audit will cover pools across all four provinces, with a particular focus on facilities in areas where disabled swimmers currently have limited alternatives. In Dublin, pools managed by Dublin City Council and Fingal County Council are expected to be among the first audited, given the density of the population and the existing partnership with Dublin City Council in the project's development. In rural areas — where a single pool may serve an entire county — the findings will be especially significant, as there is no nearby alternative for a swimmer who finds a facility inaccessible.
For families of children with disabilities, the project offers something practical: a reliable, up-to-date guide to which pools can genuinely accommodate their child's needs. For pool operators, it offers a roadmap for improvement and, crucially, the evidence needed to make the case for capital funding from local authorities and Sport Ireland.
What's Next
Swim Ireland will begin the audit process in September 2026, with the first tranche of results expected to be published in early 2027. The organisation has indicated that it will work with facilities to develop improvement plans following the audit, and that it will seek additional funding to support capital works at pools identified as having the most significant accessibility deficits. The European Para Swimming Championships, taking place in Kocaeli, Turkey, from 7 to 12 September, will provide a timely backdrop for the announcement, with several Irish swimmers having achieved qualification standards for the event.
