National Aquatic Centre opened

WHEN Bertie Ahern was introduced to the Master Blaster, he must have breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t an angry backbencher.

It was instead a giant tubular water-filled chute with terrifying drops, stomach jolting bumps and a velocity to turn your Speedos into a swim hat much easier to negotiate.

The Master Blaster, along with the Dark Hole Flume, Pirates Ship and tsunami style surfing machine were some of the more benevolent obstacles the Taoiseach had to overcome to get to yesterday's grand opening of the National Aquatic Centre at Abbotstown, Dublin.

A year ago the path to swimming facility excellence was strewn with rows over costs, contracts and the fact that the outfit awarded the tender for running the whole show turned out to be a shelf company worth all of 6 and with no experience at all in aquatics.

But that was all history, as Mr Ahern said yesterday. If things were easy, everybody would do them.

The National Aquatic Centre was finished on time and within its €62 million budget, and, as planned, it is fully ready to host the swimming events during the Special Olympics later this summer and will be open to the public before and after.

The water-park with its eight different fun rides and attractions is one of the most hi-tech in Europe and the pool complex is one of the most advanced Olympic standard facilities in the world.

The 50 metre main pool has floating floors and submersible booms so that it can be divided into three 25 metre pools each of varying depths for different events and sports from learn to swim classes to water-polo matches, and the separate diving pool serves a range of diving platforms up to 10 metres high.

There is seating for 2,500 spectators and the complex is already booked for the European Short Course Swimming Championship in December which will have competitors from 40 countries and an anticipated television audience of 30 million.

Mr Ahern said he was confident the project, which aims to attract over one million visitors in its first 12 months of operation, would be financially self-supporting.

As for the Taoiseach's own swimming prowess, he declared himself "hopeless" and left the honours to the swimmers from Team Ireland who gave a dynamic preview of the skills they will have on display at the Special Olympics in June.

Mr Ahern did set one record yesterday, however. To all those who questioned the location of the Abbotstown facilities on the outer reaches of Dublin without dedicated public transport, he declared he made the trip to the site from the city centre (a journey of eight or nine congested miles) in just 16 minutes.

That didn't quite explain why he was late but then there could have been a few master blasters blocking his route to the car.