The Taoiseach said yesterday that he remained hopeful that other elements of his Sports Campus Ireland project for Abbotstown would materialise after declaring the National Aquatic Centre officially open.
Asked if he expected to return to open a national stadium on the 500-acre site, Mr Ahern said: "I hope I'll be back here plenty of times. We'll see what happens."
However, he did not want to prejudge the Minister for Sport, Mr O'Donoghue, who was working on the project.
The Taoiseach told a large invited audience in the tiered seating around the competition pool that it had not been easy to deliver the €62 million aquatic centre. "I have more than one scar on my back from trying to achieve this project," he said in an unscripted remark.
Noting that it was on time and within budget, Mr Ahern said "the rest is history" - a reference to the controversy over the aquatic centre which erupted after The Irish Times revealed that the contract to build and operate it had been awarded to a £2 shelf company.
"As we look around this splendid new aquatic facility, with its state-of-the-art, 50-metre swimming pool, top-class diving facilities and excellent leisure facilities, we can truly say that today a visionary concept has now been brought to magnificent fruition," he said.
Mr Ahern paid tribute to the board of Campus Stadium Ireland Development Ltd, the State agency set up to plan the Abbotstown project, including its former chairman, Mr Paddy Teahon, for seeing "this part of the campus" through "difficult times" to successful completion.
The centre had been designed to be commercially viable and Mr Ahern expressed confidence that, under the management of Dublin Waterworld Ltd, it would be "a self-sustaining venture, attracting visitors from every part of Ireland and indeed from abroad".
He said that Ireland had only begun to give due recognition to the importance of sport in 1997 when a minister with Cabinet rank had been appointed to look after it. Since then, funding for sport had increased from around €17 million to €161 million in 2002. Even in the more constrained budgetary environment of today, that level of funding was being sustained, because it was "an investment in the future health and wellbeing of all our people", he said. It would also help to "put Ireland on the international sporting map". The aquatic centre would "truly come into its own" in June, when it hosted the swimming events of the Special Olympics World Summer Games, at which Ireland would host 7,000 disabled athletes from all over the world with the help of 30,000 volunteers.
When the organisers of the Special Olympics - including businessman Mr Denis O'Brien, who attended yesterday's ceremony - had asked him if he really believed that it would be ready on time, "I promised tongue-in-cheek, that it would", the Taoiseach said.
In December, the main pool will host the European Short-Course Championships, which "will attract the cream of European swimmers and will be seen by over 30 million television viewers throughout Europe, greatly increasing awareness of the centre". He paid a mock tribute to the media for keeping Abbotstown on its agenda. "If it wasn't for all the talk about it, people wouldn't know about it." He was more genuine in singling out sports journalists for their support.
The Taoiseach then watched some of Ireland's Special Olympics swimmers undertaking the first official swim in the shorter warm-up pool while the mainly suited audience sweated in a hothouse temperature of 27 degrees.
