the Origins Of The Water School

I believe I was four when I my father started bringing me to Dunmanway swimming pool, he would drop off my older sister Tara to horse riding lessons and then into the pool we would go. I can just about remember the two of us playing in the water over in the corner of the pool near to the lifeguard’s seat next to the baby pool.

During one of these times, I believe Karen Collins knelt and started talking to my father about becoming a swimming teacher. Oh, the trouble that she was starting.

It was just games and splashing about that made me think that water was fun, that and the connection with my father who was in the same stage as I am now, an exhausted parent trying to find time with his children and snatching moments in between work.

But when dad handed me a snorkel and face mask, at I think about 5 or maybe 6 and told me there were fish under water in the river my brother had dammed up on our neighbours land, I gave him my arm bands and was off, I could happily swim under water chasing baby trout until I turned blue with the cold and was physically removed to dry off and get warm before waling back up the fields to home.

Our neighbour fortunately was and still is a very good natured farmer who owned all the farmland around us, allowing us free rein over the land and tolerated this particular display of engineering from my brother and allowed us the pool in the river that flowed down from Lackavane.

Once I was free swimming I was joining in with lessons at Dunmanway, learning from Jane Mac Carthy, the wonderful manager who travelled every day for 25 years from Allihies, Alk the talk taciturn Dutch man and his friendlier wife Tia, Alk taught deep end and Tia taught beginners, and of course Karen Collins.

During this time my dad, while being a mechanic on any car that survived our boreen and doing whatever else to support us, trained as a swimming teacher and started working alongside the team in dunmanway. eventually he started running his own classes and was teaching my local school of cappabui before a few other schools started going by bus to the pool to give the kids a chance to learn swimming skills and discover a love of water.

You see my father had no great passion for competitive swimming, it was fun but his true joy was in just feeling himself moving through the water and sharing that simple pleasure with people who may otherwise have been turned away from the water out of caution or superstition.

My father had been a fisherman over in Unionhall for a number of years and had formed a friendship with the Deasy’s in Myross.

 I grew up hearing of his time on their boats and how they thought him a madman because he would occasionally dive in on a good day and enjoy the waters, in fact one time he laughed as they threw in a ring Bouy and told him to think of his wife and child.

You see, back then fishermen did not swim and considered it a cruel thing as it would only cause you to suffer the longer, and it was best to go down fast.

Sadly one day, at a time after my father had moved away, the lads were out on a fine calm day, and the boat just sank, out of the blue and into the blue it went, leaving three men struggling in the water, one man could swim and had to choose between two brothers and chose the man with a family and so poor paddy joe went down, at a distance that a swimmer could get to shore.

The loss of this friend in such a way, haunted my father so much so that even forty years later his voice might crack at telling the story.

While my father himself could never remember learning to swim, he did know the things that led to him becoming a swimming teacher. And he would often say to people that he was 40 before he discovered what it was, he wanted to do with his life and when he did he never had to work again, of course that was a bit of an over exaggeration but he had found his ‘why’ and then set about figuring out the how.

While he was never competitively focused, during his time working with Co-Action he was asked to train a few of the people who were up there. And so he ended up helping Sean Brosnan get a bronze I think and Damien O Donovan a gold in the special Olympics when it came to Ireland in the early 2000’s.

After many years teaching in dunmanway swimming pool, and running his own successful Saturday classes the county council started talks about changing how the pool ran and they no longer wanted my father running his own classes there so they requested his client database and offered him employment but my father did not take them up on it as it was contrary to how he wanted to run his classes.  And so he tried looking into his own pool.

Not that we had the money of course, we were still building our house here in ballylickey and my father and Jackie were holding down about three jobs while trying to do as much of the house themselves.

But no help was forthcoming, the local business association had no interest in anything outside of the town at that time, the sports council wouldn’t help unless a million hoops were leapt through and the initial capital was far beyond anything we had spare, especially for a crack pot idea like building a specialised teaching pool in a field near kealkil.

So, the idea was abandoned and believed to be a pipe dream never to come about.

During the time at Dunmanway I had been given a job working behind the desk taking the money from customers and helping any way I could. Until one of the teachers (Karen Collins) was taken sick and asked me if I would cover her class so at the age of 15 I suddenly found myself on deck with no real lesson plan and twelve improvers in front of me expecting a lesson.

And from that point on I was being called on to cover classes and then eventually was being given classes of my own to teach, so I guess that first one was not a complete disaster. When the next teacher training course came available and I was old enough I qualified as a swimming teacher.

I guess during a lot of this time dad was also trying to find an activity that I enjoyed and was desperately trying to keep me out of trouble, for which I had a natural flair. The trouble I mean.

Fortunately, swimming was something I had loved ever since chasing those fish and I found that teaching others was actually quite a lot of fun, or at least teaching someone something that they enjoyed, as I don’t expect my teachers in school much enjoyed me there.

Around about 2008 a friend of my fathers suggested that he looked into the possibility again and with a help of sympathetic people in the bank and a lot of hard work to build up the initial capital required he was granted the loan and then with help of many people, such as Pat and Paddy Flynn who had years of experience building slatted house’s and slurry tanks which is essentially what a pool is, albeit much cleaner and less smelly.

Steven Roffe ‘Wink’  a long-time friend of my dad’s was involved in every step of the building and is still heavily involved in helping me keep everything working and up to scratch.

Jackie of course helped plan it all out and documented every step of the way and helped keep the motivation for the mammoth task that it was, her ability to design helped create the layout that plays a big part in the success of our classes.

In truth there were so many people who helped us out along the way with it, from assisting in the build, to giving motivation, whether directly or indirectly by calling him crazy and the idea the waste of time or even just not complaining about all the work going on in an otherwise quiet field on the banks of the Ouvane river.

I used to come back down on the weekends from college and help out with various aspects of the build and I will lay claim to being the first in.

It was a dark December’s night and myself and a house mate decided to take a spin down and my dad had just started filling the pool, so when I dived in, I nearly bounced straight back out again it was so cold. But I was the first in the pool, fortunately it has warmed up a lot since then and now sits happily at 31 degrees.

The Doors were opened in February of 2009 and thus The Water School was open for business just as the Recession hit.

And about two months later my father had a heart attack which he survived though he had to spend a long while recuperating. The stress of the build and working at the same time and everything else had all become too much. I ended up dropping out of college for that year and helping to keep things going between myself and Jackie and the staff who at that time included Jenna, Linda, Leana, Helen and the instigator of the whole thing Karen.

The Water School was always based on the desire to inspire in people a love of Water, to teach Swimming and to Promote water safety to the people of the area.

This it has now as of 2026, been doing for 17 years.