Sports closures - 'The facilities add to city's quality of life'

THE prospect of local sports facilities being closed down to help save the council £350,000 a year will cause concern in homes across the Capital.

We have been here before, of course, with both the hotly-contested creche closures over the last two years and a previous round of major cuts in 2001. Those culls between them spelled the end of facilities from the Commonwealth Pool to Craiglockhart and Kirkliston to the Jack Kane Centre.

Now council chiefs are warning us that we are in for more of the same.

The Capital's major sports venues have been sadly neglected over the years, but our excellent network of local facilities continues to add enormously to the quality of life in Edinburgh.

It is not unreasonable for Edinburgh Leisure, which runs the city's sports centres on behalf of the council, to shoulder its share of cost-cutting, but every possible alternative must be explored before public facilities are shut. Does Edinburgh Leisure, for instance, really need to replace its departing chief executive?

The possibility of merging the company back into the council's leisure department, potentially saving duplication of other senior posts, should also not be ruled out.

A right to be heard

WITH the best will in the world, the Pope's visit to Scotland was never going to be universally popular.

Much more has been done to shake off the prejudices of sectarian division than many people acknowledge, but even so no-one can deny that some tensions remain.

While those tensions are thankfully less prevalent in Edinburgh than in parts of the west, there are historic and geographical reasons why the Capital will be a focal point for those who would rather Benedict XVI did not come here.

The visit comes on the 450th anniversary of the Reformation, after all, while original plans for the Popemobile would have taken it past St Giles' Cathedral, where in 1637 a riot took place to oppose the imposition of a new liturgy.

Most people will feel that by reviving such memories the two Orange Order groups which intend to protest against the Pope are living in the past.

But, as with all dissenting voices, they have a right to be heard, so long as they do so peacefully and within the law.