The new Croke Park is Dublin's Colosseum, a great triumph of will and imagination on the part of everyone involved in building it, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
In the Ash restaurant, you can sit comfortably at white linen-dressed tables and lunch on gravadlax and Thai-flavoured prawns followed by roast rack of lamb or stuffed breast of guinea fowl, washed down with a good Chablis or Merlot.
And from time to time, you have to pinch yourself to remember that you're in the Cusack Stand at Croke Park.
Gone are the days of people "up for the match" armed with flasks of tea and ham sandwiches in tinfoil, usually eaten out of the boot of a car. Gone, too, are the breeze-block walls and corrugated iron gates and the pre-cast concrete bunker on Jones's Road that served for years as the GAA's headquarters.
In their place is the new Croke Park - the sensational amphitheatre for Ireland's national games that was promised 10 years ago and has now been delivered with tremendous conviction. All that remains is to get rid of the dismal Nally Stand and recreate the revered Hill 16 as an even larger, steeper and more dramatic tier of all-standing terraces.
What has been achieved thus far is a triumph of will and imagination. The U-shaped formation of the Cusack Stand, the Canal End and the new Hogan Stand gives the stadium a powerful architectural unity, conveying a real sense of community on the day of a big match.
"It is like being in one big room," as Dublin architect Gerry Cahill observed.
The cantilevered canopies over the stands stretch out to protect most of the spectators from rain. Those above the Canal End and the Hogan Stand are more transparent, to filter sunlight onto the pitch and eliminate dark shading.
Croke Park even has its own microclimate, attracting 30 per cent less rainfall than the surrounding area.
This is Dublin's Colosseum. And it's very interesting to note that the architecture of Croke Park has not been attacked, even by the most recalcitrant of the locals who feared - wrongly as it turned out - that it would overshadow their homes. Nor has it acquired an amusing or pejorative nickname, like so many other interventions in the city.
Its dimensions are vast - 215 metres long on each side and 195 metres long at each end, with the stands rising in height to the equivalent of a 12-storey office building and a finished floor area of 130,000 square metres, not including the pitch. And yet, despite its scale and complexity, there is no feeling of being overwhelmed.
According to Liam Mulvihill, the GAA's director general, who backed the €250 million project from the beginning, the tracery of its roofscape on the skyline is as much a bold, forward-looking statement by the GAA to its own supporters as it is a message to the wider public about the unquenchable spirit of Gaelic games from Malin Head to Mizen Head.
Needless to say, it was not magicked out of thin air. Gilroy McMahon, the architects who conceived the new Croke Park, spent a whole year researching stadium design in Europe and North America before putting forward their proposals. Every new stadium that needed to be seen was visited and examined in detail to see how they worked.
Des McMahon, whose great vision it was, recalls that he tacked on to an RTÉ television crew - posing as a technician - to spend a full day at the Stade de France on the outskirts of Paris. He concluded that it "could have been designed for the Moon and dropped into position - and that was something we couldn't do with Croke Park".
The genesis of its renewal goes back much further, to a very bad-tempered All-Ireland Final between Dublin and Galway in 1983, when five players were sent off and there was almost a serious incident involving the crowd. Then, there were the disasters at Heysel and Hillsborough, and the GAA knew it was hanging on by its fingertips.
"They had to take Croke Park by the scruff of the neck," as McMahon puts it. "They were aware that they would have to double the amount of space for spectators to give everyone more elbow room." How that extra space could be created on a restricted site, as well as providing a full range of modern stadium facilities, was the real challenge.
The GAA, which had previously relied on engineers for the design of Pairc Uí Chaoimh in Cork and Semple Stadium in Thurles, knew that it would have to raise its game in Croke Park. For the first time in its history, the association turned to architects and interviewed several, from Ireland and abroad, before finally selecting Gilroy McMahon.
"I suppose I said the right things," McMahon recalls. "I came clean and told them I had never done a stand, or a stadium. But I talked about the very basis of architecture to define space in an optimum way for human activity. In the context of Croke Park, it wasn't simply a question of putting bums on seats but of maximising the whole experience."
There were also the issues of reconciling static spaces with the huge movement of people a stadium generates in a safe, efficient and comfortable way and of recognising "an obligation to the city" in producing a significant new landmark on the skyline that would also relate to the low-rise, domestic scale of the immediate neighbourhood.
"I must say I didn't wipe the grin off my face for a week after winning it," McMahon says. "Maybe I understood their requirements and their unclarified aspirations and I was able to bridge that gap." He grew up in a GAA household in Beragh, Co Tyrone, and had played football for his county - though this wasn't mentioned until after he had it in the bag.
And so, long before the Celtic Tiger had started roaring, the GAA set about redeveloping Croke Park. Without any indication that it would attract funding from the Government, it was relying entirely on its own resources, not least its ability to draw on the full spectrum of Irish abilities among its Ard Comhairle and the wider membership.
Peter Quinn, accountant brother of Fermanagh tycoon Seán Quinn, was the key figure. He brought a number-crunching edge to his role as president of the GAA and in the process, cleverly spotted that the first phase of the new stadium - replacing the old Cusack Stand - could be financed by structuring it around corporate boxes and premium seats.
In going down this route, the GAA was following the North-American model of involving the business community in funding sports infrastructure, rather than the European one where everything is paid for out of the public purse.
To many ordinary members, it seemed like a sell-out of the association's principles and rhetoric of amateurism.
However, at meetings with county boards up and down the country, Peter Quinn spelled out the sums. The new Cusack Stand, he explained, would cost £22 million, but the 40 corporate boxes would raise £8 million and the premium seats a further £14 million. In other words, it could be built on the backs of the business community. What's more, all of this corporate money was upfront and the privileges it bought would expire after 10 years. And since the narrow premium tier would only account for 3,000 of the 24,000 seats in the new stand - 8,000 more than the old Cusack's capacity - the ordinary punters were still winning, even though it wasn't costing them a penny.
Quinn's financial acumen produced "the goose that laid the golden egg", as former Irish Times journalist Seán Kilfeather has put it. Indeed, with the original leases due to run out in 2004, many of those who had shelled out for boxes and premium seats in the Cusack "traded up" for equivalent facilities in the newly-completed (and traditionally more prestigious) Hogan Stand.
McMahon attributes all of this to the "organic intelligence" of the GAA - an organisation, he believes, that could never lose touch with its grassroots members in the way the FAI did by negotiating its controversial deal with Sky television. "They're the only people who have anything to show for themselves amid the morass left after the Celtic Tiger," he says.
The great trick in terms of increasing Croke Park's capacity was to build out over the railway line and towpath at the Canal End, having acquired the airspace from Iarnród Éireann and Dúchas, the Heritage Service. Thus, everything from the first 25 rows back - amounting to nearly three-quarters of the stand - is additional seating.
Since there was a limit to how many bankers and whatever could be tapped for corporate boxes on the Canal End, Government grant-aid towards the completion of Croke Park - which eventually amounted to a total of €70 million - was very welcome at that stage. Without it, the GAA might have had to defer redevelopment of the Hogan Stand.
The original plan envisaged providing a new station underneath the Canal End, to cater for fans travelling from Cork, Kerry, Limerick and Waterford.
But this would have required a new turning circle near Glasnevin to allow the Munster trains to come in, via the Phoenix Park tunnel, and Iarnród Éireann said the GAA would have to pay for it.
Much of the space behind the tiers of the Canal End is now taken up by the association's own headquarters, clad in slate-blue in sympathy with the rooftops of houses in the vicinity.
As elsewhere, the grey concrete of the main structure is relieved by the rounded, steel-railed landings of its external staircases and thin strips of ceramic tiles.
The three new stands at Croke Park are hung from a Y-shaped reinforced concrete frame, designed by structural engineers Horgan Lynch and Partners.
McMahon also credits them with the ingenuity that "allowed us to exploit the air space at the Canal End", thereby increasing the capacity of this stand by a staggering 70 per cent.
Much earlier, of course, the former Belvedere rugby pitch had been acquired from the Jesuits to provide a generous forecourt for the Cusack Stand. This extra space, plus the complex inter-leaving of exit routes from all three stands, was essential to fulfil fire and safety requirements for the evacuation of the stadium in just eight minutes.
Cleverly, the turnstiles for entry to the Hogan Stand are arranged perpendicular to Jones's Road while the broad exit gates are set back to ensure a more even distribution of people leaving the stadium. These devices allowed the architects to create a clean-looking urban facade to the street, finished in reconstituted and polished stone.
Because it occupies a tight site of only 15 acres, Croke Park had to be stacked much more vertically than Stade de France, and Sisk's had to use Ireland's biggest crane to build it. But the great advantage is that a larger proportion of fans are seated much closer to the pitch; even those in the back row of the upper tiers have a good view.
Beneath most of the seating, the stands contain an immense range of facilities, including dressing-rooms, media boxes, bars, restaurants, lounges, lifts, escalators and everything else that goes with a modern stadium. "Every cubic metre of space has been put to work," says McMahon. It's all "ruthlessly functional", in the best sense of the term.
Since the fit-out of the Cusack Stand in 1995, the project has been managed by his architectural partner, Deirdre Lennon, who had spent the previous seven years as assistant project manager of the Jubilee Line in London. "It was a co-operative effort," she says.
"People at every level took ownership of the project and felt very attached to it." McMahon says she showed "extraordinary control in implementing such a hugely complex contract while simultaneously initiating design developments to all elements". It was, as she says herself, "extremely demanding", especially as the timetable was governed by match fixtures.
"Changes often had to be made at two weeks' notice." And yet, as Lennon puts it, Croke Park "made itself - or at least it felt like that anyway".
What is extraordinary, though, is how closely the new stadium resembles the artist's impressions and perspective views done by Mick McDonagh 10 years ago. The view of the Hogan Stand from outside the corner shop half-way up Fitzroy Avenue looks just as it was portrayed - and so, indeed, does the marvellous amphitheatre within.
Meanwhile, bad blood between the GAA and residents of the narrow streets around Croke Park has been largely replaced by a new spirit of give-and-take. A tripartite liaison committee, involving Dublin City Council, meets once a month and even the times of match fixtures have been changed to accommodate the wishes of the residents.
It could be argued, though, that much of the housing on the east side of Croke Park should be demolished to make way for an esplanade between Ballybough and the Cusack Stand, lined with apartment buildings of significantly larger scale than tiny terraced houses, to capture the stadium's potential as a vehicle for major urban regeneration.
The outstanding item within Croke Park is to replace the Nally Stand and Hill 16 with new standing terraces across the entire northern end of the pitch, together with a control tower surmounted by a huge digital scoreboard.
It is envisaged the new, steeper Hill will have its own concourse underneath, with food outlets and proper toilet facilities.
Dublin City Council has already approved the €20 million plan, though An Bord Pleanála will almost inevitably make the final call. Three years ago, the board ruled against standing terraces, citing Lord Justice Taylor's Report on the Hillsborough disaster.
The GAA argues, quite rightly, that the family atmosphere at Croke Park does not warrant a similar "nanny State" response and that, in any case, it is easier to escape from an all-standing area than an all-seated area. Also, Hill 16 is an essential element of the equation, especially for Dublin football supporters - many of whom grew up on "the Hill".
It is Dublin's and the GAA's good fortune that Croke Park was not taken out of the city to a greenfield site on its periphery. The idea was considered, of course, but it would have meant abandoning the historic home of Gaelic games and, ultimately, "franchising our culture to the likes of Coca Cola and McDonald's", as McMahon puts it.
Now that the new Croke Park has risen over Jones's Road, other possibilities open up. If the GAA was to drop its antediluvian attitude to "foreign games", it is even possible to imagine all of the big matches - whether Gaelic, rugby or soccer - being played here, with all of the smaller matches staged in a redeveloped Lansdowne Road.
That could happen if Bertie Ahern drops his utterly misconceived Abbotstown adventure.
Until then, the virtual completion of Croke Park in the second year of the 21st century deserves to be celebrated without reservation - perhaps with some well-chosen floodlighting to show it off as a remarkable new landmark on the skyline of Dublin.
• Anyone interested in a tour of Croke Park should contact the GAA Museum, Croke Park, Dublin 3. Tel: (01) 8558176. Admission for the museum and tour: adults €8, under-12s €5, families €21. Website: www.gaa.ie