Seán Moran: Croke Park has grounds for concern in Euro 2028 bid

Hang around this game and you see everything twice – at least. Just over 20 years ago the GAA found itself in the middle of its first bid for the staging of an international sports tournament.

The proposed Scotland-Ireland bid for Euro 2008 put the association in an odd position. It was being asked to "discuss the possibility" of Croke Park being made available to support the FAI's part of the bid.

The most glaring problem with this was that Rule 42 was still on the books and as operated, forbade the use of GAA venues for other field sports. Timing was important though. It was just 10 months since annual congress had come within a whisker of repealing the contentious rule.

Other winds were blowing as well. The Strategic Review Committee had also recently reported that an easing off of the rule was recommended.

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Most influential though was the IR£60 million (€75m) tossed by the Government onto the top table on the Friday of the 2001 congress to speed up the redevelopment of Croke Park.

This was widely seen as having influenced the vote that narrowly failed to open the stadium – by undermining the financial argument to do business with other sports.

What was in it for Government? It had to do with then taoiseach Bertie Ahern's pet project – unkindly compared by the attorney general Michael McDowell to a "Ceaucescu-era Olympic campus" – the proposed Stadium Ireland in Abbotstown.

An open Croke Park wouldn’t have done the prospects of Stadium Ireland any good and there was no reason to imagine that the then taoiseach was unhappy at the reform motion’s narrow defeat.

By February 2002, the project had been parked until after that year’s general election but Ahern now needed the GAA to open up if the bid for the 2008 championships – an ideal showcase for Stadium Ireland – was to even get off the ground.

As we now know, none of these things actually happened but in 2005 the GAA did get rid of Rule 42 on the basis that the IRFU and FAI would need a temporary home while Lansdowne Road was redeveloped.

There were other bids, most famously the RWC 2023 proposal, with which the GAA co-operated fully – the motion to do so barely raising a murmur at the 2013 congress in Derry.

This week however we learned that the prospect of Croke Park being used for a big tournament had been revived and all but crystallised, as for various reasons other interested bids were withdrawing at the same speed as cry-offs from a particularly unpopular party.

Standing accommodation

The joint proposal from the UK soccer associations and the FAI is expected to be the only expression of interest by Wednesday’s deadline and although the success of the bid can’t be guaranteed – there’s quite a process still to be gone through – its chances in the absence of any competition have to be decent.

That being the case, there are now issues for the GAA. If Croke Park is to be one of the venues, there will be some updating required. The most obvious is in the matter of terraces, which aren’t allowed by Uefa and the same applies to temporary seating – used by the GAA when Croke Park hosted competitive soccer internationals between 2007 and 2010.

Standing accommodation is still popular within the GAA, providing cheaper tickets for those interested and lending greater atmosphere to events.

Soccer authorities, haunted by the Heysel and Hillsborough disasters, won't be revising their opinions but sports that don't require crowd segregation don't have the same issues. The Government's code of practice for safety at sports grounds was published in 1996 and the working committee established by the Department of Education, made the point.

“However, there is no reason to believe that terraces cannot remain a perfectly safe area for viewing major sporting events,” states the report at chapter 13.8 and at chapter 19.5: “Rival supporters at certain matches may have to be segregated, but segregation is not advocated where crowd disorder is not foreseen as a problem.”

Nonetheless when the new terracing at the Hill 16 end was going through the planning process over 20 years ago the GAA had to contend with objections that terraces were fundamentally unsafe before eventually securing approval.

Anyway, short of proposing that moulded chairs be mounted on trestle tables, it’s unlikely that seating at the Northern End will be a decisive issue.

More pressingly, there is the GAA’s own business, primarily its own games activities plus any concerts that might have been planned for the summer of 2028 and how all that can be accommodated.

Current calendar

It’s hard to tell at the moment, as it’s not clear whether 24 or 32 teams will be involved. It’s not clear that Croke Park would be on the rota for knockout matches but say there are 32 countries, that would mean a group phase of two weeks.

Uefa could look for clean possession of the stadium for at least a couple of weeks before any matches. That would be a minimum of around four weeks and given the Euros run from June to July, the likelihood of clashes with important championship matches would be strong, particularly under the current calendar with its July All-Irelands.

Previous bids were either at a time of more extended championship timetables or else at a different stage of the year.

This looks a lot harder to accommodate but given Government backing for the bid and the pandemic supports that kept the GAA afloat over the past two years, it will also be a lot harder to turn down.

[ smoran@irishtimes.com ]