Has the entire Irish sporting scene gone mad? Scarcely a day passes without the announcement of a plan for a new sports stadium, all of them apparently within a few miles of each other on the outskirts of Dublin without any realistic public transport facility and a significant lack of car parking.
Who are these people trying to hoodwink? Some of them are the people who want to bring English Premiership soccer to these same stadiums. Can anything be more frightening than the idea of Wimbledon or Arsenal or Chelsea playing in Tallaght? To get back to reality, for many years now the GAA has been spending many millions of pounds on upgrading their facilities in all of the 32 counties, while getting mostly negative vibes and sometimes sheer ignorant abuse. Pairc Ui Chaoimh led the way, followed by Semple Stadium in Thurles, Fitzgerald Stadium in Killarney, the Gaelic Grounds in Limerick, O'Moore Park in Portlaoise, St Tiernach's Park in Clones, McHale Park in Castlebar and Hyde Park in Roscommon. The GAA now has four stadiums which can cater for crowds of 40,000-plus, and half a dozen which could cope with 30,000. And that doesn't include the spectacular development at Croke Park.
Why then do we have a ridiculous situation in which the Football Association of Ireland and our enlightened Government are all falling over each other to build new stadiums within a few miles of the centre of Dublin? Is there any chance that some agency might knock a few heads together and bring a little common sense to the situation.
It should be clear to all and sundry that there is no need for a plethora of stadiums, either in the Dublin area or anywhere else.
The ideal solution would be for all the sporting bodies to get together in a parliamentary atmosphere and have one stadium capable of being used for all sports. A co-operative effort by all concerned is needed. An ideal venue would be what was formerly the Phoenix Park racecourse. John Treacy, the brains behind the National Sports Council, is the obvious choice to knock heads together and to make it clear that a National Sports Stadium should be just that. The Phoenix Park racecourse is within easy reach of road and rail and foot. It could accommodate, if properly planned, all sports and should include a 50-metre swimming pool and a boxing stadium. Sell off the National Stadium on the South Circular Road to help fund the new venue - sell off Dalymount Park and Lansdowne Road and even Parnell Park if needs be, but concentrate on providing a real National Stadium. Croke Park should then abandon its anti-deluvian attitude to foreign games and be available to cope with any over-flow of events while protecting its own major finals in hurling, football, camogie and so on. In that way sport might be taken out of the maw of greedy television companies and corporate sponsors.
We have to stop spending vast sums of money on feasibility studies and such like and make it clear to all and sundry that no more funding from any source will be made available for mad-cap schemes such as that to bring the Olympic Games to Ireland. The fact is that not alone could we not afford the structural and logistical costs for the staging of the Olympics, we couldn't even afford the bribes.
