Modern governments are obsessed with discovering the Big Idea. Their search for the issue that will capture the public imagination and guarantee future electoral success is fervent and relentless.

It is fair to say that the new Northern Ireland Executive has not come even close to finding its own Big Idea. Given its troubled gestation and early formative years, this is hardly surprising and the energies of all concerned have been directed towards short-term survival rather than any lofty, long-term policy initiatives.

But as the new institutions bed down and local administrators begin to discover their political muscle, it seems likely that they too will be eager to draw up strategies of their own and formulate some new and wonderful schemes.

Controversy and division stalk so many areas of life here that the choices available to them are extremely limited. And yet there is enough to suggest that if attention was focused just a little more in sport's general direction it might just yield the Big Idea.

All that is required is a little imagination. Surely someone somewhere in a position of sporting or political influence here must have been just a little bemused by the news last week that Scotland has sought out the Republic of Ireland as a possible co-bidder in staging soccer's European Championships in 2008.

The outline plan was that the majority of the games would be played in Scotland utilizing the superb stadia in Glasgow and Edinburgh and that the Republic would also supply two venues. Lansdowne Road and the proposed new national stadium were the two most likely candidates but five or six years down the line Croke Park may enter the equation.

All that detail will kick in later. The most surprising thing from a local point of view was that the proposal by-passed Scotland's nearest neighbour and was directed southwards rather than a little closer to home. Put at its plainest, it appears that Northern Ireland was not even considered. If not, the next question is why not.

The potential value of such a project here is inestimable. This is a place which needs an event or a set of circumstances which would help kick-start the journey from the past into the future. The excuses for inaction and the reluctance to act decisively can be heard from here. We don't have a stadium. We don't have the infrastructure. Who would pay for it? And so on and so on.

First things first, the logistics are difficult but not impossible. The Executive and the IFA could be credible partners in any bid with one or more countries by bringing one stadium capable of staging group games to the party. A similar scenario was played out during the rugby World Cup when Ravenhill hosted one of Ireland's early games in the competition and everyone benefited from being involved.

What is required more than anything else is a will to make it happen. With the requisite level of determination to succeed all of the significant obstacles could be easily overcome. On a purely pragmatic level the whisper for a new national stadium is going to become a scream before too long as the obvious inadequacies of Windsor Park become even more apparent and the IFA continues its nascent efforts to attract broader support in Nationalist areas.

The concept of a national stadium has been floating around for a while now and appeared to be attracting support when Mo Mowlam was Secretary of State here and the Wimbledon for Belfast project was under active consideration. A green-field site by Belfast Lough but within easy travelling distance of Belfast's city centre had seemingly been identified and all that was needed was a little extra impetus to move the scheme off the drawing board.

A humane killing was quickly administered to the great Wimbledon transplant and the stadium plans seemed to die with it. Who's to say that the time is not now right to attempt its resurrection? The project need not be on the scale of a Twickenham, a Murrayfield or even an Abbotstown. The demand simply does not exist here for a 60,000- or 70,000-seater stadium and to build one only to see it never even approach full capacity would be a grand folly.

Given that Northern Ireland attendances barely struggle over 10,000 at most home games, that crowds at Ravenhill are around the same and that GAA gates rarely top 35,000 here, the obvious aim should be to produce a ground with a capacity of around 40,000.

Include a running track and some ancillary training facilities and you have a project which would solve all of Northern Ireland's sporting needs for a generation in one self-contained package.

The attractions that would drive such a scheme are more than obvious. A new, neutral, state-of-the-art space would represent a fantastic starting point for the forging of an entirely fresh set of relationships, ties and identities. It all sounds like the archetypal offer which is simply too good to refuse.

There are, of course, two potential sticking points. The first is funding. Objections on financial grounds are dreary ever-presents in all debates about sporting provision and are based on a underlying assumption that sport is somehow a less worthwhile way of spending public money than any of the other demands on the government's purse.

But by pitching any new stadium at a relatively modest level the worst fears about crippling debts and under-use could be easily addressed. Northern Ireland has survived on a huge subsidy from central government for generations and as it moves towards tentative self-administration why can't just a fraction of that money be diverted towards a scheme which would repay the amount invested ten-fold in a multitude of different ways?

The answers will not be forthcoming for as long as the imagination deficit which stultifies public life here is allowed to continue. Big Ideas by their very nature need people with vision and initiative to pick them up and run with them, and individuals with those qualities are sadly thin on the ground around here.

Participation in staging an event like the European Championships would be the perfect way to make people enthusiastic and encourage sights to be fixed forward rather than backwards into the past. So far, though, it doesn't even appear to be up for discussion.