Irish soccer and the stadium business has been beset by incompetence, political cowardice and cynicism, and now comes the farcical element, the Euro 2008 bid, writes Tom Humphries.
Those of us who occasionally cover the comic book adventures of the Football Association of Ireland (FAI)have these descriptive nouns on permanent standby. The creators of previous superheroes always had BIFF! POW! and KERFUMP! at the ready. We have Fiasco! Shambles! and Farce!
Although we never experience an FAI adventure without the accompanying cadence of people crying FIASCO! SHAMBLES! FARCE! this week has stretched the best of us.
Connoisseurs of the FAI will recall that the first sign of anyone taking talk of the Bertie Bowl at all seriously was when Bernard O'Byrne, then chief panjandrum of the FAI, came bursting into the press tent at an under-21 match in Arklow and announced that, despite the fact that he was sitting on the committee which was just then establishing the feasibility or otherwise of a Bertie Bowl, he, Bernard, would be proceeding independently with his own vision of a Stade St Bernard with which elephant (blanc) he would further decorate the skyline of the capital city.
The response of the Taoiseach was magnificent. If the FAI brought mere incompetence to the table, the Taoiseach brought an intoxicating cocktail of personal hubris and political cowardice.
Picking a spot just off the already clogged M50, he decreed that a stately pleasure dome would be created there. Existing State laboratories would be moved with a click of the imperial fingers. Necessities such as a velodrome would be built in their stead. The 500 acres or so would be known with appropriately playful syntax as Sports Campus Ireland and would be modelled on the mother of all white elephants, the Homebush Bay project in Sydney, Australia.
Furthermore, the Taoiseach was willing to meet charges of inviability by paying people to become customers. The FAI and the GAA were handed bagfuls of cash. The IRFU, poor decent middle-class boobs that they are, sat stiff-backed and stern waiting for a courier to pull up outside with their cheque, presuming all along that the right thing would be done by them. Meanwhile, facilities were promised for every God-help-us sport under the sun.
So pleased was the Taoiseach with the concept of a people's stadium for the use of elite athletes that he laughed off the damning HighPoint Rendell report, scoffed at comparisons of the venture with a "Ceausescu-era Olympic project" and was unmoved by the sense of national surprise which prevailed when estimates of the cost reached the €1 billion mark.
Bertie Ahern is nothing if not a pragmatist, though. He knew. Rather than be crushed by this week's apparent smiting of his pet project, he will have noted with quiet satisfaction that Mary Harney has served him perfectly in the role he auditioned her for. Human mudguard.
Mr Ahern's designated role for himself is that of Helpless Taoiseach. With the best will in the world (he is filled like a helium balloon with the Best Will In The World), he would like to do these things but Mary Harney won't let him. So when the mud flies, it is the Soldiers of Rectitude and not the Soldiers of Destiny who catch it. Bertie's teflon suit never gets stained.
By early summer it would have been clear to the Taoiseach that the State's economic fortunes could not sustain a luxury like Abbotstown. His pride could not bear a sensibly scaled-down version of his dream, set down in either a refurbished Lansdowne Road or nearby at the abandoned Irish Glass Bottle Company plant. Either project could have been the focus for attractive urban regeneration and could have been financed in any of several ways which required guts.
Abbotstown and its 500 acres could have been sold. Perhaps reality could have been piped in by the abandonment of the SSIAs or - here's one that needs backbone - by the imposition of a tax to fund infrastructural projects, a tax either on income or hotel nights or ticket purchases or all three. If we want to build things and have good health, social welfare and education services, we have to pay for them.
And the bill should have been split. The IRFU and the FAI, the keepers of two global professional sports, should have been asked in return for their free stadium to come up with €30 million each as a deposit against future incomes from seat licensing and executive boxes and gate revenues. To finance this they might have sold Lansdowne Road (or the 70 acres at Newlands Cross) and Dalymount Park. Finally, the naming rights to the stadium could have been auctioned off.
The Taoiseach's vision couldn't have borne such indignity, however.
The project was in serious doubt for some time before the election but Mr Ahern hung tough. That the carpet was about to be pulled would have been clear to any organisation with average political antennae. The FAI, however, has proved tin-eared all the way through on this matter and selling the rights to international games to Sky Sports, having just been promised a huge tranche of public money, was just the trick required to use up their last goodwill with the Office of the Taoiseach.
Word came back that had news of the negotiating difficulties with RTÉ just been leaked to the Taoiseach, some leaning on the State broadcaster could have been done. Quietly the Government could have made up any small difference in TV revenues while saving soccer for the ordinary punter. Instead, Mr Ahern was left defending the need for public spending on what would principally be a soccer stadium, while the FAI took soccer off the public airwaves. He checked that his mudguard was in place and he surrendered to the inevitable.
The hamfisted stadium business is just the start but it is a fine and illustrative start. Through the remainder of what will be a difficult administration, the Taoiseach can let it be known that with Harney pulling the plug on his own personal passion, what hope has he with this county hospital or that university department. With the best will in the world!
For Irish sport the farrago is embarrassing rather than debilitating. If losing our best player just before the World Cup didn't ensure that we will always be the Republic of Ireland!, the exclamation mark will surely be copperfastened into position by our role in the Euro 2008 bid.
The Euro 2008 bid best reflects the forelock tugging, cringing side of our nature. When the Scottish FA could finagle no more money out of their own doubtful exchequer, they turned to us at the last minute. We had no stadium. We had internal advice to the effect that any bid should be postponed till 2012. We had no pride. So, we skipped out to play anyway confident that the crank contingent who begrudge the GAA the modest taxpayers' contribution to Croke Park would rise up and demand that a spanking new stadium would be built so that the greatest pro sport in the world could throw us just two or three games.
There followed a farce (Shambles! Fiasco!), which will reach its comedic high point next week when Mr Hulot from UEFA comes here "to inspect us". He will be shown a plot of ground in a gloriously inaccessible corner of Dublin where nothing is likely to ever be built, and he will then be whisked to a gleaming stadium in which the playing of the game of soccer is prohibited. Mr Hulot may be shown the on-the-record testimonials of FAI officials to the effect that Croke Park is unsuitable for soccer games anyway and he may be introduced to the local residents who implacably oppose any expanded use of the facility and who equate soccer with hooliganism in a curiously simplistic way.
To be a fly on the wall when Mr Hulot's holiday ends and he gets back to the UEFA offices in Nyon. Hopefully, he will transpire to be a raconteur of sorts. Not since Fawlty Towers will an inspector have encountered such hilarious incompetence varnished by such defiant self-regard.
Hopefully, somebody will have the wit to ask Monsieur Hulot just what contribution the nabobs of European soccer are willing to make to an Irish stadium for the global game.
One thing seems certain. The GAA will take a shelling. In the letters columns and in the radio programmes created specifically as forums for befuddled cranks, the GAA is always the easy target. It always has been.
For having the courage to go ahead with its own project, the GAA will be hammered. For providing, in the absence of any coherent Government policy on sport, a regional sporting infrastructure of its own as well as the island's only world-class stadium, the GAA will be slaughtered. For being an amateur sport placing the needs of its members ahead of the needs of the great professional sports of our age, it will be derided.
So be it. The association is in the right, but for its failure to ever see the big picture it deserves some flak.
The GAA is a voluntary organisation which survives in the commercially rapacious world of Sky Sports and 24/7 premiership hype. It is rightly proud of that. A little flexibility and a little less piety would serve it well, however. The GAA's statement during the week signalled that it had lost none of its surgical strike ability in either saying: "I told you so" or in shooting themselves in the foot.
It was the GAA's decision to place so much faith in the patent snake oil remedies of the last government. Let it be remembered that in April 2001 the GAA was on the brink of dropping Rule 42 forever when the government of the time (which looks curiously like the current Government) slipped £60 million under the table and winked. The next day, the GAA winked back, one third of the delegates went missing and the motion to delete Rule 42 was lost by a single vote.
If the Government is now reneging on the payments due for that little bit of business, well it is shameful but the GAA would find it politic and wise to let this time be for crocodile tears and quiet expressions of regret.
Even those within the GAA who would harbour genuinely ecumenical feelings are coming over a little truculent this week about being asked now to suddenly ditch Rule 42. The fact is that while nobody has the right to bully the GAA down that road, the association's own self-interest should, in the case of Croke Park, lead it that direction regardless. Any other suggestion, such as that previously made by Mary Harney, that all GAA facilities be thrown open to the broke and the indigent should rightly be met by the hasty reaching for cudgels.
There are no winners but there are no big losers anyway. It has been a governmental exercise in cynicism. The PDs are pleased to pander to their fan base by shaking their head sternly and standing by the Republic in the broad sense. Fianna Fáil is a willing hostage. So it goes. People get the governments they deserve.
The real trouble is that sports people don't get the administrators they deserve. They get other sports people.
Footnotes:
1 This conversational showstopper is called the Stadium Gambit and is deployed while sitting in a stadium in Albania, Macedonia or any small impoverished country of your choice.
2 Or Bernard O'Byrne or The Person In Charge or Any Grown Up.
Writing about Irish soccer - a brief lesson
There are three descriptive nouns which may be used:
1. Farce
2. Fiasco
3. Shambles
There are several preliminary observations which may be made:
1: Why can't we build something like this? (See Footnote 1)
2. What about the Sky deal?
3. Where's Roy Keane?
(See Footnote 2)
4: Whither now Euro 2008?
The response to these observations is always the same and deploys one or all of our descriptive nouns.
For example: Usual ---------- (insert noun 1, 2 or 3), i.e., Usual Farce or Usual Fiasco or Usual Shambles.