Bowled over by incompetence

National Stadium controversy: Yesterday when Ireland's name came out of the bowl in the draw for the 2006 World Cup finals there was the usual mix of anticipation and dread. Will we have to host those games in Lansdowne Road?

Will we be allowed host those games in Lansdowne Road? If not where? And have we any chance of qualifying? Anticipation, dread and questions: why is it that every country the Irish soccer team visits has a better stadium than the one we play at home in. From Tbilisi to Tirana, from Skopje to Seoul we find ourselves embarrassed.

Questions. Could we not have built a stadium with all the money we have wasted not building one? Questions. At what point does the aggregated incompetence surrounding the national stadium issue become a national scandal?

It's been five years now. Not five years since we discovered the need for a new stadium but five years since the Government woke up and announced that it was going to build one. Five years. Half a decade. You could look back in anger but of course along the way there have been so many moments of pathos and high comedy which lightened the mood that they draw you into resigned reminiscence.

"If it drifts it will mean that we will be left severely behind the rest of Europe and I don't think that we can afford that. The Government is confident that we can make this scheme work." Thus, with the earnestness of JFK committing America to the space race, did the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern launch us into the eternal orbit of reality that is the national stadium issue. The date was October 13th, 1998.

The idea that the Taoiseach was going to actually build a stadium took root among the populace. It would be several years before the extent of the misunderstanding between the leader and his people became clear.

Drift? We didn't know the meaning of the word back then.

In 1998 the Taoiseach was in fact speaking at the launch of a report. The first of a million launches. The PriceWaterhouse Coopers report into the brave new world of national sporting prestige was called A Stadium for the New Century. It would be joined on the shelf by many other reports including hefty contributions from High Point Rendel, Arup, the Office of Public Works and every major sporting body in the country.

There would be many reports and many committees. Back in 1998 a 16-person Feasibility Study Committee left earth under the stewardship of Derek Keogh, formerly of Aer Rianta. They were last heard of in January 1999, when one of their number, Bernard O'Byrne, announced that he, as head honcho of the FAI, would be pursuing other plans for a soccer stadium but remaining on the committee. Since then there have been so many committees that no stadium could possibly house all the members who have served time on them.

For a while, though, it looked as if there would be many stadiums. Croke Park. Bertie Bowl. Eircom Park. Maybe a rugby facility. Maybe something thrown up by Owen O'Callaghan. Alas . . .

There have been receptions. A cheese mountain and a wine lake have been consumed by those gazing over architects' models. There have been hors-d'oeuvres with the big hitters. We celebrated when the FAI got into bed with Deutsche Bank, "the biggest bank in the world" as Bernard O'Byrne so proudly put it. We thrilled as IMG got busy selling packages for Eircom Park. In February 2001 we were summoned to Abbotstown for the announcement that the German firm Behnisch Behnisch and Partners had won the international Architectural and Environmental Framework Plan competition to develop the Sports Campus Ireland site at Abbotstown. Wonderful.

Magical moments. Can we forget Paddy Teahon's emotive guarantee to bring in Sports Campus Ireland for the price of a Big Mac meal, or the wonderfully dead-panned tour of inspection by the football people charged with choosing a venue for Euro 2008? All went well we were told, they were absolutely charmed by us.

Five years of tedious argument. When it comes to sport, reason and common sense have no part to play in the discussion. It is better to curse the darkness than to light a candle, reasonable to suggest that a national stadium would mean more patients on trolleys and fewer schools and a necessary culling of the elderly. Five years on we have no national stadium and the trolleys are still stacked to the doorways. Or Mary Harney and the PDs can blithely announce that not just should Croke Park be open for business but GAA grounds all over the country should be ushering in hockeyists and socceratas and rugbionians.

Five long years. Where these World Cup qualifying games will be played is anybody's guess. The FAI are turning the screws every day. The IRFU are squealing. The GAA are just taking care of business.

Five years. There isn't a sod turned on a stadium site. Five years on and the budgetary allowance for the development of Abbotstown next year is just 1.5 million. Five years. That's about 18 million spent on studies and reports plus over 200 million on clearing the State labs out of Abbotstown.

Five years and so many promises broken. The GAA was bought out of the idea of opening up Croke Park. The FAI was persuaded to abandon Eircom Park with the sort of long term package not usually available to people other than former editors of The Irish Times. The IRFU have been repeatedly shafted. Athletics Ireland have long abandoned hope that any eventual stadium would include a running track.

Five years and John O'Donoghue is waiting on a report from the IRFU and then he will, well, he will make a report to the Government.

If this was the real world there would be resignations. There would be sackcloth and ashes. There would be ruined careers.

Out in the real world things just happened in the last five years. In February of 2001 they laid the first stone for a new home for Sporting Lisbon. The 52,000 seat Estadio Jose del Alvalade opened last month. It is a stunning stadium wrapped in a complex of bars, restaurants, cinemas, offices, health facilities, bowling alleys etc..

In May 2001 Lisbon took the decision to replace rather than refurbish Benfica's legendary Stadium of Light.

The new 65,000 seat Luz stadium is ready and waiting for the finals of 2004.

In Porto they have completed the extraordinary Estadio do Dragao, the 52,000 seat venue for the opening ceremony of the competition and even its beauty is eclipsed by that of the Estadio Municipal in Braga. Five years. In which time Detroit has erected two new stadia which are playing a key part in reviving that city's desolate downtown. Sri Lanka has taken just 175 days to build the Dambula Cricket stadium. China has embarked upon the biggest sporting infrastructure programme the world has ever seen and Wembley has been demolished and £150 million worth sold of the proposed 160 executive boxes for a new stadium which is five months ahead of schedule.

Five years. We have some reports and a virtual guarantee that when the sixth year has passed we will not have started work. Elsewhere people identify a need and fill it.

The smart money (if any currency expended in connection with this charade could be so termed) suggests that eventually the Government will settle for the idea of refurbishing Lansdowne Road. Probably this is the best option remaining but in many ways it is too little too late.

The FAI and the IRFU both have commitments in the short to medium term for hosting World Cup qualifying games.

In other words the crisis is now. The solution is down the road. The FAI may persuade FIFA to extend the derogation on the issue of bucket seats at Lansdowne, thus sparing the national team the embarrassment of playing key matches in front of 22,000 people and empty terraces. Where the games will go when Lansdowne is being refurbished is another matter.

The decision to buy the GAA out of opening up Croke Park in 2001 would appear to have backfired badly. For their bravery in pushing ahead with a massively ambitious scheme the GAA now find themselves holding virtually all the aces. If Croke Park opens for business it will do so having extracted a decent price for having gotten the Government off the hook.

The suggestion this week from a prominent GAA official that the Government might like to pay 250 million to lease Croke Park for 20 years may have had some mischief in it but it hinted also that the GAA recognises that the balance of power has shifted its way.

The GAA has taken decisions before which have proved to be neither popular nor profitable. There is no guarantee that come April and Congress the doors of Croke Park will be swung open and the pathways of Dublin 3 strewn with flowers.

The association will not be swayed by the ridiculous but shrill arguments of those who believe that because some public money went into the funding of the venture that it should be open to all sports. The debate will be an internal one. Opening up Croke Park will be unpopular with many who see the ground as a symbol of the GAA's independence and essential difference but it would be profitable and would fund other projects in a competitive sports market.

So the decision to refurbish Lansdowne will be too little, too late in terms of finding alternative interim accommodation and it will be too little, too late in terms of what might have been.

Talking a couple of years ago about the future of stadium design, Rod Sheard of HOK made an analogy with plant life.

"A small ratty stadium will not attract many bees but what we are about is attracting more bees and we must think of all the facilities that a stadium provides as the petals . . . we must keep building up those petals and adding things that have nothing to do with putting on sport . . . It's not the way we have a product today it's the way that stadium is in 50 years time that matters."

Had the Government moved in time and abandoned the comically bloated and stylistically outdated Abbotstown idea they could be just finishing a stadium which would have been one of the centre pieces of the docklands redevelopment scheme, a venue which would be at the hub of an area which attracted people by day and by night. Bars, hotels, restaurants, leisure facilities, offices, cinemas. In Detroit they even included an opera house.

The point of such ventures is not just regeneration but income. Private partners flock to such ventures. Very little changes have to be made to the transport infrastructure. Factor in the income from executive boxes and naming rights and the cost to the exchequer dwindles quickly. We had neither the imagination or the will to do it though.

Eventually with our backs to the walls the Arup report will point us in the direction of Dublin 4 and after much finessing of the neighbours somebody will take a hammer and bolster to Lansdowne Road.

It will be a dull and expedient way to end what has been a prolonged national embarrassment. Almost four years ago now the Taoiseach could be found in chipper mood as he outlined how the proposed expenditure on a national stadium was really a modest outlay. Modestly accepting that his plan was "visionary", the Taoiseach pointed out that in the first seven years of this millennium we would be spending some £41 billion (punts) on infrastructure. So . . .

"In the context of our overall spending on infrastructure it's actually a modest investment. Five pence in every £10 of infrastructural investment will build and equip this world class facility. And it will be something of which everyone who lives on this island can be truly proud."

Ho hum.