Executive's priorities on the wrong road

Distilled down to its very essence, sport ultimately becomes a question of priorities, decisions that are taken, choices that are made. On a filthy Tuesday evening in February do you stay beside the fire and the soaps or do you drag yourself out to another spirit-crushing training session? In the final minutes of a game do you hide behind your team-mates out around midfield or do you make the lung-busting run forward in search of the equalising score? Decisions, decisions.

Nothing much changes when it comes to administrators either. Do you have the vision to push through an unpopular rule change because deep inside your heart you just know it is the right and decent thing to do or do you toe the consensus line and blend in with the crowd?

It was hard not to think we had reached something like a turn in the road here over the past week and the route that appears to have been chosen is both depressing and predictable. The entire scenario is best explained by two announcements made in the space of three days by the Executive of the devolved Northern Ireland Assembly.

The first was confirmation that some £50 million sterling of government money has been earmarked for a traffic improvement scheme at Belfast's Westlink, the central arterial route that connects both sides of the city for commuter and freight traffic.

Now, on the scale of Dublin, London or any other capital city you would care to mention we're probably kidding ourselves when we talk about a traffic problem in Belfast. It is at its worst for an hour in the morning and another hour in the evening and apart from that, you can move around this city with the minimum of fuss and delay.

But the roads lobby and all the indirect taxation that accompanies its powerful interests are significant factors when it comes to influencing government policy and so a decision has been made to build an underpass to the Westlink and carry out other works, supposedly to ease congestion at a cost of tens of millions of pounds. So far so good and given the vested interests involved it would be naive to be overly surprised.

But much of that was thrown into sharp relief by another Executive pronouncement just a few days later. In the wake of the fabric of local football crumbling before its very eyes, a decision was taken a few months back to appoint a Football Advisory Panel made up of former players, administrators and a number of other interested parties. Its remit was to survey the situation and report back to the Minister for Culture, Arts and Leisure, Michael McGimpsey.

The advisory panel has spent the intervening time carrying out a top-to-bottom review of the local game and then preparing a final report of its findings and recommendations. That report is due at the end of next month but in an exercise clearly aimed at testing the water and tentatively gauging public opinion, most of its significant findings were "leaked" to the media here last Friday.

In truth, most of those findings are fairly anodyne, but given the decrepit state of the game here there wasn't really much else to be said. It doesn't take a genius to realise sectarianism has to be addressed, as does the surfeit of administrators and the confusion that produces. Investment is required in the grounds and the general infrastructure. Any visit to an Irish League ground, with its 1950s-style facilities and catering to match, would tell you that.

But one area in which the advisory panel was prepared to stick its neck out was in relation to the provision of a national stadium for Northern Ireland. "We will recommend," the report reads, "that there should be a stadium that meets international standards for football and that government, the governing body and the Sports Council should commit to establishing this within a stated timeframe."

This is a provision that has common sense written all over it. One of the most significant barriers to reinventing football here as something inclusive and open to everyone is the absence of a genuinely neutral playing field when it comes to staging major international occasions. The problems associated with Windsor Park are legion and while efforts have been made to improve the atmosphere since the dark days of November 1993 the mean-spirited undercurrent has not disappeared completely.

Again, experience counsels against suggesting that changing the venue would eradicate the problem, but it would at least be a start. The loftiness of the ideal was soon deflated in one of the local teatime television news programmes last Friday evening by McGimpsey. The notion of a national stadium, he said, was an absolutely splendid idea but there was no prospect in the immediate or more long-term future of the project attracting any government money. The unspoken sub-text was that without that investment it would remain a pipe-dream and never move behind the pie-in-the-sky planning stage.

The timing could not have been worse. While improvements to busy roads so that they can attract more traffic and in turn become even more congested are deemed worthy of substantial investment, the very notion of financing anything as frivolous as a national stadium is ruled out as fanciful right from the outset. As an exercise in warped priorities, this takes some beating.

If the new political structures, limited as they are, were to make any meaningful difference to the lives of people here it was precisely in areas like sport that progress could have been made.

Experiences just 100 miles down the road from the Stormont Executive may have shown the financial perils of setting off down the national stadium road and perhaps Bertie Ahern's travails have served as a brake on any rush towards a similar project here.

But the total reluctance of government here to get involved in any putative project has a symbolic as well as an actual significance. It may well have been that any stadium could have proceeded along public-private partnership lines but without the confidence that government funding engenders, big business and sponsors are unlikely to stick their heads over the parapet and get involved.

The fact that the Executive appears to have ruled out any financial input into a national stadium sends out the most negative of signals. As the ministers continue to balance the financial books and allocate money for the various projects over which they have control, they might well ask themselves when they last heard of a road-building scheme that succeeded in breaking down barriers and bringing divided people together.