Yesterday was a good day for those backing the concept of Sports Campus Ireland. Early in the morning the Government met the FAI, and it will have been noted with quiet satisfaction that in terms of their own stadium project the soccer people have many miles to go and very few pounds to spend on their journey. Sweet talking the FAI into a tenancy deal should be easy from here on in.
Then, at midday, the Minister for Sport, Dr McDaid, had every reason to look chipper when he presented the launch plans for Sports Campus Ireland, the Government's controversial and hugely ambitious attempt to bring Ireland's sporting infrastructure into the 21st century.
The plans are impressive: an 80 thousand-seater stadium plus an indoor arena, an aquatics centre, multi-purpose halls, a sports science centre, a velodrome, a golf academy, a tennis centre, hotels and restaurants. This could be New York city and the plans would still look impressive. They would also look more appropriate to the population size. There is a grandiosity and hubris to the plans unveiled yesterday which just seems to invite criticism. One can't help looking at the scale of the ventures involved and imagining the winds whistling through a deserted Sports Campus Ireland in 20 years' time.
The scale of the undertaking, the fact that the beneficiaries are principally professional sports rather than communities and the worry that the commercial partners in the project may just leave the keys back under the Government mat if the place makes a loss are the first difficulties which suggest themselves.
First the scale. The statement made by Dr McDaid and others yesterday to the effect that Sports Campus Ireland when completed would leave Ireland with 75 per cent of the facilities needed to house a summer Olympics is not merely erroneous but gives us an indication of how official thinking on projects such as this is often beset by giganticism and ego.
Hosting the Olympics is a project Ireland should have nothing to do with. We are too cold, too small, and too insular a place to have a hope of ever getting The Games and the infrastructural legacy which an Olympiad would leave behind would be too large and ungainly for us. End of argument. Which leaves us with the question, do we really need to build an Olympic-style campus on the west side of Dublin? Is this the best use of our resources? Are inadequately resourced clubs, communities and kids all over Ireland to gaze at the glow coming from this suburban Mecca and be inspired?
The working model cited yesterday as a successful example of what Sports Campus Ireland could be was, not surprisingly, Homebush Bay. The Australian venue was the site of the Sydney Games and is a somewhat grander project but one which is already feeling the cost of its scale and its comparative remoteness from Sydney city centre. It faces many of the problems which Blanchardstown will face.
Homebush has an aquatic centre which is a roaring success and entertains 100,000 customers a month in what is a swimming crazed country. Beyond that the outlook is bleak. People who live in Homebush and surrounding districts work in Sydney and commute home. They haven't provided a natural catchment, even on weekends. The 20,000-seat Super Dome is host only to the lowly Sydney Kings basketball team and has failed to attract the regular music events which it needed to survive.
The massively impressive Olympic stadium has troubles of its own. The AFL went to court to get out of a five-year commitment to play games there. The Sydney Swans have no games arranged for the venue. The rival Bulldogs are seeking another more convenient and more intimate venue for their games. New South Wales premier Bob Carr surveyed the ghost town last month and commented, "With the best will in the world it is going to take some effort over some years to get this seen as part of the life of the city."
Michael Knight, head honcho of the Sydney games, said: "I don't know how much it will take to prevent Homebush Bay from becoming a giant white elephant."
So there it is, Homebush with its transport system, its hotels, its aquatic centre and its stadium providing a lesson which we could learn from. Location is everything. The Government needs only look to the American cities of Cleveland, Baltimore, San Francisco, San Diego, Phoenix or Denver to see how sports facilities and revitalisation plans can have a hugely beneficial long-term effect on areas closer to town. Placing the sort of facilities being talked about for Blanchardstown in an area which would attract business, tourist and conference travellers with time and money to spend would be just the start of attracting new life into an area. Sports facilities alone will not do that. It will take a lot more than the presence of an aquatic centre to make Sports Campus Ireland part of the life of this city. The bail-outs already given to the National Basketball Centre in Tallaght should be proof of that.
THEN there is the worry about how deep the pockets of the private partners will be. It is axiomatic that he with the deepest pockets pays the most and the Government has not just the deepest pockets but the biggest interest in the place surviving. For that the campus needs life, lots of it. Certainly, siting the governing bodies of sports out in Blanchardstown along with various centres of excellence will give the campus a little flicker of activity, but the question is whether the Irish public is being offered sufficient value for massive expenditure on a risky facility which will be predominantly for the benefit of elite professional athletes. And will we be asked to pay more later?
Questions: Do so many facilities need to be centralised? Do we need everything that is proposed, a velodrome for instance? Would a professional franchise like a Dublin version of the hugely successful Belfast Odyssey ice-hockey team not benefit more from a central venue? Is Sports Campus Ireland the best use to which we can put such a large tranche of sports funding?
What about location? The proposed plan opts not for the regeneration of a specific area within walking distance of a large proportion of the population but proposes to graft buildings, arenas and accelerated infrastructure onto an area already quite densely populated which already finds the M50 ring road generally inadequate to its needs.
The successful foreign examples of this type of project all have large volumes of pedestrian traffic, are all in areas which attract leisure-seekers in the evening time, in areas with hotels, apartments and conference centres generally in places contiguous to the central business area. Sports Campus Ireland will never become that sort of place.
There are other difficulties, too. John Treacy was keen to point out yesterday that the campus would be part of a longterm Government commitment to sport, that there was little point in building the top facilities unless the top coaches were brought here and our top athletes used them. This is a commendable aspiration but one subject to the winds of change policy-wise and economically. Government funded centres of excellence and coaches are a luxury which are hard to argue for when times get harder and schools and hospitals feel the pinch. What will keep Sports Campus Ireland going in those lean days?
Finally, there are the tenancy arrangements in the 80,000-seater national stadium from the top deck of which one will presumably be able to wave at one's counterparts in the top deck in Croke Park.
Times are good in Ireland but do the cash-rich IRFU and the cash-careless FAI really deserve such a sweetheart deal or need such a big facility? What is the cost to grassroots sports projects?
The business of the GAA's involvement in the National Stadium is also a moot point. The powers that be in Croke Park will dance to whatever tune the Government is playing just now because not to do so would be politically foolish. Thus they have promised to throw a couple of events at least from their yearly schedule into the Bertie Bowl. How moving fixtures from their own 80-thousand seater stadium in Dublin to another one a few miles away is of benefit to the GAA remains to be explained, but it at least keeps the Blanchardstown dance card looking full and ensures that the Government will be bearing no grudges when the GAA next looks for money.
And the GAA will have to be paid off. If the rugby and soccer bodies end up through a mix of their own inertia and Bertie Ahern's ambition with a major facility paid for by taxpayers for which there is only a peppercorn rent to be paid, well the GAA (and savvy rural TDs) will be asking why only £25 million in lottery funds has been made available for its sports which have the virtue of being amateur, community based and culturally oriented.
SOUNDINGS taken with the GAA suggest that Rule 42, the law concerning the usage of GAA grounds is likely to be dropped at the associations annual congress this spring.
That move will come a little too late one imagines to have any impact on the plans for Sports Campus Ireland but the GAA may pick up some interim business over the next five years and diehards could yet hear God Save the Queen sung in Croke Park before a rugby international. The irony could be that the GAA will have got used to its new house guests by the time they leave for breezy Blanchardstown.
As for Eircom Park, yesterday was probably another stage in its long death. Its proponents won't be buried with it, however, as soccer's fiasco may yet be soccer's opportunity. Picture this. The Government, as it quietly acknowledges, needs soccer in its new stadium. Bernard O'Byrne needs to back out of Eircom Park and into the National Stadium. He emerges from negotiations with the Government with a cheque for the £3.5 million which has already been spent on Eircom Park, plus a centre of excellence for young soccer players, plus some capital funds plus highly favourable partnership terms in the new Bertie Bowl. Hey presto! Bernard was playing hardball all along.
But that's just one of the spectacles we are likely to see along the way. Drawing board to construction is a long journey likely to be punctuated by a general election and a downturn. Only two things can be said for certain. In the great stadium race the Government currently has the momentum.
Whatever Sports Campus Ireland winds up costing, it will be more the £350 million announced yesterday.
Everything else is still to play for.