So the Taoiseach has been compelled by his junior Government partners to make a commitment that the £60 million grant to the GAA will be conditional on Croke Park being opened up to other sports. The blank cheque, effectively offered in such strange circumstances on the eve of their annual congress last Friday night, is, if words mean anything, to be withdrawn. He has apologised to the Tanaiste, once again, for "breakdowns in communications" and conceded, under pressure, to the Opposition parties that most of his colleagues in Government did not have "the full facts" and that "the final offer" to the GAA was "certainly not clear to the Tanaiste".
After all that has gone on before, the ease with which the Taoiseach slipped back into the bad old ways in his dealings with the GAA in recent days has been disquieting. There was no due process. What there was in abundance was a return to the old political culture of cutting through red tape, subverting Cabinet procedures for the spending of taxpayers' money and a contemptuous disregard for the Progressive Democrat partners in this minority Coalition arrangement.
Mr Alan Dukes accused Mr Ahern in the Dail yesterday of bringing all the financial procedures in the legislative book into disrepute in an attempt "to subvert and corrupt a major national organisation". Mr Ruairi Quinn claimed that the Taoiseach's intervention was deliberately designed, on the eve of an historic GAA congress, to thwart a decision to reverse Rule 42 and allow other games to be played at Croke Park. That Mr Ahern pressed ahead with what was termed as a final Government offer "in principle" to the GAA in the week that the Tanaiste had to absent herself to bury her father has added a cynical edge to the whole controversy.
For all of that, the PDs seem to have won some worthwhile concessions from their Fianna Fail partners in the current situation. A commitment was extracted from the Taoiseach yesterday that "where sporting facilities are funded by taxpayers, those facilities should be shared as widely as possible to the whole community". The funding offer made in good faith in letters made to the GAA would be honoured, he said, strongly intimating that legal discussions would set out the above context. The Minister for Tourism, Sport and Recreation, Dr McDaid, will bring a full memorandum to Cabinet on the matter within three weeks.
More importantly, perhaps, given the cavalier fashion in which taxpayers' money was thrown at the GAA, the Taoiseach has also given a commitment that there will be an independent external assessment of the whole Stadium Ireland project at Abbotstown. It will take account of the soaring cost of what has come to be known as the Bertie Bowl, the ancillary costs such as access infrastructure, and the strategies to manage its on-going operating costs. Money has been thrown tossed about like confetti to secure Stadium Ireland: £60 million to see off the FAI, £60 million to Croke Park and the current estimate of the full cost of Sports Campus Ireland could be as high as £1 billion. Mr Ahern may feel he is building his monument. But neither he, nor the Government, should forget that the people are being asked to pay for it. And there is a widespread, indeed a growing sense, that it is foolish and wrong when so many State services and so many aspects of the national infrastructure are crumbling.