Tom Humphries traces the tortuous path of the slow and painful movement towards making a decision on where the national stadium should be.
It's hard to know precisely what to feel when the latest shiny-suited sports minister stands up and announces the Government's freshest grand plan for Irish sport. Déjà vu? Ennui? Winter vomiting disease? Irritable bowel syndrome?
So the Government has decided to do what intellectually unremarkable dogs on the street have been telling them to do for half a decade. They have decided to redevelop Lansdowne Road. For this small mercy we are supposed to shake our cha-chas in exuberant celebration and give much thanks. We are supposed to grant general absolution for the crimes prompted by the Taoiseach's dementia of the ego, the years wasted as the Government dreamed of a stately pleasure dome with velodromes measureless to man.
Is it churlish to point out that since 1998 we have had so many receptions, launches, press conferences, reports and briefings that the aggregated monotony and banality amount to nothing less than a glimpse of hell? There seems to be no Governmental embarrassment at the fact that all these years haven't produced so much as an upturned sod.
Perhaps when Lansdowne is rebuilt we could incorporate some of the grandiosity which Abbotstown reached for by engraving some of the more memorable quotes from the past five years on to marble slabs and placing them in the walls.
The words after all are what we are left with after half a decade of hubris and nonsense. Speaking of what Michael McDowell called a Ceaucescu-era campus and stadium, An Taoiseach chastised his doubters once by saying: "As a nation not only can we afford this undertaking; we cannot afford to let it slip."
Such a moment, like the vision of a great dam at Ardnacrusha, deserves commemoration. In the meantime we are left with a modest proposal and the task of deciding who has been blessed and who shall be blamed.
The decision, of course, marks a big win for Irish soccer. The sports association with the least competence and the most exaggerated sense of its own entitlement finds itself with a tureen in its hand just as it begins to rain soup.
The people who mislaid Flower Lodge and Glenmalure Park, who turned Dalymount Park into a rustbowl and in the Shamrock Rovers stadium in Tallaght have created a latter day Pompeii, the people who "almost" gave us Eircom Park and the Euro 2008 championships - these are the blazers who will benefit the most.
Good luck to them. It is not the fault of those kids who dream of the big time that Irish soccer has never built a venue in which to have a big time. It is soccer's fine fortune that the Taoiseach is a Manchester United sort of guy from whose lips phrases like "Theatre of Dreams" find a ready launch area.
Soccer wins out, and the Government will help build an Irish home for the world's richest professional sport. In rugby headquarters the celebrations will be somewhat less dizzy. Had the IRFU known half a decade ago that the governmental huffery and puffery about stadiums would amount to this they might have refurbished their own place by now at less cost and with greater efficiency.
And then there are all those other sports who will be invited to huddle under the fig leaf that is the diminished Abbotstown dream. How they must regret not following the example of the Golf Union of Ireland who last year just gave up on the Taiseach's big dream of an Abbotstown Golf Academy and set about providing one for themselves at Carton House.
Once upon a time the plans for what was to be built off the M50 would have taken a volume to compile. The sporting metropolis would be all things to all sports people. It would have a sports science and medicine centre, a tennis centre, golf academy, velodrome, indoor arena, Bertie bowl, aquatic centre and so on.
What is remarkable is that we believed it for so long. Two years ago this week, Mr Des Allen, speaking on behalf of 65 Irish sporting bodies, embraced the whole idea in a cautious way: "The Federation of Irish Sports welcomes wholeheartedly the decision to build the facilities in full and as originally proposed, but obviously it would be very disappointing for the 65 sports we represent to see reduction and disastrous to see the elimination of some of the facilities. To suggest reviews at this stage would appear to be stepping back."
There has been stepping back of course. More stepping back than a beaten boxer. Still the Government rolled on. In a way the finality of yesterday's sudden U-turn into the realms of common sense means that we will miss the whole show.
The production survived the High-Point Rendel Report which contained judgments so damning of the whole business that it should have brought forth a sheaf of resignation letters rather than the grim pathos of Paddy Teahon of Sports Campus Stadium Ireland fulminating that we had his personal guarantee that he'd get the Bertie bowl built for the price of a Happy Meal.
Then the soiled and flimsy tissue of hope that was the joint Euro 2008 bid was pressed into service to help dry away our tears. We were urged to stomp and cheer for the vision and acuity of our leaders who would prepare the nation so wonderfully for its putative co-hosting role.
Of course UEFA, the only people we needed to impress more than ourselves, didn't see it that way. It was one thing to get the nabobs and panjandrums of the FAI on board; another thing entirely to convince folk from the real world that we were a serious sporting nation.
And through it all the Progressive Democrats were never for turning. By interring the Bertie bowl dream yesterday the Taoiseach quietly ceded one of the key prestige battles of the Coalition years. A personal calamity given the political weight he had put behind Abbotstown, but not an unexpected calamity. One shambles had begotten another over the years.
A quick leaf through our back pages is once again in order. In far distant 1998 and in the midst of the solemn deliberations of a governmental committee to examine the feasibility of a national stadium the FAI with perhaps six fixtures a year to contribute to such a stadium decides that it must have its own place in which to decently stage these. This place would have retractable roofs and would look very similar to a stadium in Arnhem in Holland.
By the following spring the government was offering cash (€11 million in grants) if the FAI scrapped the idea. For a brief and glorious period the city prepared itself (not really) for the day when its citizens would be able to stand in the upper deck of the 80,000-capacity Croke Park and gaze across at the 70,000-capacity Bertie Bowl and then take in the distant splendour of the 45,000-capacity Eircom Park.
Eircom Park shrank again and again until finally it disappeared. Abbottstown was shelved and relaunched more often than a beloved book. The GAA on the verge of opening the gates of Croke Park was suckered by an offer of £60 million to keep the place to itself and thus enable the Bertie Bowl.
And so it went. Architects were commissioned. Reports were published. Abbotstown was damned and ridiculed but never truly scrapped. The costs mounted. Attitudes hardened.
Yesterday's announcement of a new 50,000-seat Lansdowne Road isn't quite too little, too late, but is certainly the bare minimum, delivered much too late.
The GAA, not unlike the IRFU, has been used and abused throughout the entire process and for a sporting body which formerly was not averse to considering itself the sporting wing of Fianna Fáil, that process has been distressing. The final bemusement came yesterday with the Minister's casual claim that the GAA could use Lansdowne Road if they wanted to.
As such, of course, the Minister was reclassifying himself as a 'nit wit' or some unspecified part thereof, vis a vis the rules of nitwittery as established by an Taoiseach threeyears ago when he announced that "if you believe that soccer, rugby, gaelic football, ladies football and camogie and other sports can all be played on the same pitch you have to be a bit of a nitwit." The contention yesterday by the Minister that the dimensions of the new ground would be adequate to accommodate Gaelic games is worrying. The pitch in Croke Park is 145 metres long and the GAA minimum-length pitch is 130 metres. The maximum length of an international soccer pitch is 110 metres, and a rugby pitch is 10 metres shorter.
Better perhaps to point to another engraved marble slab. The FAI and the IRFU in a joint statement 2½ years ago worriedly pointed to the issue of pitch dimension.
Both organisations are conscious of the negative impact evident in stadia around the world where soccer and rugby are played on a pitch far removed from spectators, normally as a result of a surrounding athletics track.
The statement went on to to give the specific dimensions of the three types of pitches and pointed out that in the event of Croke Park becoming the National Stadium "this would leave spectators at rugby and soccer matches a minimum of 15 metres from the pitch side and 25 metres from the goal line." So is Mr O'Donoghue telling us that we are to build a world-class, state-of-the-art stadium which is unsatisfactory for its two principal tenants but may just suit the GAA which has no real interest or incentive to use the facility?
One suspects that we won't be seeing much hurling on the sward of Lansdowne Road for some time.
Neither, of course, will we be seeing anything else for a while. It is hoped that, with the unlikely quiescence of the residents of Dublin 4 the Stadium project will be completed by 2008. That's four years, or 12 months less than the Government has wasted on the debate so far. Soccer and rugby will spend part of that period looking for alternative homes.
With the mood as it is in the GAA at present Croke Park will be remaining locked.
Perhaps the final stage of the metastasising scandal of the national stadium will be the sight of Irish teams playing home internationals in Britain.
For this the Soldiers of Destiny have shimmied and stroked for so long? When it happens the GAA will most likely shoulder the blame, and certain profiles along the Drumcondra Road will be kept discreetly low.
And in the Fianna Fáil offices in Mount Street there will be quiet, wondrous realisation that this is a country which merely loves the idea of itself loving sport, a country that loves the last good time more than it loves anything else.
We are a people who will tolerate any class of a shambles if it has to do with sport, because at the end of the day it's only sport. The Taoiseach, who loves the idea of loving sport more than any of us, knew that all along, of course.