Bertie's vision well and truly bowled out

FROM THE ARCHIVE MARCH 2nd, 2002:Eight years ago this week, Bertie Ahern's vision of a National Sports Stadium began to fall apart. TOM HUMPHRIESsifted through the ashes

BUILDING A stadium. One supposedly fun thing the Taoiseach will never want to do again. When Charles Haughey famously complimented Bertie Ahern on his high levels of cunning and deviousness he was horribly premature with the flattery. The only true measure of cunning and deviousness in Irish politics comes when you mix it up in the fight club that is Irish sports administration. In that virtual world poor Bertie has been biffed about like a lightweight.

The Taoiseach’s plans for a stately pleasure dome (with velodromes measureless to man) to be built out in Xanadu West surely came to end this week. What is remarkable is that they survived the High-Point Rendel report of a few weeks ago, a judgment so damning of the whole business it should have brought forth a sheaf of resignation letters rather than the grim pathos of Paddy Teahon fulminating that we had his personal guarantee that he’d get the Bertie Bowl built for the original price.

Instead, the soiled and flimsy tissue of hope that is the joint Euro 2008 bid was pressed into service as a fig leaf to cover the Government’s little embarrassment, and the populace was urged to stomp and cheer for the vision and acuity of a leader who would prepare the nation so wonderfully for its putative co-hosting role.

Back in the real world, away from the simpering nabobs and panjandrums of the FAI, the Taoiseach had a rather more difficult time selling the idea. By the end of last week the Progressive Democrats still weren’t for turning. As has been the pattern through the last three comical years, one shambles had begotten another.

A quick gallop through it all would do no harm: rewind to 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 stage these.

The FAI, proprietors of the rust heap that is Dalymount (and former stakeholders in Glenmalure Park and Flower Lodge), announce that they won’t have another good night’s sleep until they have a place to call their own. Remember that Wembley Stadium has never been a home of its own to the English FA. They don’t have one. Ditto the world champions, France. We must have our own version of Windsor Park.

Thus the beginnings of the Bertie in Wonderland time; part fairytale, part magic realist fable. Words have different meanings in the wonderland that is Irish sports administration: mostly it’s one, long, mad hatter’s party. Certain things have a life of their own though – it’s just a matter of waking up their souls.

The souls of sports politicians are not responsive to the same pressures as those of politicians in the real world. In his epic personality clash with Bernard O’Byrne, Ahern came to appreciate – and perhaps to be inspired by – the fact that the Eircom Park proposal made no commercial sense at all in no way diminished its attractiveness to a certain constituency. O’Byrne had junior soccer behind him.

There then came a couple of chapters upon which Ahern will reflect in his retirement and wonder if he wasn’t hallucinating at the time. The FAI, with nobody willing to put the final bullet into the ailing Eircom Park business, had to be bought out of its own folly with Government money. Briefly the Taoiseach saw his own vision reinstated. The Bertie Bowl.

This splendid fantasy hung on a slender thread. There could not be an outbreak of permissiveness among the GAA. So on the eve of last year’s Congress some £60 million more of Government money fell like manna on the shoulders of the delegates. Just say no.

The GAA took the money and the PR hit. It has suffered worse before and privately, indeed , there were smiles. The Congress had established that the demise of Rule 42 was inevitable whenever the mandarins chose to pull the lever. In the meanwhile £60 million was good business.

A year later the Government was back with egg on its face. One shambles begets another. Scotland the brave being that little bit too timorous to spend the crucial extra £100 million on its own bid to host the Euro 2008 Championship found itself with a choice.

Typically, the Irish announced that they had no problems. Then they announced that they also had no stadiums. Quiet voices within Irish soccer suggested that a bid for the 2012 championships held out better prospects. Quiet voices within Irish soccer are seldom listened to. Sure count us in, we said. Tell the Uefa crowd whatever you need to tell them.

And so, for his dalliance with some Irish sporting bodies, the Taoiseach finds himself anatomically compromised. The GAA Congress in early April holds the Bertie Bowl in one warm hand, the Euro 2008 bid in the other. Between now and then a little squeezing will be done.

Which is more painful to the Taoiseach? That the GAA should continue to send more than two dozen delegates out to the toilets in order to retain Rule 42 and allow the Bertie Bowl a chance at life under a new administration, or that Croke Park should come over all glasnost and throw open its doors to the fantasy of Euro 2008 football, thus putting the Bertie Bowl out of its misery and giving the Government a little daydream to be going on with?

The GAA won’t be the only ones squeezing and Bertie Ahern won’t be the only one feeling the pain. For the FAI, the entire business is an excruciating and painful embarrassment. Late this week they were reduced to making whimpering noises to the effect that the Abbotstown development would still be their preferred choice of venue in terms of their own future and the Euro 2008 bid. This line of thinking usually has the label “wishful” attached to it. The FAI require, in other words, that Fianna Fáil either win a majority in early May and triumphantly announce the rebirth of the Bertie Bowl or are returned with coalition partners who can be convinced before May 28th (the next Uefa deadline) to give the go-ahead for an expensive national stadium despite the High-Point Rendel report.

Otherwise their fate lies entirely in the hands of the GAA.

For the IRFU, it is a setback which provides an unexpected opportunity to flex their muscles. Late last week they issued a statement which came as a final, blackly comic reminder of how much the world has changed in this time of governmental meddling. Once the most discreet and confident of sports organisations, the IRFU announced that unless the Bertie Bowl was erected as promised they would stubbornly continue to exist as slum-dwellers. There would be no rebuilding of Lansdowne Road as a 30,000-seat venue.

On the surface it was an unconvincing argument, there apparently being no impediment (apart from local residents) to rebuilding Lansdowne Road as, say, a 40-45,000-seat stadium.

Given its constituency, the IRFU knows that its executive boxes and 10-year premium tickets would sell almost instantly.

The IRFU can be forgiven its moment of cussedness, however. The onset of professionalism has changed many things and in response the sport has begun to look outside itself a little more.What it has seen at one level is a war in which the inscrutable mandarins of Croke Park have won hands down, but a war in which the rewards for the vanquished warriors of the FAI have been considerable. Soccer has been given a Marshall Plan. The GAA have reaped the reward for taking the risk with Croke Park. The IRFU, in return for its quiet patience, has been pushed around and taken for granted.

Just a few years ago over a series of private meetings the GAA and the IRFU seemed to be heading towards a marriage made in heaven. There were quiet whispers that a formal announcement would come soon.

The IRFU would move operations to Croke Park while Lansdowne Road had the painters and decorators in. Thereafter the GAA’s headquarters would be available for those rugby occasions so irresistible to the sheepskins that herds of them would be willing to travel to the near northside just to be in attendance.

Irish sports organisations in the new century have no umbrella body (perhaps the Sports Council, but not a sound has been heard from same), but they do have a joint motto: “Where’s ours?” So rugby suddenly wants to know why it should foot the bill for refurbishing Lansdowne Road while the Government saves face and three-quarters of a billion euro by acting as cheerleaders for a laughable attempt to host the European soccer Championship.

If there is a dignified way out of this morass it is for us all to ole along with the pretence that the Euro 2008 bid isn’t a pointless pantomime. The circumstances we now find ourselves in leave us contemplating the arrangement which has always made most sense anyway: a refurbished Lansdowne Road staging most soccer and rugby games; Croke Park making itself available for those events in either sport which would attract an attendance of more than 45,000; the Government taking the leftover money and creating an integrated regional sports policy that benefits kids and not superstars.

And as to the thorny question as to whether the Croke Park calendar can actually be cleared for soccer in May and June 2008?

Umm, yeah, right. The GAA will be sure to make the Artane Boys Band available too. Unlike this debate, they never grow old.