League clubs to meet over FAI strategy

The National League's clubs are expected to hold an emergency meeting next week to discuss the latest developments in the FAI's Eircom Park scheme following the resignation of the association's treasurer, Brendan Menton, from the board of Centime, the company established by the association to build and run the stadium.

Next week's previously scheduled meeting of the association's affiliates, called specifically to deal with the outstanding questions surrounding the costings of the project, has now been postponed indefinitely to allow the chief executive, Bernard O'Byrne, additional time to come up with the required documentation.

In its place, a meeting of the association's board of management - in effect, its directors - has been brought forward to Thursday, and this is likely to be preceded by a gathering of the National League where a strategy can be agreed upon for its representatives.

The latest moves by the clubs follow Tuesday's meeting of the Centime directors, after which Menton decided to step down.

At the meeting, the Eircom Park project director, Joe Keane, answered questions relating the scheme to "everybody's satisfaction", according to FAI president Pat Quigley.

But Menton, upon hearing reports that he was supposed to have been happy when leaving the meeting, insisted that he had told his fellow directors three times that he would be considering his position.

"Basically I resigned because I got fed up with not being told things," said Menton, who found out only at that meeting that O'Byrne had agreed with Keane last year that expenditure on the construction of the stadium be capped at £65 million, plus £3 million to cover contingency costs.

"Fundamentally we've turned the whole thing around," Menton continued, "because now, instead of saying we're going to build a specific stadium and insisting that it can be built for this amount, it has been decided that we are going to spend so much and then see what we can get for the money.

"I think a great deal of the wrangling that has taken place within the association could have been avoided had we been told that this was the line being taken."

Aside from the immediate problem, though, of having to face renewed criticism from the league and a number of other affiliates within the association, there will also be pressure on O'Byrne to make it clear just what it is that the association can get for its £65 million.

Representatives of hbg, the company contracted to build Eircom Park, have informally indicated in recent weeks that the original specification for the stadium could not be met for the £55.5 million share of the budget that they would actually receive because of the delays incurred in the planning process.

As a result, it now appears that the association is putting some of the proposed "ancillary" facilities at the site on hold until additional funding becomes available. Among these are believed to be retail units and the proposed museum.

At Tuesday's meeting, however, Keane expressed his continued confidence that a 45,000-seat stadium could be provided for the available budget. Given that the sliding roof and removable pitch, which carry a combined price tag of around £15 million but which allow the stadium to be used for a wide variety of other purposes, are essential to the viability of the project, the rest of the stadium will have to be brought in at a cost of around £1,000 per seat - around a third of the projected per seat cost at the proposed Stadium Ireland at Abbotstown, or the new Wembley.

It is, on the other hand, not far from the sort of amount currently being spent by English Premiership clubs, according to Simon Inglis, English author of several leading books about stadium design.