Casement Park in line for major overhaul - 40,000 all seater Stadium.

[orangeman]

Very messy all round.

[Clinker]

By Eamonn McCann

Confronted last Friday with a damning report on the Casement Park redevelopment scheme, Minister Caral Ni Chuilin accepted responsibility, rejected blame and said that she won't be resigning.

The report from the Project Assessment Review panel of the Cabinet Office made 20 recommendations for change. The most telling from the point of view of Ms Ni Chuilin's Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (DCAL) was that she must appoint a new "senior responsible officer" to take over from the DCAL deputy permanent secretary who has filled the position until now.

Another recommendation was that the chair of the Safety Technical Group, Paul Scott, should be replaced by someone with expertise in "mediation and facilitation", rather than in the technical practicalities of the project.

The review had been undertaken in response to a claim by Mr Scott to the DCAL committee at Stormont in April that, in spite of his safety concerns, he had come under "undue pressure" from within the department to agree to give the scheme the go-ahead. He accused officials of "bullying".

The panel found so little trust left between DCAL, Ulster GAA, Sports NI and other "stakeholders" that outside counselling was required: "An independent mediator will be needed to reset working relationships."

It was reported on Monday that Mr Scott had been told by Sports NI, for which he works, that he's not to make further public comment on the matter under pain of possible disciplinary action.

The report was published late last Friday afternoon, the traditional time for release of news which official bodies don't want widely publicised. Rather than distributing copies or emailing the report to newsrooms, DCAL summoned journalists to its head office in central Belfast, where they were given an hour to read the text and then almost seven minutes to pursue with the minister any issues arising from the report and its 20 recommendations.


The minister interpreted the document itself as meaning that she had been "open, transparent and professional" throughout. The GAA took a similarly creative approach, accepting a recommendation for drastic change in the way it handled its role - appoint a new, full-time project leader and invest "significant additional resources" - before hailing the report as a "clear vindication of the premium which the GAA attached to the development of a new safe stadium".


The GAA had joined with DCAL in opposing residents of the area, who had mounted a court challenge to the stadium plan. Both the association and the department stressed the urgency of the project: the provision of a 38,000-capacity stadium was key to winning the staging of the 2023 Rugby World Cup, it was suggested.

Given the objection already upheld in the courts, it is highly unlikely that the stadium, when and if it is completed, will hold 38,000 spectators. As well, the time-scale for completion stretches ever further into the future.


Following the residents' success last December in having planning permission quashed, the association seemed confident that this would prove no more than a blip. There would be a new application before the planners by the middle of this year, it declared.


Now, though, according to the panel, it will take 12 months from the repair of relations between the various stakeholders before any new planning application can be submitted. It is likely to take another 12 months for formal approval. That's if there are no further court challenges.

It is hard to see a sod of turf being turned on the site before the second half of 2017.

The project has been costed at £77m. But past experience, current delays, administrative chaos and inflation over a longer-than-anticipated period suggest that taxpayers will be lucky if the final bill doesn't top £100m.

This has been an outright disaster for which nobody is prepared to accept any blame.

[Here]

[snatter]

Belfast City Council should step up and offer an alternative site capable of holding the originally tendered 40K capacity.

A site big enough to hold a 40k stadium.
A site big enough to allow a roof on ALL four sides of the stadium.

I loved the reference in the report to the H&S importance of ensuring that fans continue sitting in the uncovered Andytown Road stand during any outbreaks of heavy rain. How fecking miserable will that be?

Time for the GAA top brass to stop digging a hole and get a big enough site.

[Applesisapples]

When are SF going start putting able people in positions of authority. Good government is being sacrificed at the alter of SF's own needs regarding it war veterans.

[Clinker]

Casement turning into a Field of Nightmares

Patrick Murphy 
15 August, 2015

You will be heartened to hear that our beloved Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (DCAL) has progressed from supporting the film industry to making its own films.

Its latest production is an Irish adaptation of the Oscar-winning Field of Dreams, a film about an American farmer who responds to a voice urging him to turn his cornfield into a baseball stadium. The ghosts of past baseball stars turn up to play in it, thereby rescuing him from financial ruin.

So, stand by for Field of Nightmares - the Casement Park Story, which will not be coming to a cinema near you any time soon.

Starring Carál Ní Chuilín as the Voice and featuring a cast of thousands from Sinn Féin, the GAA, the PSNI, the SDLP which approved the initial plan, and (if it still exists) Sport NI, Field of Nightmares has already cost an estimated £6.7 million in professional fees. It is currently the most expensive field of hay in Irish history.

Film critics have described it as a political comedy, with several sub-plots of intrigue and incompetence. Although the GAA has pledged £15 million of the £77 million total cost, a staggering 80 per cent (£62 million) will come from public funds.

Although 35 per cent of Dublin's new Croke Park's funding came from the National Lottery, only 7.5 per cent came from the taxpayer. Insolvent Stormont's generosity knows no bounds.

(Oh dear, you say, I hope this column is not, in the DCAL Minister's words, `an anti-GAA element.' No, it is pro-GAA. Well, pro-hurling actually. With a few honourable exceptions, it sees Gaelic football as organised boredom, camouflaged with jargon.)

DCAL offered three reasons for its proposed lavish spending on Casement: it urgently needs refurbishment; it will boost the economy of west Belfast and it will promote Gaelic games. It got the first one half right. The other two are seriously flawed.

Casement certainly needs a new stand and new changing facilities. There is no argument about that. However, it does not `need' a 38,000-seat stadium with pubs, restaurants and corporate boxes in the same way that, for example, hospitals need medical equipment.

But, says the Voice, such a stadium will promote Gaelic games. It will not. The way to promote hurling in Belfast, for example, is to have every child in the city with a hurl in his/her hand. Sport can only be promoted through the development of children, not by facilitating those who see it as entertainment during dinner.

Would Antrim hurlers have avoided relegation this year,or would Fermanagh footballers have progressed even further if there had been corporate facilities in Casement?

(No, you may not ask if a 38,000-seater stadium would improve the quality of diving in Gaelic football. You could be barred from the corporate boxes for that sort of comment.)

President Obama recently undermined DCAL's argument that a redeveloped Casement would economically boost west Belfast.

His budget for next year proposes to end public subsidies for sports stadiums, because there is now sufficient evidence that they do not boost local economies. Public money spent in other ways can achieve significantly better results.

If DCAL disagrees, it might like to explain how exactly corporate boxes at Casement will reduce child poverty in west Belfast.

So why build such an unnecessarily grand affair? Could it, heaven forbid, be politically motivated?

There is nothing new in developing sport and stadiums for political advantage, as certain totalitarian regimes have discovered.

The Free State government used the revived Tailteann Games (an Irish equivalent of the Olympics) from 1924 to 1932 to promote the new post-Treaty state. For helping to organise the games, the GAA received £10,000 to build what became the Hogan Stand. Not much changes in Ireland.

But this time the process has been described as "shambolic" and a "mess". The British Cabinet Office identified a raft of failings, which the Minister published last Friday at 4 pm, giving journalists an hour to digest its 50 pages and seven minutes to ask questions.

"I am anti-censorship," she said, in this film's most immortal line. In Field of Dreams, the voice says, "Build it and he will come." Sinn Fein's voice in Field of Nightmares suggests, "Build it and they will come - to the polling stations".

In what looks like a monument to Sinn Féin's New Nationalism, the plans for Casement Park appropriately required guidance from London to stop them collapsing. So far the process has turned out to be a political own goal, which, sadly, still leaves Casement Park in urgent need of redevelopment. There will be no Oscars for this one.

Here

[Maguire01]

That article is fundamentally flawed, given that this money comes from London, not Stormont's budget, so it's spent on the stadium or it's lost to Northern Ireland. There are plenty of valid arguments against Casement, but this isn't one of them.

[Tony Baloney]

Feck me, what is going on now ffs?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-34192612

Looks like some people arent going to lie down for the DCAL steamroller.

[BennyCake]

Feck sake, just abandon ship and extend the Athletic Grounds.

The fees wasted already could've built 2 stadiums.

[ONeill]

Feck me, what is going on now ffs?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-34192612

No matter how many times they're rapped across the knuckles for unprofessionalism, it happens all over again.

[rrhf]

Lest we forget.. ffs

[Tony Baloney]

I see wee Feeney is away. He'll be missed.

[rrhf]

Was a kip for a city stadium.. Hopefully a taxpayer paid brand new spanking gift wrapped stadium could be built..

[ziggysego]

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/stadium-experts-bullying-claim-dismissed-by-independent-probe-34294387.html

[rrhf]

The plot thickens.

[DuffleKing]

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