First. Location, location, location. Homebush Bay in Sydney which Irish officials have hailed as the model for Abbotstown is some distance from the city centre. Not nearly as tough to get to as Abbotstown and not suffocating inside a necklace of traffic, but just not convenient. Homebush was supposed to be the new heart of Sydney. Stadium Australia, which just six months ago staged the greatest Olympic celebration ever, was described at the time of opening as two things: the new heart of Sydney and a new icon for Sydney. Stadium Australia is the centrepiece of the Homebush Bay campus. It now stands on the brink of bankruptcy with a debt of 196 million Australian dollars. It is indeed a perfect model: we should look and learn.
Private investors, the key to Stadium Australia (and Abbotstown), have already been back to the government with Multiplex looking for an additional $20 million in government funding, a request so far denied. Private investors are annoyed that revenue projections have not been realised. Accor, the French-owned hotel group which run the two hotels on the Homebush site, has given the authorities a year in which to make the place pay. Australian rules football hasn't scheduled any games there for this year. One of the rugby league tenants has already fled. The Homebush campus was deemed to be viable if it could attract between 20,000 and 30,000 visitors daily, which, when adjusted pro-rata per head of population, matches the viability figure of 10,000 per day for Abbotstown. By the new year the number visiting Homebush Bay was down to 1,200. The naming rights to the stadium had yet to be sold and the New South Wales government was considering a $600 million scheme to bring a 10,000 population to Homebush Bay.
The very site which has been an inspiration for Abbotstown has been a turkey, a magnificent turkey but a turkey nonetheless. Our national sports campus, conceived in haste and hubris, has the potential to be something even worse. A dodo? The location is wrong, and the size is wrong. Even the swimming facilities would need a 50m warm-up pool if they were ever to become eligible to host even a FINA World Championship. As for the velodrome? Enough said. The pity of all this foolishness is that the need for a national stadium has been overlooked and obscured.
In attempting to wrap the ego-driven "Bertie Bowl" project in a happy-clappy, sport-for-all package the Government has failed us in more ways than one. Sports Campus Ireland won't be for everybody. It will be for elite athletes and for those who wish to pay to watch them. The training and coaching facilities more properly belong with the national coaching centre in Limerick, and much of the remaining investment in Abbotstown would be more sensibly used on regional sports projects.
What the Government has done by entangling the campus and the stadium projects has been to attract the lazy and cheap, old arguments, about every pound which is spent on sport being a pound seized from the grasp of a sick child. The case for an adequate national stadium has been all but lost in the process.
So what of the indoor arena and the national stadium? Both are viable projects, merely misconceived in the grandiosity of the Taoiseach's vision. When this all began in the early summer of 1999 with the intention of building a stadium, helped in no small proportion by £50 million of J.P. McManus's money, it seemed like a fine idea.
It still could be. Both facilities need to be realistically sized and properly located, however. With Lansdowne Road becoming increasingly dilapidated and outdated, and with soccer still homeless, there was some sense in the Government subsidising a national stadium with a capacity of between 40,000 and 50,000. How often would the FAI require a larger space than that? In the last few years only perhaps for the Belgian play-off game in 1997 and this year for the Dutch and Portuguese games. That's three times in four years, contingent on results, and the right glamour-laden names coming out of the hat.
The FAI conceded that point when it set about making its own plans for Eircom Park. Nobody in Government seems to have asked why if the figures didn't add up for the FAI and the 45,000-seat Eircom Park they will add up for an 80,000-seat national stadium.
RUGBY won't make the difference. An England game every two years might sell 80,000 tickets if the game is meaningful. Put rugby in Abbotstown, however, and much of the congeniality and charm in attending internationals is removed. The Government continues to insist that rugby will fill Abbotstown three times a year. And pigs will fly. Neither will the difference be made by the handful of GAA matches which Croke Park has handed over as part of its latest public relations calamity. All these events would make a reasonable bill of fare for the modest-sized new facility, which after 10 years of Lotto Irish sport deserves. If we wish we can commission a design like Old Trafford or Sunderland which will allow for capacity to be added in years to come. The alternative, tossing bales of money into the large stadium-shaped kiln of the M50, is unthinkable.
