Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the State's enthusiasm for stadium building is that none of the proposed extravagances set out to be an asset to the community. The time for the soulless stadium beached on a green field well away from civilisation passed not long after footballers stopped wearing sideburns. Modern sports arenas aim to make a cultural and economic contribution to the life of the place they belong in.
Croke Park has made a start on being a living, breathing part of a wary community with its splendid museum, which will be supplemented by a hall of fame. A proper merchandising drive might see a good GAA shop and perhaps a restaurant added. The stadium, a shrine for so many Irish people, might soon enjoy plentiful company seven days a week.
The projects proposed by Bertie Ahern on behalf of the Government and Bernard O'Byrne for the Football Association of Ireland would not regenerate anything, except perhaps debts.
The FAI proposes a retractable roof gimmick on a site in distant city west, an idea which places economic needs above character. The Government, in cahoots with an apparently benign private investor, proposes clearing a site in Abbotstown and throwing up their own monument to the boomtime.
Neither building will house a professional sports franchise of any sort and neither will add anything to the daily life of the city. Close your eyes and you can visualise them both, windswept and eerie, sitting in a stolid ocean of carpark spaces.
Build it and the liquidators will come?
Simon Inglis loves sports stadiums and believes passionately in the possibilities they represent in terms of architecture and civic planning. Inglis is the spiritual leader for us poor lost souls who suffer a sinful quickening of the pulse when we see floodlights looming in some city we are hurtling through on a train. We are the people who lean over your dinner on the aircraft trying to get a glimpse of a stadium 29,000 feet below. We spend a day or two of every family holiday wandering off to peer through locked gates into the bowels of an empty stadium. Inglis is our high priest and this is his third book devoted to the religion of stadium worship.
This time Inglis has opted for the travelogue format instead of the reliable formula of photos and detailed information which distinguished previous successes. He tries a little too hard to make the platefuls of prose digestible to the audience, disguising the context-setting first chapter as an exchange of letters between an ancient Greek and an ancient Roman.
Only after that do we get to push through the turnstiles.
Inglis has visited stadiums across the world in search of an explanation for the passion people feel for these quasi public spaces. His choice of destinations is eclectic and enviable.
He spends All Ireland hurling final day of 1999 in Croke Park correctly divining, as many members of the Gaelic Players Association seem unable to, that the gathering and mingling is a cultural event not dependent on stars and megastars but on a sense of place and a feel for history.
Inglis pays homage at the sun-kissed little baseball cathedral that is Wrigley Field on the north side of Chicago, he goes on a stadium binge in Buenos Aires and listens to the thunder of hooves in Pamplona and the grumbling of locals in Auckland. On he goes, through Beirut, Bombay, Houston . . . What a life to lead.
The absence of more than a few pages of photos hurts the book as Inglis piles anecdote upon fact in a curious love-song to the modern sporting arena.
His journey is one that demands company. Inglis has a gentle manifesto for how stadiums should be and what they should aspire to. Bernard and Bertie should sit down together and read it.
Tom Humphries is a writer and an Irish Times journalist