“International football week” has been a fairly uninspiring phrase on this island for the last couple of years, met in my house with roughly the same excitement as “taxes due”, and “it’s Toy Show week”. Ireland have been terrible, and Northern Ireland have been just as bad ... until this week.
Because on Monday night, Northern Ireland hammered an already-qualified Denmark by two goals to nil at Windsor Park, in front of a raucous crowd in Belfast, for their first points won against someone other than San Marino in their group.
I tuned in, because I knew that we would be talking about the future of Casement Park on our podcast the following day, and sure enough there were a number of banners stating Northern Irish fans’ opposition to Casement Park being redeveloped to house Euro 2028 games there.
For those of you who haven’t been following the story, Ireland and the four countries making up the UK were the sole bidders to host Euro 2028, and as such were selected. Uefa insists on using stadiums with a capacity of at least 30,000, and nowhere in the six counties is there a stadium of that size – not at Ravenhill, and not at Windsor Park. But if Casement can be rebuilt in the next four years, then that is the only place in the jurisdiction that would work for Uefa.
When presented with a choice between no games, and five games at a redeveloped Casement Park, it appears Northern Irish fans have made their feelings clear. They can watch the Euros on TV.
To be fair, the Irish Football Association (IFA) is lobbying hard to bring the tournament to Casement Park, and the UK government has said it’ll do whatever it takes. A plurality of Northern Irish people will support it, and if planning permissions proceed, Casement Park will be built. So the GAA will get their stadium, and Westminster might even pay for the lion’s share of it.
We were told this week by Mark Langhammer, vice-chair of Crusaders FC in Belfast but nevertheless a champion of the Casement Park redevelopment, that the absence of a functioning executive in Stormont is a big boon. The more local the politics get, the less likely it is to be built. This is what happened to the proposed stadium at the Maze prison site, a 42,000-capacity stadium for use by Ulster rugby, Northern Ireland soccer, and the GAA.
The second it got turned over to Stormont, it became a “shrine to terrorism”. The IFA soon put a halt to that project, and they and Ulster rugby got funds to redevelop their grounds.
Now we watch Ulster play URC games in a tidy, well-appointed ground that is always either full or almost full, and Windsor Park has been renovated to a capacity that is commensurate to demand. Why are the GAA building so big?
Cahair O’Kane, one of Ulster’s leading GAA journalists, wrote a column in the Irish News asking this very question. The Ulster final, as he wrote in April, is in the process of being undermined by the GAA itself, with provincial finals and championships surely being phased out under the new football structure. That’s the only game that gets anything close to 34,000 people in the gate.
Depending on the GAA to grant them games above and beyond an Ulster final is a forlorn hope, particularly when you see the difficulties even the Munster Council has in getting games to the newly developed Páirc Úi Chaoimh. The Munster hurling final was due to be held there this year, until Clare fans put the foot down and decided they couldn’t sit in a traffic jam for a few hours. Clare handed home advantage over to Limerick instead.
Munster GAA are now engaged in trying to come up with some kind of rota system which will guarantee the Páirc at least one in every three Munster hurling finals, but it’s proving very difficult. The GAA attitude to stadiums is to build ‘em big, and build ‘em with a male aged 25-45 in mind.
[ Michael Walker: What if Euro 2028 happens without Belfast?Opens in new window ]
The idea that you should be able to sit in comfort, have unimpeded views, easy access for those in wheelchairs, for the elderly – none of that is really anything anyone has any time for. I admit as much myself. It’s only since my own parents’ mobility issues began, and my friendship with a wheelchair user, that I started thinking about such things.
But they matter. And if we’re going to build stadiums that cater to all GAA members, we should try to play a game or two in them once in a while.
Langhammer told us that in 30 years of studying stadium use around Europe, he can see clear benefits to renovating Casement. It’s very similar in size and design to a stadium in Stockholm that regularly welcomes big outdoor music acts – the sort of event space that just doesn’t exist in Belfast.
That’s where the argument for building Casement can be made. If it’s going to be made using public money, then it should be used by the public. It’s completely antithetical to how sport has been viewed in Belfast for a century, but maybe, just maybe, Casement can be something the entire city can use, not just “them ‘uns”. If that means welcoming Coldplay as well as Cushendall to Casement, then so be it. The GAA aren’t going to fill it too often themselves, not without a big culture change.
Ciarán Murphy’s first book, This Is The Life, published by Penguin Sandycove, is out now
