LockerRoom: In my house we are more than a little concerned about keeping up with the Joneses. We like to stay neck and neck with Mr and Mrs Jones. So much so that often it takes a stewards' enquiry to separate us in a photo finish. Last week was mid-term, a time when the Joneses like to jet off to Frahiliana. So on Friday we took a city break - or a day trip to Belfast.
As was pointed out frequently during our grand day out, I am a very boring person to travel to Belfast with. Boring? Irritating? It's a thin line apparently. It's not my fault that every street looks like the one where a British soldier looked sideways at me during the war years. It's not much of a combat story but if a veteran isn't entitled to a little respect then what has the world come to?
Myself, I'm as hippy-dippy and as happy-clappy about the peace process as the next person. I still have a secret hankering (which I don't mention around the office) for a united Ireland but I accept that, like my hankering for an etiolated heroin-chic body shape, it's all aspirational.
And, despite having that political aspiration which dares not speak its name, I find that every time I go to Belfast I spend the time there registering all the differences and none of the similarities. Hmmm. They have this (a Sainsbury's) but they don't have that (a hideous spike disfiguring their main street) How can they get up in the mornings?
On Friday, because I am given to getting lost and my condition is contagious, we spent a lot of time astray in Belfast, a circumstance which afforded me the chance to see several hundred streets which looked like the one where the terrifying incident with the Brit occurred. After a while you get to feel how different life is and you realise that a lot of other cities apart from Dublin should have grid-style street layouts.
On Friday our reason for being lost was that we were looking for an ice-skating rink. Our idea of good, clean fun is to shove the lil'uns out on to the ice all frail and shivery and then watch them slip and slide like greased pigs back towards the railings. All good fun until somebody loses fingers under a passing blade and we have to sue for the loss of the colossal earnings of a potential classical pianist.
Anyway, in search of ice we travelled first to the Odyssey. The words "travelling to the Odyssey" make the short trek across the bridge sound like an adventure which should perhaps only be undertaken by the Starship Enterprise but when you travel with me and count in the time spent being aimlessly lost, well, every journey is epic.
Anyway the Odyssey is something of (sorry) an oddity. A fine idea to revitalise a piece of dockland yet one which doesn't seem to have made the connection with the city. Not that the Odyssey isn't commercially successful - I'm sure it is. It just appears that nothing much has been spawned around it. We came out and drove down a long, straight road towards the motorway and it reminded me of another long, straight road I was lost on a few years ago in the ruined downtown of Detroit.
Behind us the Odyssey just sat in looming isolation. The ice rink turned out to be near the airport. It took us a good - no, a tense - hour to travel to the wrong airport and then back to the right one. Two airports! Who knew? Ice rinks are a splendid idea and Dublin should have one.
In Dundonald what seemed like thousands of teenage kids were slipping and sliding about the place, conspicuously oblivious, it seemed, to the attractions of getting alcoholic drink down them or buying gear to inject themselves with. I noticed (because I am unreconstructed and just can't help it) lots of Rangers jerseys and a few English national shirts on the skaters but no county jerseys or Celtic hoops. Do Taigs not skate? Are we not past the politics of skate?
We watched the rosy-cheeked youth of Dundonald go round and round the rink with arms swinging purposefully and legs striding out across the perfect white sheeting beneath their skates. Is this where the Orange Orders practise marching? With bowlers and sashes you could effect virtually the same movement. (Memo to self: The Twalfth on Ice? Explore development deal for amusing musical show or icescapade along the lines of West Side Story.)
Anyway, enough digression. Almost all my encounters with Belfast prior to becoming a sports journalist (this includes the brutally oppressive eyeballing by a trigger-happy armed member of the forces of occupation, at what has since been recognised as a singularly low point in The Troubles) took place under the influence of politics or drink.
Until I began covering sports events in Casement Park and Windsor Park I could never quite reconcile the dourness of the politics with the happy fervour of the drinking and partying. It would be nice to say that sport in Belfast is a common passion but it isn't. It's two separate, delineated passions which unintentionally find a similar form of expression. In Casement and Windsor, on those days when everyone is transfixed by sport, you can taste the salt of Belfast's personality.
What I have always liked about both venues - apart from certain grisly elements in their histories - is their accessibility. Both are fine grounds to walk to and they provide some of the sense of Belfast as a defiant, living city.
All of which makes the proposed stadium out at the site of Long Kesh, near Lisburn, more of a curiosity than it should be. The British government, thrifty as your maiden aunt, have the site of the old prison lying out there. Rather than waste it or permit it to become part of the memorials circuit, they propose an £80-million, 42,500-seater stadium to be built by 2010 and shared by the GAA, soccer and rugby.
The GAA last week became first to sign up for the deal. I'm not sure why. Some of the people who argued that they would do away with themselves by means of gruesome use of pencil sharpeners before they'd see a Union Jack fly in Croke Park or hear God Save The Queen being parped there are happy enough to sign up our amateur game to groundshare with the professionals in a site paid for with money that came from the Royal Mint, in a stadium built on the site where 10 republicans, some of them GAA men, starved themselves to death.
I'm not saying they are wrong; I'm just saying I am curious and baffled. The Ulster Council of the GAA (so cussedly partitionist a body that they have almost seceded from the GAA) have taken to playing their big games in Croke Park and play their lesser games in Clones (45,000 capacity) or in Casement (32,500) - have they something to bring to this party? I'm not sure.
Will the Ulster Council be allowed to import en masse the surliest collection of maors ever to wear bibs, the Clones stewards? If so I can see where the entire thing is going. If those boys told the Orange Order they couldn't march down this street or that road - well, they wouldn't be marching and that would be it.
What will a stadium in Lisburn offer the GAA people of West Belfast? What will Lisburn offer the GAA? Something different one hopes from what it has offered St Patrick's GAA club during their 40-year wanderings and struggle to survive.
It is said that perhaps the GAA will be using the new stadium for one of the International Rules games which come here every second year. A United Ireland side being dismembered by Colonials. It could be a tricky sell.
What are the ramifications of all this? The GAA has agreed to pony up some rent but apart from dragging the GAA people of West Belfast down the M1 to Lisburn to see the occasional game it's hard to see why the stadium should exist at all and especially hard to see why it should be planted in so inaccessible a spot. Windsor Park's current capacity of 14,000 is adequate to cater for the needs of just about all those who like to bait Celtic players and watch low-scoring international games.
And rugby? Will the IRFU be taking events from Lansdowne (which remember could just have preliminaryplanning permission by late 2010) to the new facility up north. Are two similar-sized rugby stadia viable? What about the money being put into revamping Ravenhill, the home of Ulster rugby? What about the redeveloped Casement? Back in 1992 Derry and Down played there and attracted 35,000. Since then the ground has undergone two separate redevelopments and the Ulster council has spent £43 million in the last four years redeveloping county grounds around the province as well as a similar sum developing two secondary grounds in each county.
Casement was the biggest beneficiary of this and along with Clones and Breffni Park has been targeted by for still further development. So where does the place just outside of Lisburn fit in? All the answers to this are, one presumes, in the gift of the Strategic Investment Board, the NI agency in charge of the stadium. Oddly, according to last week's Observer, the SIB are blocking demands (under the Freedom of Information Act) for all such information .
The stadium, it is said, will be modelled on the lovely, sturdy Dragao stadium in Portugal. Very nice. The concept of different classes and creeds all sharing the same cathedral of sport is very nice too, but when three sports bodies, none of whom have an apparent need for such a facility, sign up to that facility regardless of the needs of their fans you have to wonder a little what else is going on in terms of whispered promises.
Sometimes you notice what's different. Sometimes you see what's the same.
