Taoiseach Enda Kenny joined Republic of Ireland manager Martin O'Neill, FAI chief executive John Delaney and Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport Shane Ross at the launch on Thursday of the Euro 2020 Dublin "brand" in the CHQ building, where the logo for the Irish end of the tournament was unveiled.
Delaney said that preparations for the four games to be hosted in Ireland (three in the group stages and one in the round of 16) are going well but acknowledged that Uefa have yet to make a number of key decisions relating to the organisation of the tournament, not least which other host city Dublin will share a six-game group with.
The sense is, Delaney said, that rather than pair Dublin with its near neighbour Glasgow, Uefa may prefer to mix things up slightly, so other cities within the recommended two-hour flight time, such as Amsterdam, Copenhagen or Brussels, might be chosen.
Where a host nation qualifies for the tournament, the intention is that two of that team’s group games would be on home soil, but no decisions have been made yet as to whether that would have any implications for ticket allocations for the relevant games.
O’Neill, meanwhile, appears still to have slight reservations about the 13-city format, saying: “I would have been more down the traditional route of doing it in one particular country, or co-hosting it with another country pretty close by, but it will be interesting to see how it goes.
“It might be an absolute roaring success. I genuinely don’t know. The competition itself may determine if that’s the way they are going to go in the future. But let me put it this way: if we’re not going to host it, then the second-best thing is to play two matches here.”
Ross described the tournament as "good news "for Ireland and said that the four-year lead-in provided an opportunity to maximise that benefit. Enda Kenny, however, joked that he remembered being similarly optimistic when, as minister for tourism himself back in the mid-1990s, he had appeared at an event with Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche to promote the 1998 Tour de France starting in Ireland.
“We didn’t know then that it would turn out not to be one of the greatest tours, for reasons that you will all remember . . . with syringes falling got of suitcases and all of that,” he said of an event that generated several major doping scandals.
