Green light for €100m Sports Campus

THE Government is expected to approve the revised €100m blueprint for the controversial Sports Campus Ireland at Abbotstown in north-west Dublin later this month.

Sports Minister John O’Donoghue will unveil the development plan to colleagues at an early meeting of Cabinet in January.

The plan, prepared by Campus Stadium Ireland Development (CSID), was presented to Mr O’Donoghue in November after it held intensive discussions with all the main sporting organisations, in addition to the Sports Council and the Olympic Council of Ireland.

Though much scaled down from Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s original idea of locating an 80,000-seat stadium there, the new plan for Abbotstown will include facilities for a large number of outdoor pitches - both turf and synthetic - as well as indoor facilities that can cater for 35 indoor sports. The campus will cater for elite athletes and international teams. It will include training facilities, accommodation, as well as sports medicine suites.

A source close to the project told the Irish Examiner yesterday that the minister was concerned that Ireland was seriously lagging behind other European countries in terms of sports facilities. “The reality is that we are falling well behind other countries in so far as facilities for top athletes are concerned. There are nine regional centres of excellence in Britain and a new one is currently under development in Wales.

“Smaller countries such as Greece, Switzerland and Denmark are also well advanced in comparison to Ireland. Internationally speaking, this is something that we need to address immediately.”

When the decision to site the new National Stadium at Lansdowne Road was made by Mr O’Donoghue last year, the Government also approved the development of the campus of excellence at Abbotstown.

The €100m-plus price tag would not entail an immediate spend but the facilities would be phased in over a period of five to six years. For that reason, it is not expected that there will be any major opposition at Cabinet level to the detailed proposal, as there was from PD ministers who opposed the ‘Bertie Bowl’ on the basis of its enormous cost.

The National Aquatic Centre is already in operation at Abbotstown where it provides training facilities for top swimmers as well as a large public pool.

There will be more than a dozen all-weather football pitches on the campus designed to cater for all major outdoor sports including hurling, Gaelic football, soccer, rugby, hockey and camogie. The indoor facilities will be designed for use by national squads in basketball, gymnastics, volleyball and by athletes doing winter training.

The campus development will be in tandem with the €250m redevelopment of Lansdowne Road, due to be completed by 2008.