Stadium development - Long road to a redeveloped Lansdowne

PLANS for the €350 million redevelopment of the stadium at Lansdowne Road would already seem to be in difficulty before they have been formally drawn up.

The request for planning permission was supposed to have been submitted by the Lansdowne Road Stadium Development Company before Christmas of 2005, but this was not done until mid-January of this year. As a result, the completion date has been revised to the summer of 2009.

City planners sought 106 additional pieces of information, which the development company plan to submit by August. The project is then likely to come in for objections from local residents, who complain that their houses will be in the shadow of the stadium for most of the year.

The planned increase in the capacity of the stadium would appear to be relatively moderate, and, where there is no significant change, there should be no question of facilitating people who want to extort money by delaying the project — for their own selfish purposes.

This is about much more than mere community development. It is a national project with economic and national ramifications for our largest sporting bodies, the capital city, and, not just the country itself, but for the whole island.