Michael Moynihan: Why Páirc Uí Chaoimh is the best sports stadium in the country, bar none

A full-on festival of celebration surrounding a game like Sunday’s Munster Senior Hurling Final is an obvious platform for showcasing the entire area and all it has to offer

Páirc Uí Chaoimh: An array of child-oriented events, non-alcohol-related adult distractions, family activities, and music performances would create a terrific atmosphere and an experience that all could enjoy. Picture: Chani Anderson

There’s a big game this Sunday in Páirc Uí Chaoimh: Cork are playing Limerick in the Munster Senior Hurling Final.

A sell-out is expected because Cork are involved — just try logging onto Ticketmaster, you get the ‘ah here’ message, telling you not to even bother — so there’ll be a fair crowd around this weekend.

Expect over 40,000 roaming the city from early morning, most of them Googling ‘Best breakfast in Cork’ on their phones (just head to Salt or Proby’s, thank me later), before meandering down towards Ballintemple from around lunchtime on.

I note there have been calls to build an event around the game, a wider celebration than leaving the festivities at the level of just having a few pints before and after the game.

Before dwelling on this, I should probably divest myself officially of any accusations of hypocrisy. I acknowledge there was a time when The County Bar in Liberty Square, Thurles, played a prominent role in my own pre-game festivities. 

This led in turn to quite a bit of meandering up towards Semple, but all I can really say about that is autre temps, autre moeurs, which is a pretty accurate phonetic representation of how I sounded just before throw-in, actually.

Now things are different.

Cork and Limerick supporters before the Munster GAA Senior Hurling Championship Round 2 match between Cork and Limerick at Páirc Uí Chaoimh. Picture: Ray McManus/Sportsfile

Those calls for a different form of celebration around the game are absolutely correct. An array of child-oriented events, non-alcohol-related adult distractions, family activities, and music performances would create a terrific atmosphere and an experience that all could enjoy. 

The food element is already in place in the form of the Marina Market and the Black Market. The alcohol end is looked after by the local hostelries, not to mention the unflagging ability of teens to source bottles of lukewarm cider.

Let’s not get hung up on the drink, though. What Cork should be emphasising is the environment around Páirc Uí Chaoimh, not just the stadium itself.

It’s on a different level to what you’ll find near and around other stadia in the country, particularly those with a similar mission statement, and showing how the venue and the surroundings complement each other should be a priority.

Meaningful co-operation between Cork GAA officials and Cork City Council officials here could create a best-in-class partnership that would be the envy of the country (a sentence which gave me no end of pleasure to write).

When I refer to other venues I’m not joking, either. If you go to Croke Park for a game it’s an enjoyable experience, but the hinterland is no bucolic paradise. Dublin 3 must be one of the most built-up parts of the entire island, never mind just the capital: there’s barely room to jostle your mates’ drinks (sorry) when you meet them on Jones’s Road.

The same goes for other stadia around the country. Cusack Park in Ennis is hemmed in on all sides by the town, with precious little space to congregate nearby unless you’re in the supermarket car park across the road — and even there the shoppers can be short-tempered dealing with the influx of out-of-town cars.

Walsh Park in Waterford is the same — a tight venue also in the heart of an urban area. The cosiness was underlined if you were there a few weeks ago for the Cork match, when a nearby factory burned down mid-game, laying an odd smokescreen effect on the uncovered stand side of the ground.

Yes, in Limerick the Gaelic Grounds does enjoy a spacious green area behind the city end terrace, and Semple Stadium above in Thurles has even more room to congregate, particularly when you consider the playing field behind the town end of the ground.

Young Kayleigh plays in the fountains in the Marina Park Cork. Picture: Chani Anderson

Take up the comparison, though: Cork has an enormous public park behind the city end terrace, a beautiful riverside walk along the North Stand, and a fine open space and pond behind the Blackrock end terrace. (Granted, the building work seems to be encroaching a little on the public park side, but presumably that’s temporary).

These are the kind of sylvan surroundings that stadium designers all over the world would kill for: they’re huge advantages, natural and man-made, which should be maximised, which means using them to the full. A full-on festival of celebration surrounding a game like Sunday’s is an obvious platform for showcasing the entire area.

By the way, my list of comparable stadia I picked deliberately, because you can find plenty of complaints from GAA supporters in various counties about having to travel to Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

Yes, they acknowledge its modernity (grudgingly), its playing surface (haltingly), and its capacity (ill-humouredly), but the location seems to rankle with quite a few people from other counties.

In fact, many of them see the location of the venue as some kind of conspiracy against them. It’s remote! It’s inconvenient! My position is absolutely irrefutable: Páirc Uí Chaoimh is in a terrible location!

Except for one thing.

It’s not.

For one thing, the stadium has always been there. You’re well warned in advance about your destination; it wasn’t suddenly moved to make things awkward for out-of-towners.

Second, there have been large-scale sports events in the area for almost 200 years. The Cork Park Racecourse was operating from the middle of the 19th century. Big crowds have always been able to access the area.

Most important, it compares well to other venues.

Let’s say you land into Cork for a big game in the Páirc. Conscious of the environment, you took the train and disembarked at Kent Station.

I consulted a walking-hiking website as an independent, objective source of information, and it suggested the journey from station to venue was approximately 2.9km.

For comparison purposes, landing at Heuston Station in Dublin entails a stroll of 5.16km to Croke Park. If you get the train to Limerick for a game, then the walk from the station out the Ennis Road to the Gaelic Grounds is a 3.4km hike.

Say you let the train take the strain to a game in Waterford. When you leave Plunkett Station you’re looking at a walk of 2.04 kilometres up to Walsh Park, and the word ‘up’ is doing some fair work in that sentence. My walking-hiking website estimates the elevation during that stroll to be 38m, which will sound a serious underestimation to anyone heading up the slope through The Glen or Gracedieu.

(For comparison, the elevation from Heuston to Croke Park in Dublin is 21m, which will ring a bell with anyone hiking up North Great Georges Street. The elevation from Kent Station to Páirc Uí Chaoimh is estimated at 7m.)

The journeys in the smaller urban centres are a good deal shorter.

Ennis train station to Cusack Park? About 1.3km. Thurles train station to Tom Semple’s field: just over 800m. (Ennis is almost one-tenth the size of Cork, Thurles around one-twenty-fifth the size of Cork.)

Enjoy Sunday. It’s not that far away at all.

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