Tommy Martin: Can Tolka Park be saved from the bulldozers?
Refurbishing Tolka Park to Uefa category 3 standard and building a community centre with gym, crèche, café, and meeting facilities has been proposed to give Shelbourne’s historic stadium a new lease of life.
“In a perfect world,” Roger Kahn wrote in the classic baseball book , “The Dodgers would have remained in Brooklyn and Los Angeles would have gotten the Mets.”
There was outrage when the Dodgers were ripped from their spiritual home in 1958; a little less in 2016 when Shelbourne FC announced that they’d be bunking in with Bohemians at the new, redeveloped Dalymount Park.
After all, Brooklyn to Los Angeles is 4,000 kilometres and an emotional ocean away. Drumcondra to Phibsborough is a 30-minute stroll through Victorian redbrick streets and, back then, Shels were just about hanging on.
Bearing the scars from the financial collapse that followed their glory years, Tolka Park was a chip to cash in.
Hand the lease back to the council, who’d sell it to a developer and use the money to fund Dalyer. The club would share the new stadium with Bohs.
Grin, bear it, and survive.
Still, a small band of Shels loyalists kicked up.
“The fact of the matter,” went a statement from The 1895 Trust, an independent supporters group, “is that the club is being uprooted from what is, for many, the only home of Shelbourne they have ever known.”
A few weeks later, play was stopped in a home game against Waterford in October 2016. Fans lit flares, burned banners, and filled the air with angry chants. The club expressed its “disgust and disappointment” at the protest.
It was a shame about Tolka Park, I remember thinking at the time. So much history, and it wasn’t that long ago it seemed in the middle of things in Irish football. The first all-seater League of Ireland ground, home to a successful team, big European nights. Underage internationals were played there and British clubs played pre-season friendlies there too.
But look, that’s life. It was a tough on the Shels fans, with their memories and their identity.
But they were small in number and their voices were drowned out. Anyway, the club had always roamed — over more than a century home had been Havelock Square, Shelbourne Park, Irishtown, Harold’s Cross, even lodging in Phibsborough on occasion.
And this was good for Irish football. A spanking, new Dalymount? That would be great. In a perfect world, Shels would remain in Drumcondra, but this wasn’t a perfect world.
And then the world changed.
In recent months, stickers saying ‘Save Tolka Park’ started appearing on lampposts and bus shelters around Dublin’s northside. I got collared by Bernard Mulvany on the school run one morning.
Bernard is a local activist for People Before Profit, practised in the art of the elevator pitch as only a man who knocks on hostile doors can be.
It turned out this was not just a bunch of angry kids, he told me. The ‘Save Tolka Park’ campaign was up and running and it was bigger than Shelbourne now.
The Shels fans had coalesced with local community groups, junior football clubs and activists. They propose to refurbish the ground to Uefa category 3 standard and build a community centre with gym, crèche, café, meeting facilities and, that most precious modern amenity, public toilets.
A hybrid pitch would be installed that could be used by local football clubs and, crucially, the Shelbourne women’s team, who could be squeezed out in the move to Dalymount.
Viewed that way, Tolka was not doomed, but rich in potential. Not just a rickety football ground, but a community’s crown jewel.
What changed in the intervening five years? The pandemic has made people look at cities as places to live rather than to sit in traffic, work, and then get the hell out of whenever possible. People now question how decisions are made about those places and for whose benefit.
Sure, there is a housing crisis. But it’s being exacerbated, not solved, by the sort of people who would buy up Tolka Park.
Few expect any housing built there to be accessible and affordable. Why would they? Selling Tolka, say the campaign, would be an act of ‘cultural vandalism’, part of a larger gutting of the social and cultural heritage of Dublin city by private interests.
What felt inevitable five years ago is now being questioned. The Tolka/Dalymount deal made sense because we were told to think about things in purely bottom line terms. Now we can see that it represents the corralling of two historic community football institutions into one. Everyone can relate — every city and town has a Tolka facing the bulldozer.
The campaign is up against it. They want funding to be divided between refurbishing the two grounds, rather than being poured into the escalating costs of the new Dalymount, which has gone from a planned €20m, 10,000-seat stadium to a €35m, 6,000-seater. Yet government and Uefa funding is in place, the FAI and the council are on board and the ball is rolling.
Crucially, Shelbourne FC are fully signed up and have refused to comment on the Save Tolka Park campaign.
And bigger clubs and fanbases than Shels have had their spiritual homes bulldozed in the name of progress. Sometimes you have to move on, but something always dies when you do. That’s as true in the days of the Dodgers as now.
The campaign had an online launch last week and the last speaker was musician David Balfe, who goes by the artist name For Those I Love.
A die-hard Shelbourne fan, Tolka is where they scattered the ashes of his friend Paul Curran, whose suicide inspired Balfe’s eponymous, globally successful album. The place is freighted with meaning for him.
“Tolka seems to be this living museum,” Balfe said, “somewhere where history is stored and held and it comes back to life every time you walk in the turnstiles, and you add more to it that day...If a developer buys its steel and stone, I don’t think they’ll ever buy its soul.”
In a perfect world, they wouldn’t be allowed to.
