Final place in sporting jigsaw about to fall into place

IT’S 20 years since this column sat down to complete the Leaving Cert – for a second, excruciating time – but it is probably some sort of twisted pseudo-tribute to that daunting time in all our lives that scraps of the information we had to learn by rote occasionally jostle their way back to the forefront of the mind when least expected, writes Brendan O’Brien.

Patrick Kavanagh, for instance. Many has been the time, whilst on the way to cover a GAA game in Clones, that his poem ‘Stony Grey Soil’, with its conquering plough and steaming dunghills, has elbowed its way into the frontal lobes uninvited, whilst memories of ‘Iniskeen Road’ have likewise been rekindled on the odd occasion when tasked to cover Monaghan’s league games in that very district.

If there was a favourite then that was it. “There’s a dance in Billy Brennan’s barn tonight/ And there’s the half-talk code of mysteries/ And the wink-and-elbow language of delight.”

Class, especially in a cold classroom, even if the second verse in which he compared himself to kings, nations and Alexander Selkirk always seemed a mite self-aggrandising.

“Canal Bank Walk”, by way of contrast, had rarely bothered to intrude until last Tuesday when Kavanagh’s line about wallowing happily “in the habitual, the banal” seemed apposite whilst driving through what, to most eyes, would probably be the distinctly ordinary and far-from-beautiful landscape that comprises the National Sport Campus in West Dublin.

The vast majority of the 520 acres in Abbotstown remain undisturbed and unremarkable but there is more than enough happening to stir the sporting soul. And, just as Kavanagh wrote ‘Canal Bank Walk’ after a victorious battle with cancer and, thus, at a time of personal renewal, the work being undertaken is symbolic of a brighter future.

Pitches are being laid, buildings constructed and roads paved. Diggers, JCBs and trucks of various sizes and specs are dotted at a handful of spots around the campus as men with PVC jackets and hard hats erect scaffolding, dig ditches and, presumably, drink lots of tea.

Within months, another construction site will be added to that concrete mix and few will be welcomed more.

Last Friday, the National Sports Campus Development Authority (NSCDA) signed the contract for the construction of the long-awaited National Indoor Arena which will incorporate a National Indoor Athletics Track, a National Indoor Sports Centre and a National Gymnastics Training Centre. The first sod is to be turned imminently.

Full planning permission was already in place and the aim is for the arena to be completed by November of next year. Sean Benton, chairman of the authority, described it, quite rightly, as the Campus’s “great leap forward” and the realisation of what has, for a long time, been “the missing piece of the national sporting infrastructure”.

In all, 20 sports will have access to the facility for training and competition purposes. So, too, will the general public and the inclusion of seating for spectators will allow numerous National Governing Bodies (NGBS) host national and international competitions. Gymnastics Ireland, for example, are already thinking along such lines.

The NGB’s CEO is Ciaran Gallagher who, over coffee this week, told the Irish Examiner about his organisation’s plans to bring a World Cup gymnastics event to the new Indoor Arena as soon as 2017. Paralympics Ireland has already entered a bid to host the 2018 European Paralympic Swimming Championships in the National Aquatic Centre just a few fields across.

Such ambition from relatively young and highly-ambitious CEOs such as Gallagher and Liam Harbison, his counterpart in Paralympics Ireland, is increasingly typical of a new breed of NGB and their leaders, which is what makes the completion of the jigsaw that is the Sports Campus all the more necessary and exciting.

Work at the Sports Campus was understandably stalled by the economic implosion that kicked in back in 2008, but the NSCDA’s own website includes a timeline of work on site that bears witness to the ever-increasing efforts being undertaken and the provision of funds in last year’s Budget for the National Indoor Arena was key in that.

That aside, there is a new High Performance Centre being completed at the Irish Institute of Sport which will allow the Institute to bump up its athlete services to a significant degree, as well as a Campus Provision Building that will provide conference and changing facilities. Both of those should be ready by the summer.

The GAA and FAI are both due to finish work on their own training facilities in March, while two multi-purpose turf pitches capable of hosting soccer, rugby and Gaelic games will be ready around the same time. We could go on and list other buildings already finished, but the overall picture is probably obvious by now.

There will be little banal or habitual about it all when completed.

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