Grounds for concern
FOUR years ago, the whistle-stop tour that is the life of a GAA president took Nickey Brennan to the outskirts of Carlow town, where he officially opened a new gymnasium underneath the main stand in Dr Cullen Park.
It was a routine enough affair, peppered with handshakes and ham sandwiches, and the speech he delivered could have been cut and pasted into the hundreds of others holders of the same office have delivered before and since.
One remark aside, that is.
This was in an era when new stands and terraces were popping up like mushrooms around the country but the structure Brennan was standing in that day had been built towards the end of the 20th century and its modest 1,200 capacity drew rich praise from the Kilkenny man who held it up as a beacon for other counties, may of whom were showing less constraint.
“There’s no doubt that we put too much money into too many grounds over the years,” says the former Uachtarán. “A lot of it was money that wasn’t spent wisely because we needed more compact grounds. We were too slow in bringing some order to the whole thing.”
Brennan did at least attempt to bring some belated perspective to the building mania and established the National Infrastructure Committee under the chair of Dan McCartan. The NISC visited every county ground in the country as part of its remit but the concrete had long set on countless major projects.
What we are left with now is a landscape littered with oversized county grounds, 10 of which can cater for 30,000 or more spectators when the average attendance at a provincial football championship match — the games that routinely attract the largest crowds — was less than 19,000 in 2010.
In fact, the combined capacity of Ireland’s 32 county grounds — more than 800,000 — is now such that it exceeds that of the 20 multi-million pound businesses that are soccer’s Premier League clubs even though the average GAA venue will see a game about once every eight weeks.
None of that makes any sort of sense.
“Ireland has plenty of stadiums,” says Seamus McCloy, the Derry chairman who succeeded McCartan on the NISC. “We’re certainly not short on them. The biggest mistake was definitely building too many with capacities that were far too big. There’s no point in having 10,000 people in a 40,000 capacity stadium. It just looks empty.”
No matter what way you look at it, there was an extraordinary waste of resources on bricks and mortar in the association during the life span of the Celtic Tiger, especially when it is considered that there are no senior inter-county fixtures held outside of Croke Park after the last week in July when crowds really begin to peak.
Okay, so they do cater for club games — and rightly so — but Healy Park in Omagh, redeveloped at considerable expense in recent years, did not host a single inter-county game after April 11 in 2010 while McDiarmuid Park in Carrick-on-Shannon was another ground to go unused throughout the championship despite its own extensive facelift.
“If a county is drawn away from home in the championship, they might go through the entire summer without a home game,” McCloy points out. “They might lose first up and go straight into the qualifiers. These grounds were built at massive cost and we are not getting the best use out of them.”
In all, county grounds were filled to just over 52% of their capacity for the football provincial championships last summer and that figure dropped to 45% in Munster. In other words, they are roughly twice as big as they need to be and that percentage plummeted for the qualifiers.
“There is no reason why two or three counties couldn’t share the one ground,” is McCloy’s take on it. Tribal realities will never allow that to happen. People don’t want to live in their neighbours’ houses, they simply want theirs to be bigger. It is human nature.
So, as the saying goes, we are where we are but the fact is that we aren’t as well placed as we should be, given the vast sums of cash already used thus far and the overall impression is that of an opportunity lost.
Outside of Croke Park, there isn’t a single corporate box in a GAA venue and other facilities continue to fall short, too. Food at GAA venues still consists largely of chip vans and sweet shops while the majority of vantage points in stadiums remain uncovered in a country renowned for rainfall.
“The days of watching games with a plastic bag covering your head should be over,” says McCloy. “We need covered facilities. If a man and a wife are booking a holiday they stay in a nice hotel and eat in nice restaurants so we can’t expect them to come to our games and stand around in the cold.
“People are travelling long distances to watch games. They have to park their car and pay for that as well in some instances and have to walk to the ground. You can’t then ask them to queue up in the rain for a hamburger for half an hour. Who wants to do that?”
It isn’t all bad. McCloy is effusive in his praise of O’Connor Park in Tullamore, both for its size and its state-of-the-art facilities, while Celtic Park in his own native Derry is another example of a stadium devoid of oversized ambitions of grandeur — although both are largely uncovered venues.
What people also forget is that stadiums continue to devour pounds and euro long after the ceremonial ribbon is cut and that eats up money that could otherwise be used to fund coaching programmes and other, more worthy, projects being diverted from the coffers of county boards that are already struggling to keep their heads above water.
“I don’t have the figures but I’d estimate no stadium outside of Croke Park is holding its own,” says McCloy. “I would assume the rest are struggling to break even. You have to paint handrails, wash terraces, replace seats and these are grounds that are underused.
“Counties have to have a sinking fund for ground maintenance. They have to plan for not just maintenance costs but other things like changes in legislation (to health and safety) and there is no point in just turning around one day and saying ‘we need a million to fix this’.”
Centres of Excellence have now replaced stadia as the focus for infrastructure projects but the NISC has still signed off on almost €750,000 in funding for the redevelopment of five venues this year — Fitzgerald Stadium, Armagh’s Athletic Grounds, Markievicz Park, Longford’s Pearse Park and O’Connor Park in Tullamore.
Plans to redevelop Páirc Uí Chaoimh and Casement Park have already been well publicised but the scariest thing is that over a third of the county grounds — Páirc Tailteann in Navan and Cusack Park in Ennis to name but two — have actually had little work carried out on them in modern times and are in dire need of attention to remain fit for purpose.
McCloy warned earlier this year some counties will actually be forced to play ‘home’ games at neutral venues if measures aren’t taken to upgrade facilities in the next two years. The spend is far from over.
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