Northern Ireland Stadium News

President of the Irish Football Association Raymond Kennedy has indicated his preference for a new build stadium to be built as part of Ormeau Park.

With question marks over both the Maze plans and the future use of Windsor Park for international football, Kennedy said that the Irish FA would go along with any of the Belfast plans. His comments have been seen by some as a rebuke to the IFA’s Cheif Executive, Howard Wells, who has consistently backed the Maze plans and is rumoured to be seeking employment elsewhere.

“Beggars can’t be choosers. I want a stadium to play football matches and I want them in Northern Ireland, not anywhere else.

Belfast City Council have come up with five sites and I would take any one of them.”

Raymond Kennedy, Irish FA President

He also said that the Irish FA will be meeting with Linfield football club and the government to discuss the disputed contract that, on the surface, seems to tie the Irish FA to playing international football matches at Windsor Park for another 80 years.

“We have to look at where we are going to play our games in the short-term and that has to be a refurbishment at Windsor Park.

We’ll be meeting the government shortly and if that short-term agreement with them comes to pass then maybe we’ll look at a long-term solution.

I know Linfield have plans for a longer term solution - I don’t know whether we can buy into that or not.”

Raymond Kennedy, Irish FA President

Despite revelations that Edwin Poots’s Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure has spent nearly £3.5 million on promoting a new stadium in his back yard, the press are hinting that the white elephant is edging ever-nearer to it’s ultimate demise after the DCAL Permanent Secretary Paul Sweeney refused to endorse the plans.

According to the Sunday Life, “The absence of support from key civil servants in the departments principally involved in the project … is likely to put the final nail in its coffin.”

Finance Minister Peter Robinson is due to make a recommendation to the Executive before he takes over the position of First Minister later this month, however he has recently hinted that the Maze could be redeveloped through other means that wouldn’t require the construction of a national stadium, suggesting he may already have a decision in mind.

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A new report has identified (the BBC web site covered it too, but it’s hidden away) 5 sites in Belfast that could support a stadium. Those locations are Ormeau Park, the Danny Blanchflower playing fields in east Belfast, the North Foreshore off the Fortwilliam roundabout of the M2, Maysfield and the Boucher Road playing fields. Estimated costs for the project have been quoted at around £75 million - less than a third of the estimated cost of the maze - and it’s believed that Drivers Jonas have been involved in drawing up a business plan with Belfast City Council, who commissioned the report.

Cllr Bob Stoker, chair of BCC’s Parks and Leisure committee said a comprehensive case has now been made for a stadium based in the city and that while some councillors had site-specific questions, these would be answered before the council decide on their preferred location in the next couple of months.

With increasing rumours that the Maze plans are set to be scrapped, Councillor Stoker’s committee couldn’t have picked a better time to hand this report to the Executive who must now be considering other options.  Not only this, but last week the Amalgamation of Official Northern Ireland  Supporters Clubs released a highly critical analysis of the government-commissioned PwC report released earlier this year.

Links:

• Potential Sites
• PwC Report
• AONISC Response to PwC Report

Head of the Strategic Investment Board and Head Cheerleader for the Maze, Tony Whitehead, has resigned.  Some are heralding this as confirmation that, following the reshuffle of the DUP’s leadership and executive team, the proposals to build a stadium at the Maze have “collapsed”.

Coming shortly after the announcement that there will be no olympic football at the Maze, even if plans for a stadium do go ahead, there is certainly a feeling that the Maze is not the done deal we were told it was over 3 years ago.

Add your voice to the chorus and sign the petition.

It’s 2-and-a-half years now since direct rule ministers told us that the Maze was “the only viable option” and yet we don’t seem any closer to seeing a business case for it.

We were told earlier this year that a business case would be forthcoming in the Autumn and then that it would be with the Finance Minister Peter Robinson in December. Instead all we’ve seen are attempts by the Minister to use his comittee for cheap publicity stunts, in what the members of that committee said amounted to an “abuse of the democratic process.”

With the Northern Ireland Executive’s budget announced today there’s still no sign of this famed business case. All DCAL are saying is that the business case is “still being considered” and that they don’t know when it will be ready.

As you can probably guess, StadiumForBelfast has suspicions that DCAL have simply realised that the business case is simply unworkable and, unprepared to admit defeat, are working away desperately trying to ’sex up’ their dossier. Surely they will surprise us all and those issues were all in our imaginations (and yours). Even if they don’t, sure transport, atmosphere, economics and of course the sporting experience don’t really matter anyway.

Time to stop the madness. Sign the petition.

Culture minister Edwin Poots was yesterday foiled in an attempt to “abuse” the democratic process by manipulating the DCAL Executive Committee to justify a publicity stunt promoting the Maze stadium plans later in the day.

A meeting of the committee was called for the architects and consultants to show off some pretty pictures (artist’s impressions) of what a new stadium could look like and then turn them over to the media to circulate. Members of the committee were furious that they were being used like this and walked out of the meeting, pointing out the absurdity of having a meeting like this without any kind of business case or feasibility study for the plans available after all this time, despite such details having been repeatedly requested.

The real agenda seems to have been using the meeting as a pretext for a news conference that would once more build up the hype around the Maze Stadium with the media following their usual unquestioning attitude to the plans.

“It seems to me that this committee is being used this morning as a platform to justify a PR exercise outside this room and to use the committee this way is an abuse of the democratic process.”
Nelson McCausland (DUP), DCAL Committee member

“This is like being asked to give an opinion on a car you are buying for someone without having seen anything other than how it looks.
…
We are not a plaything to be used in a political game of chess by the Minister. Treating a Committee in this way is corrosive to the democratic process and makes a mockery of DUP claims of accountable Ministers.”
David McNarry (UUP), DCAL Committee Deputy Chariman

Well said and well done. It’s about time someone stood up and questioned the minister’s unwavering support of this expensive white elephant. It’s just a pity that instead of doing their job over the last three years the media have simply been regurgitating government press releases, or maybe we wouldn’t have had to wait this long for it to happen.

Last week Ian Paisley Jr. (Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister) visited Nationals Park, “a key social and economic regeneration project in Washington DC” centred around the building of a new baseball stadium. The stadium is being built as the new home for the Washington Nationals baseball team and will be the focus of a regeneration effort encompassing business, residential and retail projects. You can see where he’s going with this, right?

His visit serves to highlight the enormous benefits to the economy the building of a new stadium can bring in terms of regeneration etc.

“It is clear that this site will also become not only a thriving economic platform for small and minority business but a social centre for the local community.”
Ian Paisley Jr, OFMDFM Junior Minister

Hopefully while he was there he’ll have taken note that the site of Nationals Park is approximately one mile from the US Capitol buildings, not in a field 10 miles outside the city. There isn’t much of a community to use the Maze stadium as a “social centre” since there’s not a built-up area around for miles!

Another startling example of the “let me just bend over for you” attitude of the local ‘press’ to the Northern Ireland Office was printed in the Belfast Telegraph yesterday in an Open Letter to Sports Fans in Northern Ireland penned by David Curran. Curran makes a lot of flawed assumptions and uses a lot of warped logic. It seems he made the mistake of actually believing some of the rubbish that has been said about the Maze proposals and opposition to them. To afford Mr Curran the generous assumption that his errors were honest, let’s look at his collection of “mistakes”.

(On a side note, the Amalgamation of Northern Ireland Supporters Clubs have reportedly made repeated requests to have an opinion piece printed in the same paper. These repeated requests have allegedly been repeatedly ignored.)

Mistakes 1 and 2: “The British Government gifts us a 360-acre site, barely 10 miles from Belfast”

The site may be free, but surely Mr Curran is familiar with the concept of opportunity cost. A mere two lines later he says “We have the site for free to build a stadium, housing or other amenities.” The site is infinitely better-suited to a housing development than a stadium.

As for the location. The fact that it’s 10 miles from Belfast isn’t a problem. The fact is that it will be a nightmare to get to via the one road in and out and that there will be limited facilities to encourage supporters to hang around a while. This still (after those four years of “navel gazing” by Curran and friends) does not offer a solution to the problem that fans will simply have to turn up immediately before the match and leave again immediately after.
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Today Belfast City Council announced it was to “discontinue the … assessment of” the two remaining private development proposals for a stadium at Ormeau Park. Despite assurances from the council that they will “develop a business case” for a stadium in the city instead, this is a serious setback for proponents of a stadium in Northern Ireland’s first city.

The council must now prove that they are serious about contributing towards a new stadium for Northern Ireland in Belfast before suspicions mount that they were only ever paying lip-service to the idea in a cynical ploy to curry favour with their electorate.

The two developers involved in the proposals, Durnien and Sheridan, are certainly angry and legal action is already being discussed. If this has all been a big stunt from the council, it could end up being a costly one.

Apparently Magilligan prison is crumbling and the government is discussing where a replacement might be built. 

Magilligan is to be replaced with a new £150m 1,000 cell jail. Northern Ireland Affairs Committee Chairman, Sir Patrick Cormack, said that a senior prison official told the committee one of the essential criteria was the new jail was within 30 miles of Belfast.

Wait a minute… isn’t there a site in that area that is capable of holding a prison.  If memory serves correctly there used to be a prison somewhere within 30 miles of Belfast on a site that is currently vacant.

It’s an obvious solution I know, but bare with me.  What’s to say we go ahead and build the prison on the prison site and put the national stadium somewhere where people will actually be able to get to it?

End the White Elephant farce. Sign the Stadium For Belfast Petition.