In September, the British Government announced they were pulling the plug on the funding needed to rebuild Casement Park as a venue for the 2028 European Championships. Now that the dust has settled on that decision, and as Casement continues to wither, Somhairle Mag Uidhir discusses the competing visions for the North’s most historic GAA ground.
In October 2023, the Tories committed to funding a rebuild of Casement Park in West Belfast to a scale that would enable it to host matches during Euro 2028. A month ago, Keir Starmer reneged on this promise, citing an increased price tag of £400m (disputed by the GAA) as justification. Maybe the GAA should have bought Sir Keir and his wife a few shiny tracksuits from O’Neill’s.
Somewhere in Whitehall, in some civil servant’s binder, exists a memorandum. And in that memorandum will be written the real reasoning behind the British Government’s decision. Yes, Starmer’s insatiable desire to demoralise an entire population and prove his credentials as an ally to capital means he has revelled in an austerity agenda. But that’s not why Downing Street pulled the plug. If they had wanted to fund the 30,000-plus-seater Casement necessary for the Euros, they would have.
Perhaps, in thirty years’ time, this little note will come to light—one sheaf among thousands of released state papers. It may be that it will divulge a quid-pro-quo with the DUP: in exchange for the Paisleyites behaving themselves for a while the British Government tanks the mega-Casement. Such a deal would be typical of the sectarian horse-trading that masquerades as grown-up politics in the North.
In thirty years’ time, will Mervyn Gibson, leading member of the Orange Order, still be invited onto the BBC to croak about how “aspects of the GAA still support terrorism,” as he was last month? However Gibson hedged his ‘contribution’ to the Casement debate, there should be no doubt: much of the opposition to the stadium had been rooted in sectarianism all along. In this way Gibson’s stance was representative of political unionism more generally, as the DUP and their loyalist bedfellows have sought to disrupt efforts to have Belfast among the hosts for the Euros precisely because the venue was to be a GAA stadium situated in the west of the city. If Starmer didn’t do a deal with the DUP then more fool him: he gave something away for free.
And in thirty years’ time, will Casement still lie idle? The British Government funding was to join GAA and Stormont commitments, as part of a scheme to redevelop Windsor Park (soccer) and Ravenhill (rugby). Those stadium upgrades have been completed; at Páirc Mhic Asmaint the weeds bend under their own weight. While the GAA have come out in recent days stating they have adjusted their vision to a more “modest and basic” fit-out, they are still wedded to a capacity of over 30,000.
If it is rebuilt, what sort of Casement Park will we have? In whose interest will it have been rebuilt and to whose profit will it be controlled? Will it be Corporate Casement, or a People’s Casement? While the British Government has shut the door on the Euros, these questions remain wide open.
Hallowed Turf
I played in Casement Park only the once. Schools hurling final. An older year’s team and I was moved from corner-back, where I had been playing the whole campaign, to centre-half, with a pep-talk from the manager to boot. It wasn’t the most significant game in GAA history but at a personal level, to be taking to that pitch meant a lot. I still have fond memories of going to watch Antrim win Ulster Hurling finals back when they were competitive, and fonder memories again of my mate’s mild-mannered da getting into it with one Down supporter, a woman in her seventies who definitely started it and arguably finished it too.
Casement, and venues like it, exist somewhere in the middle. They aren’t Croke Park, unreachable for the vast majority of young aspiring athletes. But neither are they just another club ground. Dotted around Ireland, pitches like Casement are hallowed turf, where you watch the best of your county’s stars compete in club finals and provincial championships; where program sales endow the event with a little bit of grandeur and passing through dark and creaking turnstiles, a little sense of history.
That, for me, is the value of a Páirc Mhic Asmaint: a place where we put those amateurs that are the lifeblood of our wonderful games on a local pedestal, even if it’s just for a day. You might never reach those heights yourself. Or maybe you’ll get lucky with a good run in the Intermediate. Or, indeed, sneak in with your school.
That fateful day, as classmates watched on from under that rusted stand and the bainisteoir’s endorsement rang in my ears, I had what can only be described as a stinker. Nearly twenty years later, I’m glad I had the chance. Casement should be redeveloped, and soon. It’s a sad sight to see how it’s gone to waste.
Size At All Costs
That the BBC think Mervyn Gibson a legitimate individual to platform on the issue is indicative of how the establishment in the North try with all their might to reduce every question to its most base, sectarian terms. Aside from simple ugliness, one of the other effects of this sectarianisation is that it skews discussion. We should be having the Casement debate on our own terms, on constructive terms, not on terms set down by the Orange Order.
If we start from a position that rejects such sectarianism, how should we approach Casement Park? The GAA initially proposed a preposterous 40,000 capacity stadium, whose main aim was to capture ticket sales as large-capacity concert venue. Despite attempts by Sinn Féin and the GAA’s Ulster Council to rewrite the story, residents never opposed redevelopment, but rather the scale of the project. No one objects to a new GAA stadium on the site: the central issues have always been size and cost.
In his 2013 book, GAAnomics, Michael Moynihan discusses the GAA’s Celtic-Tiger induced splurge on stadiums that were simply too big. Moynihan writes that “there are 26 stadiums with a capacity of over 20,000 in Ireland, and the GAA owns 23 of those. The reality is, however, that only Croke Park and Semple Stadium have the potential to be self-financing.” Moynihan is no socialist. Neither is Christy Cooney, ex-President of the GAA, who hints at the regret within the upper echelons of the Association at the extent of stadium developments: “Going back ten or 15 years, would we have developed to the extent we did? Maybe we wouldn’t, but the [Celtic Tiger] money was there.”
Casement is the last of these redevelopments. The penultimate was Páirc Uí Chaoimh. Memorably called “Cork’s Taj Mahal” by Colm O’Rourke, it has been a total catastrophe for everyone involved – other than the developers and contractors who have made a pretty penny. The Cork County Board is carrying a €30 million debt from the project, paid for with a loan from Central GAA, while the stadium made a loss of €331,000 in 2023. They have had to sell the naming rights: tragically, it is now called SuperValu Páirc Uí Chaoimh. (What would the equivalent be, Lidl Casement Park?)
Corporate GAA’s method for dealing with residents’ concerns about Casement was high-handed. Backed by Sinn Féin, they tried to run roughshod over reasonable worries. But those anxieties were well founded. A report by one expert concluded that there was the potential for another Hillsborough.
Why did they go about it this way? Why the insistence on such a big project, with a build-it-at-all-costs mentality? One thing is evident: providing for Gaelic Games was never the main motivator. Had it been, the stadium could have been developed to a more appropriate scale, avoiding much of the fallout of the last decade. As Cahair O’Kane noted in the Irish News last year:
“An Ulster final is the only game in Ulster that ever touches 34,500. The average for an Ulster semi-final in the last 10 years is just under 17,000. Ulster Club finals wouldn’t touch the sides of 10,000. … It’s just too big. In order to justify it, you’d need nailed-down GAA assurances at this stage that two All-Ireland quarter-finals, no matter who’s in them, would be annually coming up the road to west Belfast. Otherwise, how are we ever going to even come close to filling the thing?”
No amount of unionist intransigence should distract us from the fact that ever since the very beginning the Casement redevelopment was a profit-driven, commercial enterprise void of any real democratic input, and designed to draw large scale events such as concerts and international soccer games. Again, just because the DUP are bigots does not absolve us of the responsibility to ask a simple question: is this sort of Casement Park a good idea?
Gates Closed
In the United States, major sports have a dynamic completely at odds with what you find in the GAA. Teams are “franchises” owned by billionaires, which they can uproot from one city and implant them in another, fans be damned. These billionaires do this to pressure public authorities to subsidise their stadium plans with taxpayer money. “Pay up or you’ll lose your team!” It’s a transparent racket, and it works. The NBA’s Seattle team is no more; the owner ripped them out and moved them to Oklahoma, renaming the once-iconic Sonics as the “Thunder”. Community links count for nothing.
One of the greatest travesties is that Casement was closed in 2013. It may have been just a poor strategic decision – we’re not dealing with billionaire owners after all. But it’s not impossible that it was shut when it was as a way to build pressure and ram through plans. The fact that such suspicion exists is itself indicative of the bullish approach to the redevelopment by the GAA hierarchy and the nationalist establishment in the North.
And billionaires or not, there are common aspects to all big stadium projects. They are pushed as a way to host large international events, touted as a driver of job creation and economic progress, and celebrated as a source of local pride. These have all been at the heart of arguments advocating for the 30,000-plus vision for Casement. We can add a further element specific to the North: the ‘symbolic importance’ of hosting the Euros 30 years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.
As should be obvious, the Gaelic Games-specific reasons for such a huge rebuild are very weak. The justifications for the current plan rest on these other, non-GAA claims. Let’s examine each of these cases in turn.
An Economic Bounty?
“Hundreds of local jobs will be created during construction and many more will be supported when the stadium is opened bringing considerable opportunities for a broad range of supply chains.”
So says the Casement promotional website, and so says much of the commentariat supportive of the 30,000-plus development. On the face of it, it seems logical. A good gut instinct, however, is to approach everything that mainstream economists and the business sector recommend with a large dose of skepticism. Western economies are suffering from long-running problems. In the North, which has never had a particularly dynamic economy, the picture is worse still. The pattern has been long-running stagnation matched by the increasing prevalence of plunder and the redistribution of wealth away from working class people upwards to the 0.1%. Think austerity, privatisation, attacks on workers’ rights, the ever greater hold of temp agencies and the rolling back of union jobs, the increased role of debt, bailouts of the big banks, and so on. All the ugly symptoms of capitalism over the last number of decades have allowed the super-rich to pile up astronomic wealth while overwhelming numbers of us are significantly worse off than were the previous generation.
In this context, many economies have latched onto the neoliberal tourism model as a potential life raft. However, as Brian Kelly notes, “the vast majority of jobs created in the tourism and service sectors will be minimum wage positions that offer no way out of poverty.” It’s a seasonal, low-wage, highly precarious sector. This model happens to be the dominant economic strategy for the North. Here’s where stadiums and tournaments come into the picture. Dave Zirin, The Nation’s Sports Editor, has written extensively about of the cost involved in hosting World Cups and the Olympics, and the politics and legacies these international tournaments offer:
“You create this tourist mecca that reimagines what work is for working-class people. It’s not industry, and it’s not union work. It’s service work. The jobs the Olympics create, after the construction, are almost entirely service work. It tends to be low pay and flexible. These are the hallmarks of neoliberal economies. These countries are trying to drastically reorganize their economies. Usually they need a war or a hurricane to do that, but those are risky and difficult to plan. The Olympic Games—that’s something you can plan for.”
All of this is confirmed in the records of Brazil, South Africa, Greece – and the list could go on. Hosting international tournaments is a Trojan Horse for further pushing this totally discredited neoliberal agenda, whose most significant impact is the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. To argue the North would somehow be different requires substantial proof. I won’t hold my breath.
It’s not only the aftermath which lends itself to this economic race-to-the-bottom. Yes, some construction jobs are created during the building process. But the hundreds of millions spent on a stadium project are ultimately much more beneficial to the private developers and contractors involved. Here we come to the second aspect of the nationalist establishment’s economic perspective for the North. It is a blueprint which has adapted itself to a general environment where public services are run down and where public funds are focused on what are called capital projects – constructing buildings and venues—rather than providing day-to-day services.
Belfast’s new Grand Central Station is a prime example. Coming in £140m over budget, it’s a very modern and clean transport hub. Meanwhile, understaffing and price hikes define a public transport system in crisis, and this station involves little (if any!) investment in routes or services. Or think of the new University of Ulster campus in Belfast City Centre: one hundred million in overspend while university staff are overworked and students treated as cash cows. Again, no matter how impressive a built structure, it is no substitute for the public goods and services our society desperately needs.
Proponents of the economic benefits reject this analysis, repeating “jobs, growth” ad nauseum like all who are well-trained to dance the neoliberal tune. The more reasonable might accept some of the above, but would reply that because of general economic difficulties, the stranglehold of Westminster rule, the backwardness of the DUP, and so on, that a large Casement redevelopment is a rare opportunity not to be squandered, even if it “isn’t perfect”. But that logic is to accept that there is no alternative, that public funds must be spent on glass and steel rather than on social safety nets and the workers who maintain them. That is the perspective of middle-class nationalism, of Sinn Féin, the SDLP and all their fellow travellers in the media and business sector.
Against this, Roger Casement might say:
“Where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land [..] then, surely, it is a braver, a saner and truer thing to be a rebel, in act and in deed, against such circumstances as these, than to tamely accept it, as the natural lot of men.”
In submission to the slow degradation of public services and lacking any will or desire to take on a broken economic system, nationalism is attempting to carve out an economic niche within the existing order. They want to gobble up state capital funding in order to enrich a layer of supportive developers, contractors, and the like. The job creation here is limited; many are precarious, low-paid, and dependent on the whims of visitors.
They wrap it up in the idea that it will benefit working class communities on the ground. This justification has a name: trickle-down economics, and it is as discredited as the Thatchers and Reagans who were its most loyal champions. When all the bluster is peeled away, these are the real business dynamics behind the 30,000+ proposal for Casement. It is the politics of plunder, it is race-to-the-bottom economics, and it too has a name: disaster capitalism.
Pride and Symbolism
Alongside the dubious economic arguments, our media was awash with proclamations about the significance of the Euros coming to Belfast, the symbolic pride it could have generated, and the capacity of such a stadium to unify divided communities a quarter of a century on from the Good Friday Agreement. Predictably, a crisis-laden unionism desperate to get its hand on some red meat to throw to its supporters has responded to these claims with flagrant sectarianism. There has long been a naked desire on their part to prevent the hosting of such a tournament in west Belfast, one element in wider attempts to derail nationalism’s increasing confidence and influence.
Again, one of the more destructive effects of sectarianism is to drag the whole level of debate downwards; there is an understandable gut reaction to uncritically accept the Casement-Euros fanfare because of how loathsome the DUP and other assorted sectarians are. And compared to economic facts and figures, notions of ‘pride’ and ‘significance’ are more subjective, making the distortion caused by the sectarianisation of the question even greater.
Across the North, west Belfast tops the list on most deprivation indices. There are the obvious historical reasons for this, and a decade of Tory rule, often willingly implemented by all the big parties up on the hill, has only compounded existing inequalities. The institutions set up by the peace process are creaking at the seams, and the enthusiasm they inspire from people in the North is at an all-time-low. Our health system is thoroughly broken, you can’t get a GP on the phone, schools everywhere are in severe debt, and the housing crisis is making a whole generation depressed.
And it’s not as if we’ve been starved of symbolic events in recent years. There is currently a nationalist First Minister in Stormont, DUP ministers are snapped awkwardly holding hurls, and Genocide Joe Biden graced us with his celebration of 25 years of the Good Friday Agreement to sickening fanfare. The last thing the North needs, then, is more symbolic guff. Yet the disaster capitalism at the heart of hosting international tournaments is invariably sold on the basis of such pride and potential symbolism. To put things bluntly, photoshopped drone shots of a floodlit 30,000-plus Casement Park will be used to temper your anger at the increasing dysfunction of daily life and to turn your eyes away from the gentrification happening all around.
Gentrification
The new Ulster University campus in Belfast city centre has brought with it a raft of high-rise student apartments. At the foot of the New Lodge, an area of huge housing need, they block out the skyline. In another such area, Carrick Hill, they soon will.
The overpriced Titanic Museum was the hook around which the surrounding waterfront redevelopment was hung. Despite the promises, the outcome was predictable:
“working-class communities across the city…‘missed out on the dividend’ arising from the project, which failed to meet even the minimal ‘social responsibility’ goals that the city had set in exchange for fast-tracking the project through planning and handing over £10m in ratepayer’s money. The Titanic project, at more than £92m, two thirds of it public money, is the most expensive tourist attraction in Europe. [1] Yet it failed to generate a mere 25 apprenticeships, fell short of creating a pitiful 15 jobs for the city’s long-term unemployed, and to date includes not a single unit of desperately-needed social housing.”
Meanwhile the developer behind Weavers’ Cross (the development of which Grand Central Station is the centrepiece) boasts of:
“…the potential for 1.3 million square feet of mixed-use office, life sciences, residential, student housing, hotels and retail/leisure space, presenting a unique opportunity to transform and regenerate a current brownfield site and create a new destination in the heart of the city.”
Belfast already has too many hotel rooms than what can be filled. Student accommodation will soon be in the same place. Meanwhile, the commercial property sector (offices) is in crisis; the world has too many offices and nowhere near enough demand for them – Belfast included. In the midst of an ever-worsening housing crisis, of public services in dire straits, public money is being funnelled into the same failed property investments which have bedevilled cities across the globe. The Irish language signage controversy at Grand Central Station is but the tip of the iceberg at Weavers’ Cross.
Developers and property speculators will prey on a mega Casement built for concerts and tournaments. They’ll sit on unused land while its value increases, waiting to flip it. We will see an increase in AirBnBs and the building of hotels to service short-term visitors, pushing up rents and enriching landlords. The public purse will be further hurt as the construction follows the course of every other big infrastructure project with costs above initial projections that need to be covered. To repeat, coursing through every sinew of the vision for a mega-Casement is a disaster capitalism which transfers money into the hands of the few by plundering the many.
Páirc Mhic Asmaint do chách
The GAA was founded towards the end of the 19th century, accompanying revivals in the Irish language and other aspects of Irish culture which, in turn, formed part of wider momentum for independence and self-determination. Concerned with the promotion of distinctly Irish sports, it was envisioned as a cultural bulwark against British colonial influence in Ireland. This is all well known. Less appreciated, but equally important, are the strong class dimensions to the Association’s origins.
The British form of athletics were something people did “in fine weather after having undergone several weeks of careful nursing and when nobody outside their own class is allowed to compete,” according to one of the GAA’s founders, Michael Cusack. They were sports “not for the amateur, but the gentleman amateur”. Michael Davitt, another of the founders, was adamant that Gaelic games should cater to the ‘working man’ who “seemed now to be born to no inheritance other than to labour”. It was based on the mass involvement of poor people up and down the country, in direct contrast to the British administration’s approach to sports as elite pastime.
The GAA has come a long way since then. No longer the sole purview of the working man, Gaelic games are increasingly played by women (though there are many institutional barriers still to be torn down). Clubs are rooted in increasingly multi-ethnic and racially diverse communities up and down the land. Participation, whether on or off the field, is a core aspect of Irish cultural life. But the Association is at a crossroads. The runaway expense of the inter-county game has locked in a cycle of commodification and increasing professionalisation, which risks eroding the values of amateurism, accessibility and mass participation that make the GAA such a unique organisation. It is a lucrative business for some, of course.
Casement should be rebuilt. It should host Ulster Championship games on hot summer days. It should once again become the crowning glory of Antrim GAA, the pitch which all budding camógs, hurlers and footballers aspire to grace. On the wet winter nights of preseason, the dream of thousands roaring as you take to Casement’s immaculate sod should be a shared motivation for all grades and ages in Antrim.
However, Casement shouldn’t be about developer profits, gentrification or low-wage neoliberal tourism. It’s time to move on from mega-Casement and the failed economic model driving it. Instead, let the rebuild be guided by the original ideals and values underpinning Cumann Lúthchleas Gael. Casement as a community institution designed to inspire the best of our amateur athletes, as a place which celebrates clubs and their volunteers, as a venue which is the collective fruit of an organisation founded on mass participation, owned and run by the people of Antrim GAA for Antrim GAA. A People’s Casement Park. Páirc Mhic Asmaint do chách.