JOHNNY McINTOSH: What about Antrim?

PURELY from the selfish perspective of Antrim GAA, I think it’s a good thing that the British Government pulled the plug on its commitment to fund the rebuild of Casement Park in time for Euro 2028.

To be honest, I never saw the point of building a vast, 34,000 seater stadium. It would rarely, if ever, have been filled. Antrim doesn’t need a massive stadium with bells attached, it needs a proper county ground.

I don’t think getting to host Ulster finals would be of any benefit to us, so what I would love is an 18,000 capacity stadium similar to the Athletic Grounds. We need something that would leave a real legacy for Antrim GAA, a proper sporting hub in West Belfast.

It would be our GAA Headquarters – we could have handball, gym and catering facilities for everyone and it would benefit the local people who are actually using it.

I think certain sections have been caught up in the idea of staging the Euros and how amazing it would be, but, in Antrim, we don’t really have any interest in that. We want a county ground we can be proud of – where we can play our league and championship games.

People forget that when Casement Park was active, it was ours. Our hurlers and footballers could train on it, it was our base, it was our home. We could have meetings there and it was a social hub for Andersonstown in West Belfast. It held school blitzes, it was used for club matches and our county finals.

I know we have Corrigan Park and I don’t mean to belittle that, but we would like a real state-of-the-art ground and I think Casement could bring so much to Antrim GAA.

There was this idea of building a 34,000 seater stadium and invariably UEFA were going to have a massive investment in that, and to me that means that UEFA were going to have some control over it.

The GAA and Irish Football Association would also have control over it, and it begs the question, what about Antrim? Where do we come in? Would Antrim hurlers and footballers ever have got training on it or would we be told, no, Northern Ireland want it this week?

We do need a new stadium similar to Healy Park or the Athletic Grounds but we need to think outside the box with it. We could have something like what Derry have in Owenbeg, except a bigger stadium.

My worry was we’d build this really fancy stadium and it’s basically locked up. The other thing people forget about Casement, is that when it was a fully up and running stadium, the gates very rarely were closed. Kids from the neighbourhood were pucking a ball against the stand and even going onto the pitch. To me, Casement felt like the epicentre of everything in Antrim GAA. I don’t really feel that anymore, I think there’s a big thing lost there.

When I was 15 or 16, all I dreamt about was playing for the Antrim minors for one reason and one reason only – because Antrim minors at that time played directly before the Ulster Senior final. You got to play in Casement on the first week of July, a big crowd already through the gates, it was such an important thing. Now minors have two or three games in Abbotstown in the middle of the winter and it’s not really an incentive to play hurling at county level.

As I see it, why should Antrim not have our own really good county ground? It’s hard to know exactly what will happen but I really hope we build a smaller than envisioned stadium. We don’t have to put it way up into the sky. We should use the infrastructure around the area to make it almost a centre of excellence in its own right.

The old Casement Park actually had a running track around it and I would say, why not do something like that again? We’ve a great opportunity here to do something different. I see so many teams in West Belfast training at the old Mary Peters track but why not have Casement for a five-lane running track?

It should be something for the entire community and I think that’s one of the reasons why the proposed Casement Park has fallen flat – there was such a disconnect there and people on the ground got the impression that a new Croke Park is being built on your doorstep and that’s it. They would get no benefit. If you were living beside it, you’d have certainly complained about it because you’re getting nothing but hassle from it.

So for me that’s the answer – if we could go more that’s based around helping the community, we could build a stadium that we’re all really proud of.