Opening shot – Casement should be Belfast’s Croker

Casement Park in 2012

By John Hughes

Last week Ulster GAA launched a fresh round of consultation on the Casement Park project. It is taking the form of a charm offensive in West Belfast over the course of the summer with the updated plans for Casement Park likely to emerge in autumn of this year.

Given the grief that Ulster GAA have copped from the good people of West Belfast in trying to bring Casement to a successful conclusion it is probably understandable that energies are tightly focused on turning around opinion in that area.

However the strongest reasons for persisting with Casement aren’t specific to the Andersonstown Road.

Belfast is the focal point for cultural life in the north of Ireland, and yet the GAA has always been somewhat under the radar in the province’s capital. The old Casement Park was a homely ground, but it was never going to host Ulster football finals and so the biggest days of Ulster GAA were always happening off Broadway as far as the mainstream media were concerned.

Bringing Ulster GAA’s big days into Belfast puts the Association front and centre in the place where the cultural agenda is formed.

Let’s take one small example.

BBC Radio Ulster’s GAA coverage currently languishes on a squall of static on the medium wave band. Meanwhile Irish League soccer gets FM coverage every Saturday and Ulster rugby games are also given the FM treatment. Soccer games that wouldn’t have the attendance of a lot of GAA club league matches, have web highlights on the BBC.

Why exactly do you think that is?

Now yes, the BBC should definitely be giving the GAA a fairer deal as the largest sporting body in the north without us having to go down on our knees for it. But the GAA doesn’t help itself by failing to showcase the game in the province’s main centre of population. Nothing quite communicates the importance of an event than seeing hordes of people converging on a venue to be part of it.

Unfortunately many people in Belfast can go from one end of the year to the other without the GAA featuring in their lives in any way shape or form.

Out in the rest of the province we might live and breathe the games, but if it doesn’t register in Belfast, then it might as well not be happening at all as far as the cultural agenda is concerned. And that is what lies behind the GAA’s persistent unrepresentation in the province’s media.

There’s another angle to the Casement project which also needs serious consideration.

When I was growing up I dreamed about playing for Armagh and winning an All-Ireland. I can’t say that I ever visualised the experience of walking up the steps in St Tiernach’s park. Clones is a decent ground, but it is only one of a number of decent grounds across Ulster. It isn’t anything special.

By contrast, any child who swings a hurl in Munster dreams of taking the acclaim of the fans from the stand in Semple Stadium.

We have the most meaningful provincial football championship, but we don’t have that sort of spiritual home, and somehow that takes a some of the lustre from the event. Place is part of the equation too.

I think people only fully appreciated the value of Croke Park to the GAA when they finally saw it reborn in the concrete and steel. What had previously been a old shack of a place was now a theatre which demanded a spectacle to match.

I believe the new Casement Stadium can be the theatre that Ulster deserves, but rather like Croke Park, we’ll only realise that when we finally walk through the turnstiles for the Belfast’s first Ulster final since 4 April 1904.

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