DCU new 10,000 seater stadium

[Jinxy]

Peter Quinn was given a good grilling on Off the Ball last night about this. For a normally assured individual, I thought he performed poorly.

He was extremely vague on how much access non-GAA sports would get to the facilities (which he had started off the interview stating as being one of the goals) and when pushed about the DCU football (soccer not GAA) teams complaint that they had not been engaged in any way in the consultation and their request to provide input was ignored, he deferred to Moyna saying he (Quinn) had only become involved at the end of the process and Moyna was the person to talk to about the detail.

What I took away from it was that the indoor facility was aimed solely for the use of the GAA. At the GAA's behest, if they didn't want to use it 24/7, other sports possibly could use it, but that the principle way other sports would benefit would be through sports scientists doing generic field sport-type experiments using the facilities.

Anyway, good luck to them getting private finance as its clear that until the provide guarantees that it is a multi-sport facility they shouldn't get a cent of public money.

They want to put an athletics track in there. It's probably not going to be used for playing matches anyway, it's a research centre. The thing about research into gaelic games is if we don't do it in Ireland, obviously no one else will. So you can hardly blame them for wanting to focus on this. There's mountains of soccer research. There's shag all GAA research.

[HarpoJoyce]

They want to put an athletics track in there. It's probably not going to be used for playing matches anyway, it's a research centre. The thing about research into gaelic games is if we don't do it in Ireland, obviously no one else will. So you can hardly blame them for wanting to focus on this. There's mountains of soccer research. There's shag all GAA research.

There's acres and acres of GAA analysis though.
It may mean buying back RTÉ, TG4 and Setanta Ireland footage though. I don't know if that's an option ..........?

[Aberdonian Stu]

Ferdinand von Prodzynski, the president of DCU, commented on it when asked at a debate on fees tonight. He said the development of the arena is not set in stone. The college wants to do it but will not unless they are successful in their fund raising efforts and he was quite clear about said fund raising being far from a done deal.