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Irish Times
Soccer/ National League: After 105 years in Phibsborough the membership of Bohemians last night endorsed a proposal put forward by the club's committee to sell Dalymount Park and move to a new purpose-built stadium at Diswellstown, Castleknock in a deal with Andorey Developments valued at some €48 million.
In a meeting at the Regency Airport Hotel in Dublin attended by more than 358 of the club's members, 86 per cent (310) voted in favour of a change to the club's constitution allowing the committee to complete deals worth more than €1 million, with 42 opposed, and five abstentions. The change, which required the support of three quarters of those in attendance, has effectively paved the way for the deal with Andorey to proceed.
The club's honorary secretary Gerry Conway said the membership had taken an "exciting" road forward by opting to support the proposal which involves Andorey providing a 10,000-seater stadium plus on 8.5 acre site plus between €25 million and €27 million in cash in return for Dalymount, which subject to rezoning, would provide 5.7 acres for redevelopment. Club officials said they hoped to be in the new ground in three to five years' time.
Bohemians have debts of more than €1 million, a significant portion of which is owed to members, and these are likely to be cleared but there are no shareholders and so almost all of the money should remain within the club.
"I think the question before the members was whether the club merely survived or actually thrived over the coming years and I'm delighted that they've chosen the latter," said Conway.
"At the end of the day, an asset of €48 million is only of any use if you cash it in at some stage and by doing so now the club will have an opportunity that no other club in this league has, to move to a state-of-the-art new home and have enough money to construct a state-of-the-art academy. We will be in a position to do things in a way now that we could only have dreamed of previously."
Last night's vote copperfastened the demise of the proposal, made last year, that Shelbourne sell their interest in Tolka Park and invest part of the money received in improvements at Dalymount which would also have benefited from substantial public investment.
Subsequent negotiations between the two clubs on the matter had actually proceeded well but opposition from within the membership of Bohemians to what was seen as a poor deal for the club emerged quite quickly, particularly when it became apparent just how much money might be raised by selling up and moving on.
Senior club officials subsequently suggested they would be happy to talk with Shelbourne about a groundshare at the new stadium, on the basis of the Tolka Park outfit being tenants.
Shelbourne chairman Ollie Byrne was adamant last night this was out of the question. "We shall not be sharing at Carpenterstown (another name for the area in which the proposed stadium would be situated) under any circumstances," he said. "We were asked by the FAI, the Minister (John O'Donoghue) and the Government to halt work on our own move to Swords in order to talk to Bohemians about the possibility of a groundshare at Dalymount Park and we did so.
"It is our intention now to pursue other possibilities and negotiations are already under way with a number of parties in relation to several aspects of the future of this club."
Within Merrion Square there is an appreciation that from Bohemians' point of view the deal on offer last night was something of a "no-brainer". There is, however, some concern as to how the club will fare in the planning process, highlighted yesterday by local Labour Party TD Joan Bruton describing the site as "totally unsuitable" for the purpose.
Club members opposed to the deal, meanwhile, projected that the rezoning required for the redevelopment of Dalymount would be difficult to obtain and insisted they would lobby councillors over the coming months with the aim of defeating the proposal.
If the deal falls through on planning grounds, however, Bohemians will benefit from a guaranteed non-refundable €2 million payment which they would receive within 30 days.
The vote, therefore, appears to mark the beginning of the end of more than a century of football at Dalymount Park. The ground hosted its first game on September 7th, 1901 when Bohemians beat Shelbourne 4-2 in a friendly. In May 1957 a record 47,600 attended the World Cup qualifier against England but from the '60s on the ground went into decline, hastened by the FAI's decision in the early '70s to switch many then all of their international games to Lansdowne Road.
In 1988 the FAI agreed a deal to purchase the ground with a view to redeveloping it but the plan was abandoned.
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