What's Casement Park and why should I care?

There are stories rumbling in the media about the PM's chief of staff, Sue Gray, taking an active role in negotiations over Casement Park: I'll explain the background quickly

The really short version of this is that Casement Park is a largely derelict stadium at 88–104 Andersonstown Road, in west Belfast. It opened in 1953, one of the largest stadiums in Northern Ireland, and was intended for hurling and Gaelic football. That is significant, because both are organised by the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), a body that also promotes Irish music and dancing, and the Irish language. Since its formation in 1884, the GAA has been strongly associated with Irish Nationalism, and has substantial influence in the worldwide Irish diaspora. Lest there be any doubt, the stadium was named after Sir Roger Casement, a Foreign Office diplomat who exposed atrocities committed by the Belgian authorities in the Congo and in the rubber industry in Peru, for which he was knighted. But Casement retired from government service in 1913 and became a supporter of Irish Nationalism, attempted to secure assistance from Germany for the Easter Rising of 1916 (while the United Kingdom was at war with the German Empire) and was arrested and convicted of high treason. He was hanged in Pentonville Prison on 3 August 1916.

Casement, therefore, is a hero of the Irish independence movement, but equally anathema to the Unionist community of Northern Ireland as a traitor to the Crown. That the stadium was named after him, and was the home of Antrim GAA, made it a focus of Irish Nationalism and Republicanism. In 1971 and 1972, there were major rallies against the introduction of internment at Casement Park, and from July 1972 to October 1973 the stadium was occupied by the British Army, initially by 19th Regiment Royal Artillery, because of its use as an assembly ground by protestors.

The Provisional IRA held a rally at Casement Park in August 1979 marking the 10th anniversary of the deployment of British soldiers in Northern Ireland, at which they displayed their arsenal of weaponry. On 19 March 1988, two corporals from the Royal Corps of Signals, Derek Wood and David Howes, wearing civilian clothes and driving an unmarked car, encountered the funeral procession of PIRA member Caoimhín Mac Brádaigh. The mourners initially believed they were Loyalist paramilitaries and that they were under attack, and the soldiers were dragged from their car, taken to Casement Park, beaten, stripped and searched. They may also have been tortured. When it became clear they were members of the British Army, they were taken to waste ground nearby and executed.

The political and sectarian symbolism of the stadium could hardly be more pronounced. But it was also a functioning sporting venue, hosting eight Ulster football finals, and it was refurbished in 2000, with floodlights added in 2006. Casement Park hosted its last match on 10 June 2013, the 2013 Ulster Senior Football Championship between Antrim and Monaghan, and has been closed since.

There have been numerous plans for redevelopment. In 2011, the Northern Ireland Executive announced it would provide £138 million for various stadium redevelopment projects, of which Ulster GAA would receive £61.4m to be used to redevelop Casement Park into a 40,000 all-seated stadium. A further £15 million would come from the central GAA. The new venue was scheduled to open in 2015, but local objections and a judicial review brought that work to a halt. A different, smaller design submitted in 2016 was refused planning permission, and the executive was suspended early in 2017 over the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal. By this stage, the projected cost of redevelopment had risen to £110 million.

New planning permission was granted in July 2021. This would create a stadium with a capacity of 34,578, work would start in the first half of 2022 and would take two years. An appeal against the project by local residents was rejected by the High Court in Belfast in May 2022, but the timetable was already slipping, with work to begin at some point in 2023, and completion expected in 2025. The stakes were raised substantially last October, when the UK and Ireland were chosen as joint hosts of the 2028 UEFA European Football Championship (9 June to 9 July 2028), as Casement Park was one of the nominated venues, and the only one in Northern Ireland. Again, the symbolism is obvious.

In November last year, main contractors the Buckinghamshire Group went into administration and Magherafelt construction firm Heron Bros announced they would not proceed with the redevelopment. But the GAA was confident this would not affect the stadium’s readiness for 2028. Work began clearing the site in February, but in June the government announced there would be no details of any financial assistance until after the general election. The first minister of Northern Ireland, Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin, has said that Casement Park will be rebuilt and opened “on her watch”, but many are starting to doubt if the stadium will be redeveloped, either in time for the Euros in 2028 or at all.

The situation, then, is this. The redevelopment work has fallen behind or collapsed time and time again, and the projected costs are rising. Now that this year’s European championships are over, there is a closing window of time in which Casement Park must be rebuilt if it is to be in a fit state to host football matches in four years time.

The stadium itself is of intense symbolic importance. For Nationalists and Republicans, it is a major centre for sport and culture, and one redolent with memories of the Troubles. That in part is why O’Neill has made its completion so central to her tenure in office. It would also be a major sign of economic and political progress all round if some matches of a tournament jointly hosted by the United Kingdom and Ireland were played in Belfast. At the same time, for some Unionists, this is a vanity project for Republicanism, a rebuttal of their culture which is still, just, numerically dominant in Northern Ireland. Given how little public money is available to be spent on all sorts of seemingly urgent projects, some Unionists feel that devoting more than £100 million to the restoration of a GAA stadium, named after a convicted and executed traitor, is deeply provocative.

The previous secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Chris Heaton-Harris, was bullish about the stadium’s prospects, speaking in reassuring terms at the British-Irish Council last month. Asked if the government was reneging on its promise of financial support, he responded:

I think you’ll find that there’ll be an announcement almost certainly by the new government on this in the future, which will suggest the premise of your question might not be correct.

However, it does not take much of a cynic to imagine that Heaton-Harris was speaking in the comfort of knowing it was no longer his problem. He had already announced that he was leaving Parliament, so at best it would be a matter for a successor Conservative Northern Ireland secretary, but much more likely a Labour one. There was no impetus for brutal honesty or unpleasant truths.

Only two months earlier, Heaton-Harris had admitted that the government was still trying to calculate how much the project would cost. The £62.5 million pledged by the executive in 2011 was clearly now a thing of the past, and some had suggested the total bill might be as high as £308 million. Even with £40 million on offer from the government of Ireland and £15 million from the GAA, a sum of that size would surely be impossible to justify.

Sir Keir Starmer visited Northern Ireland within hours of kissing hands as prime minister, accompanied the new secretary of state, Hilary Benn, and the Downing Street chief of staff, Sue Gray. Benn was reassuring on one hand yet evasive on the other. He asserted that the redeveloped stadium “will be built”, and that Casement Park was “a very important programme”, indeed “probably the most urgent issue” he faced. But he was resolute in refusing to suggest a timetable, and, by extension, did not say explicitly that the stadium would be ready for the 2028 tournament.

There are two issues: first is cost and there’s a certain amount of money in the pot but it’s not enough. The second issue is we’re into extra time in trying to get it built in time for the Euros. But Casement Park will be built and as soon as I’m in a position to make that decision, I will. You have to bear with me.

Is Benn really saying that there is a distinct possibility that Casement Park will be redeveloped but not in time for Euro 2028? That would seem an extraordinary missed opportunity. Yet he has said that it will be built “one way or another”. But he has not said when he will be able to give a definitive answer about the stadium’s future.

Not everyone wants the project to succeed. The Traditional Unionist Voice leader Jim Allister, who was elected to the House of Commons for North Antrim at the general election, had previously cross-examined the Northern Ireland Executive’s communities minister, Gordon Lyons of the DUP, about the development, but had received little clarity.

This is an intolerable situation, particularly when compared with other sports such as football which didn’t received a penny more than the money they were promised in 2011 when the minister announced the delivery of the cash last week.

Whatever Allister’s motivation, whether care for prudence with public money or a dislike of that money being spent on a GAA venue, his party will likely oppose the redevelopment, but they have no weight of numbers in the Northern Ireland Assembly, let alone the House of Commons.

The situation is so difficult and complicated because a number of participants are talking in effectively different languages. For understandable political reasons, the first minister has promised that the stadium will be built during her tenure of office, which could end at the next assembly elections. These are due to be held no later than 6 May 2027, so she is dealing with a period of slightly under three years and she will not want to face the electorate having failed to deliver on this symbolic project. She has already come under pressure from the leader of the opposition in the assembly, Matthew O’Toole of the SDLP, who urged her to “live up to her word”. But she is also talking the uncompromising language of no alternative, saying the stadium “must” be built in time for Euro 2028 and that she is “determined” that it should be so. Neither of those words makes it any more or less likely.

By contrast, and again for understandable reasons of his own, Hilary Benn is framing his response in terms of practicalities, costs and available resources. The stadium will be built, but there are significant financial challenges and those will have an enormous bearing on the schedule of the work. It may be, he has effectively admitted, that the project will not be completed in time for 2028, however regrettable that may be. Meanwhile, the prime minister has been tending his relationship with the Irish taoiseach, Simon Harris, very carefully, and Harris has promised that his government “won’t be found wanting” in terms of financial contributions. The taoiseach was at Chequers last night to hold talks on a range of issues with Starmer ahead of today’s meeting of the European Political Community at Blenheim Palace, but Harris has stressed that the relationship between London and Dublin is much broader than the relatively simple issue of Casement Park.

This is the delicate situation into which The Times (here) and The Daily Telegraph (here) are alleging that Sue Gray has inserted herself. It is claimed that the Downing Street chief of staff, who lived in Northern Ireland for a while in the 1980s, was permanent secretary at the Department of Finance from 2018 to 2021 and applied unsuccessfully to be head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service in 2020, has been attempting to exert undue influence to have additional funding for Casement Park agreed. One anonymous Whitehall source said her intervention was “subverting cabinet” and was “constitutionally improper”. As the facts are still very unclear, I will say no more on that subject at the moment, though I may well return to it. Hopefully, however, if anyone has glanced at the headlines and wondered what journalists are talking about when they refer to Casement Park, this has explained and placed it in context. It is not just the redevelopment of a former stadium in Belfast. It goes to the core of the identities of both communities, their histories and expectations, and will not easily yield to patient negotiation.