DESPITE their strong financial showing in recent years, Croke Park stadium director Peter McKenna doesn’t envisage his team getting involved in similar projects at other GAA venues.
Croke Park, which is a separate business entity from the GAA, contributed over €8m to the organisation’s income this year and aims to top the €10m figure in the near future.
More than €3m of that revenue came from hosting concerts by The Stone Roses, Taylor Swift and Michael Bublé among others, and their input represented 13 per cent of the GAA’s overall income for the year.
Páirc Ui Chaoimh’s recent rebuild has been overshadowed by the debt that will be accrued, with McKenna having estimated that the overall cost could run to €110m. Cork county board dispute this and say it will be €86m, with GAA director-general Tom Ryan saying last week it would end up somewhere in the middle.
Having been built with smaller conferencing facilities similar to those in Croke Park, as well as being able to host concerts, means the GAA are hopeful the stadium will begin to pay for itself over time.
On the idea that some of the staff that have made Croke Park successful would be parachuted in to oversee things in Cork, McKenna said it was “a very small team and there’s a limit to what we can do.”
He added: “You’d always be conscious of stretching guys too much. They do a very good job but if you start putting them a couple of days elsewhere… they can’t do everything.
The weekend past saw a new controversy hit the stadium, with the “unacceptable” condition of the pitch for Cork hurlers’ game with Wexford leading to their next game against Clare being switched to Pairc Ui Rinn.
A new pitch is set to be laid, which would take 6 to 8 weeks, but McKenna said he had no fears about whether it would be ready in time for championship season.
McKenna also revealed that Dublin manager Jim Gavin shunned his calls after he’d criticised the pitch at headquarters.
Gavin was most notably critical following Dublin’s 2017 Leinster final win over Kildare, which came days after U2 had played a concert that led to part of the surface in front of Hill 16 being relayed.
It was blamed for Dean Rock slipping in the early moments and earning a subsequent black card for a foot trip.
McKenna stood over the idea of hosting summer concerts in the stadium.
“I stand over it from a technical point of view. We test that pitch, all the metrics of it. Managers need to deflect from other conversations, so it is easy to say that I didn’t like this or whatever.
“The pitch is put down to the highest standards and we know exactly what the performance metrics of that pitch are in terms of stud turn, hardness and so on. And I have them there for every week for the last five or six years, so no, there is no issue with the pitch.
“They are but managers deflect, they don’t want to talk about the issue that you want to talk about, so the pitch is an easy way to create a diversion if you like. But the figures are there and I am happy to show them to anybody.
“I have tried several times [to contact Gavin] but he is a very busy man, he is a pilot as well as everything else,” he said.
