Croke Park

25th November, 2009

I attended a breakfast meeting this morning with the President of the GAA and management of Croke Park. The objective of this meeting was to discuss the ongoing huge difficulty of the impact of the stadium on the local community. This was prompted by the recent protests over the U2 concert.

In this meeting I said that we had to sort this problem out. It was a cause of huge local frustration and it wasn’t acceptable that it continue.

My proposal was to use the report produced by the Croke Park Liason Group as the basis for future review. We should allow this dialogue to take place in quarterly open meetings. The report should be drilled down to the key issues against which progress can be tracked. We then use the open meetings as an opportunity to hold key service providers to account on delivering these tasks.

The GAA are now meeting residents on same and will revert back to the public representatives in January.