West Belfast has been promised a rebuilt Casement Park for decades. Yet to this day, not an inch of progress has been made. In fact, quite the opposite has happened. Abandoned and left to decay, Casement Park lies in ruins.
And, outrageously, the never-ending saga of delays, obstructions and deferrals is set to continue. This summer, Westminster confirmed it will not provide all the fundings needed to begin redevelopment.
In the meantime, Antrim GAA remains without a home.
Money for Casement?
The current plans to revamp the 1953 Casement Park grounds – named after the Easter Rising revolutionary Roger Casement – date back to 2011, when funds were allocated to redevelop it alongside Windsor Park and Ravenhill. Over £130 million was set aside for sports redevelopment. In theory, this was to be equally split between Nationalist and Unionist areas.
Indeed, Ravenhill and Windsor Park have since seen substantial redevelopment. Not Casement though. That was kicked into the long grass over and over again.
First, planning permission disputes were dragged through the courts in 2014 and the original designs were deemed unsafe in 2015. Revised plans were proposed in 2017, which only met with approval in 2021. By then, inflation had made the initial budget wholly inadequate.
Then came the lure of Euro 2028, and again further shortfalls in fundings, with ever ballooning cost estimates. The Labour government’s latest announcement put the final nail in the coffin of redevelopment.
The question arises naturally: why has Casement alone remained abandoned? The primary reason is not logistical or financial, but political. You see, Casement Park is located in the Nationalist heartland of West Belfast. What is even more, it is used for Gaelic football – a ‘terrorist’ pastime according to the likes of Jim Allister and Orange Order leaders (i.e., those actually marching in the memory of terrorists and murders).
It is not a coincidence that the park has seen zero construction efforts, whereas the two other sports parks in Unionist areas have. This is not an exception, but the rule built in the sectarian nature of the Six Counties statelet.
The peace process, power-sharing and even a Nationalist First Minister have in no way changed this, nor could they have. Over and over again, the Unionist establishment and the British ruling class have trampled the rights of Nationalist communities – despite the ‘equality’ enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement.
Sectarianism and deprivation
This is nothing new unfortunately. Britain consolidated its rule in Ireland by affording relative privileges to Protestant workers. Still today, the gap is stark. Of the five most deprived constituencies in the North, three are overwhelmingly Catholic (the other two split evenly).
The Unionist establishment used its control of the statelet to divert fundings for social houses, infrastructure etc. towards Protestant areas. To give one example, the Casement saga brings to memory the infamous decision to build the Ulster University campus in 1968 not in Derry, but in the small town of Coleraine, which just so happened to be a Unionist stronghold.
To be sure, the North of Ireland as a whole is one of the most deprived regions of Western Europe. The division between Catholic and Protestant workers has consciously been used by the ruling class to drive down the living standards of both communities. This is all the more true today, in the midst of a terrible crisis of British capitalism. As austerity crushes workers from every community, the British establishment has next-to-nothing to give workers – Protestant, Catholic or otherwise.
All the more, those opportunists politicians at the head of Unionist parties try and cause a ruckus over every and any sectarian question they can engineer: Irish language signs, sea border, Gaelic sports, music, bonfires, and – of course – a stadium in a Nationalist area.
The only aim is to divert the attention from the crisis and the deterioration of living standards that they themselves are responsible for.
Revolution
That decades on from the original plans, Casement Park still lies abandoned is a shameful indictment of the sectarian nature of Stormont and the Six Counties statelet. The situation has rightly angered thousands of workers from West Belfast who – under the banner “Casement Now” – marched in the spring in one of the biggest protests the city has seen in recent years.
The money exists to build a modern stadium for Antrim GAA – and far more besides. While we are denied sporting facilities, Westminster finds billions for the arms industry. Or take the millions in expenses claimed by Stormont MLAs every year. Indeed – from the longest NHS waiting lists in the UK, to the shockingly low number of new builds in 2024, the state of schools and more – the North’s infrastructure lies in tatters, chronically underfunded to the level of permanent crisis.
But the wealth exists to solve all the problems facing workers and youth, from West to East Belfast and beyond. Only it needs to be wrested away from the ruling class and the establishment.
