« McCartney Home Attacked By Thugs | Marching Season 2005 - The Story So Far » |
Belfast Welcomes The London 2012 Olympics
What does London's successful bid to host the 2012 Olympics mean to Northern Ireland? Within hours, stories were appearing on the BBC and Belfast Telegraph websites proclaiming this a great step forward towards Northern Ireland's new multi-sport stadium. I don't know if they deliberately didn't prominently mention the fact that it's at the Maze or if it was just a subconscious desire to forget that detail - I mean I wouldn't want to spoil the happy mood with a dose of reality either.
Belfast Hosts Olympic Football
Northern Ireland will host three Olympic football games. At the minute they're penned in for Windsor Park but obviously if a modern, larger capacity stadium was available the games would be shifted there. To be quite frank, while I would love to see Northern Ireland football moved to a neutral venue and love to see the sport being played in a modern stadium with a higher capacity than Windsor Park's 14,000, it just isn't worth the though of Olympic football being played beside a shrine to gutless killers and murderers who plagued Northern Ireland for so many decades.
A Day At The Maze Stadium
Picture the scene as the teams and supporters from the USA, Canada, Spain or wherever else pull up in their tour buses. What a great day it will be. A momentous occasion that they'll surely remember for years, nay, decades to come. An Olympic soccer game (obviously we can't call it football, that might upset the GAA) in war-torn Belfast.
And it begins...
Follow up:
"Welcome to the Maze Stadium. If you look to your left you will see a shiny new 30,000 seater stadium. If you look closer, you'll see cobwebs, but never mind that - it doesn't get used that much.
If you look to your right, you will see a memorial shrine to the murdering scumbags who tore this country apart for more than 30 years, terrorising, murdering and bombing Northern Ireland in an attempt to bend the country to their own will.
Have a nice day."
Appealing, no? Then there's half time, as fans munch on their pastie suppers from "Bobby's Burger Bar" and peruse the adverts in the programme enticing them to visit the Long Kesh Hunger Strikers Memorial Museum, right beside the venue, to experience the struggle for Irish liberation themselves.
Of course time is short and they've had a long day so they decide to skip the museum. Wait a minute, look at that traffic!! The guys at the Stade de France warned us about the horrendous traffic jams that they are burdened with every time there's a big event, all thanks to some goon who thought "An out of town stadium? What a great idea!"
So with the prospect of sitting in the car park for an hour, the museum seems like a more attractive option. Baring this in mind, some of the supporters wander into the museum. Here they have explained to them the tragic story of 10 brave prisoners of war. 10 gallant heroes who stood up to the mighty British imperialist government, winning their rights to extra pillows, softer matresses, and whatever the fuck else they were spitting the dummy about, and continuing the struggle against 800 years of British oppression in Ireland.
When they leave the stadium they'll naturally be looking to sample the nightlife. The obvious thing to do will be to head to the nearest city, so off they go towards... Lisburn. Enough said there really.
Of course it's not all bad. The simple fact that Northern Ireland is sharing in the Olympic games is fantastic, but God help us if tourists come anywhere near the fucking Maze Stadium. We all know who's to blame for this. The sellouts that describe themselves as Unionists on the Maze Consultation Panel (Edwin Poots, for one, sticks in my mind), not to mention Peter Hain and the Direct Misrule ministers at the NIO who are happier appeasing insurrectionists than actually running a country.