Michael Moynihan: Cork county board is all talk no action on Páirc Uí Chaoimh concert potential

“Concerts in this building are challenging because we’re a mid-size venue,” he said.

“We’re too big for Live at the Marquee, we’re too small for Coldplay. We talk to the promoters every day we are seeing now if we can move the dial a little bit and go into smaller events and use car parks and use 4G and put marquees up on the pitch and so on.

“So lest anyone think we are idle, you are at the discretion of the major acts’ touring diaries; it’s not your diary, it’s theirs, and we play games for a significant period of the year.

“Concerts are the only thing that will move the dial on debt here. Everything else really is to keep the lights on.” 

This I found interesting for a lot of reasons, not least the fact that Martin was able to report it in the first place. Páirc Uí Chaoimh is where the Cork County Board holds its regular meetings, and in January that body decided to ban the media from those meetings.

In February, a member of the board then complained that media reporting of their meetings was inaccurate, which sounds like a winning entry in the ‘having your cake and eating it’ invitational.

All of which is a long way of saying kudos to Martin for emerging with something to report.

Not so much the obstacle to concerts presented by playing games in the stadium, mind. The debt Cork GAA owes is so big — north of €30m — that it has moved games to accommodate concerts in the recent past, and significant games at that.

In all the howling and finger-pointing about Cork v Limerick being on GAAGO last summer, few people seemed to realise that that game was originally fixed for a Sunday, when it would have been on RTÉ. It was moved to Saturday and went behind a paywall so that Páirc Uí Chaoimh could be prepared for a Bruce Springsteen concert, as pointed out by GAA President Jarlath Burns.

No, our big takeaway from the breakfast meeting was the discovery that Páirc Uí Chaoimh is not in the Goldilocks zone for concerts

Too big for Live at the Marquee and too small for Coldplay means the stadium is both Daddy Bear and Mammy Bear. Too hot and too cold at the same time.

And yet.

There seems to be no shortage of venues that can accommodate a variety of crowd sizes around the country once you start looking. For instance, a few playing fields in Rathfarnham in Dublin will host 40,000 people for the Longitude Festival the first weekend in July: if the Cork County Board wants a few pointers on running such events, it could consult the members of Ballinteer St Johns GAA club, who help with the stewarding of the festival.

Across the Liffey, Malahide Castle also hosts large-scale gigs such as Take That during the summer: its capacity is approximately 20,000. St Anne’s Park, Clontarf has about the same capacity for concerts such as The 1975’s in recent years.

Too Dublin-centric?

If you point the car south from the capital you can turn off for Stradbally in Laois, where some open fields will aim to pull in 80,000 spectators next summer for the Electric Picnic. Indiependence, the festival which ran for almost twenty years in Mitchelstown, was attracting approximately 15,000 people at its height.

In fact, last year 100,000 people visited another music festival in Ireland, one not too far from Páirc Uí Chaoimh at all: the Guinness Jazz Festival, which of course is held every October Bank Holiday in Cork.

Open-air event, bespoke concert venue, rolling multi-location festival: none of these seems to be restricted by the notion of a mid-size venue.

With some imagination and plenty of hard work, concerts and events are held all over Ireland which accommodate crowds that are half of, equal to, or — in some rare cases — over twice the capacity of Páirc Uí Chaoimh. And very few of them appear to be dependent on single headline acts like Coldplay, either

In fact, one could point out that quite a few of these successful music festivals bear a strong resemblance to the original of the species. 

When Siamsa Cois Laoí was created as a revenue stream to help pay off the debt on the original Páirc Uí Chaoimh we didn’t realise that it would be the template for every music-lover’s day trip for the next 50 years.

Or that organising a modern version would seem to be beyond the new Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

What is the problem with holding concerts in the venue?

All of this is not good news for Cork people keen to see concerts, of course. Pointing out the shortcomings of Páirc Uí Chaoimh as a concert venue is disheartening enough, but at least it’s a venue. Bricks and mortar.

In contrast, the proposed location for the Cork event centre remains unmarred by progress, almost nine full years after the first sod was turned. The only step forward was revealed earlier this month by Eoin English here, when he wrote: “... seven people have been chosen to sit on the project development board, which will spend the next 12 to 18 months overseeing the new procurement process announced by Cabinet last October.” Presuming Eoin didn’t plagiarise that from a Yes, Minister script, it means we will still be waiting for the first block to be laid on the site over a decade after that first sod was turned.

Between this committee taking a year and a half discussing the procurement process, and the Cork County Board discussing car parks and marquees on the pitch, readers can maybe glimpse a common thread. A good deal of talk. Not a whole lot of action.

Readers can also glimpse an alternative, by the way. Eoin reported here in December: “The hugely successful Marina Market in Cork is set to compete for a multi-million state aid package to deliver an event and conference centre in the city.

“It has established a team and says it is working with a leading architectural body to oversee an international competition to design a new 5,000-seat conference space, a 100-bed hotel, and a gallery, focused on its south docklands site.”

I don’t recall an eight-person committee meeting for a year and a half to discuss whether this venture should go ahead. In the quotes accompanying Eoin’s piece, the Marina Market spokesperson mentioned being part of “Cork’s growing ambition”: not the challenges facing the venue or keeping the lights on.

A bit more of that attitude wouldn’t hurt in Cork. A bit more of the can-do, I mean.

A bit less of this-is-why-we-can’t.