croke park


A face only a mother could love, like a capsized battleship from the Galactic Empire: Croke Park. The pic, taken from the east on 21 January 2015, shows the Cusack Stand, refurbished and completed in 1995. The stadium has 11 "refreshment stations" (bars) for the crowd, they were installed pretty recently, during the redevelopment of the venue. "The Davin bar on Premium Level 5 is the largest bar in Ireland and there are about 400 beer taps in total on this level." This in a nation weighed down by obesity, drink driving and lung cancer... (Aviva Stadium has "620 linear meters of beer line run" and "1,000 kegs & capacity to serve 90,000 pints" - needless to say, the class structure of Ireland irrevocably built into both venues!) Community and Handball Centre Croke Park; a case study of how things were (and possibly still are) done in Dublin. And here an interesting article on continued GAA spending on oversized venues, the same tendency is met with in large hospital projects in Dublin in recent years, possibly a lingering aftereffect of the merry spending frenzy of the Celtic Tiger years.