Safety expert claims plans for new Casement Park could have led to another Hillsborough

Antrim GAA fans left without a proper home

Normally the word 'committee' and 'government' send us right to sleep if put together, but today there was some extraordinary claims made about the stalled plans to rebuild Casement Park in Belfast. The stadium was partially demolished in 2014 but in December of last year the planning permission granted for a new 38,000 capacity stadium to take its place was revoked. A judge ruled that the Northern Ireland's Environment Minister had acted unlawfully when approving the redevelopment of the GAA's headquarters in Antrim. Today the saga took another twist as Paul Scott from the Safety Technical Group told a government committee of his concerns over two planned exits, and safety at the redeveloped ground,which had the potential in his view to cause another Hillsborough style disaster,

'There are a heck of a lot of people potentially trying to get out of a relatively small place.'

'If we did have an incident and there was panic and if people tried to exit... crushing, that may be more a problem than fire.'

'It is of course accepted that these circumstances may never come to pass, or that they could at the first match, you just don’t know.' There was one Hillsborough incident and we’ve seen the consequences of that. It’s better to design properly than to hope.

'The people who suffer then are particularly the elderly, children, ladies.'

'These GAA matches are very much family affairs.'

He also went onto claim that he was under pressure from several groups which had an interest in the redevelopment to approve the plans and he had made a compliant in December of last year,

'I and Sport NI have received undue pressure from the GAA and from DCAL about my view of the safety of the Casement Park plan.' 'An email was received that our comments were at odds with the requirements.'

He claimed that his concerns about the stadium plans had been ignored and that the outside pressure had left him seeing a stress counselor and many sleepless night. Almost €100million of government funding has been earmarked for the project, and the redeveloped stadium was also set to be a key plank of any possible Irish Rugby World Cup bid. H/t to BBC