Editorial: The GAA's offer to increase its contribution to the Casement stadium has come far too late

​The communities minister Gordon Lyons has welcomed the ‘realism’ shown by the GAA that it is now finally talking about increasing its contribution to Casement.

It is a very generous assessment of the conduct of the Gaelic sporting body. For more than a year there has been intense sporting, political and media pressure on the UK government to stump up the grossly inflated costs of the west Belfast stadium.

Hillary Benn has been grilled on it since he first set foot in Northern Ireland as secretary of state. Sir Keir Starmer the same. Like Chris Heaton-Harris before them, they have been weak and apologetic on the matter.

Meanwhile, the IFA added to the pressure on London to deliver this massively one-sided project to build a stadium far in excess of crowd capacity requirements for the GAA games that will ultimately be played there. And in many BBC reports the GAA were not even asked about helping fund the shortfall.

Stormont committed £62.5 million in 2011 to Casement but there has been huge delay in the GAA delivering it. It is not unreasonable to expect that initial UK pledge to help build the stadium to be uprated for inflation, which would mean about £90m.

The Irish government offered roughly £42 million. But the GAA contribution sat at a feeble £15 million. Yet only weeks ago the cost of a stadium capable of hosting the Euros 2028 was £400m, with no guarantee even at that price that it would be built in time.

Now, the reported revised cost is £270 million, but that is still far greater than original projected costs of a stadium. Now Ulster GAA says “it will not be found wanting”.

Then why did it not say so long before? Why did it not say we realise that due to our delay costs have spiralled, so we will be massively increasing our contribution. Instead, as often happens in NI, the UK was implicitly maligned for discrimination, and as usual didn’t defend itself.