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Budget (Northern Ireland) Order 2006

I am simply saying that the plans for a national stadium, whether it is for 10,000, 30,000 or 40,000 seats—the monitoring committee has looked at different figures—will not be anywhere else with public money. The noble Lord talks about ““the money””—there is no piggy bank. The stadium is only part of the whole development of the Maze. There are 350 acres of prime land, in a way, but it is a brownfield site, and there is a lot of work to be done because of negative value. There will be enormous infrastructure costs on top of the stadium costs as well. Put simply, those who think that we can abandon the Maze and have a stadium in the middle of Belfast can forget it. It will not happen. It is not a runner. If there has been any doubt on the part of Ministers, we have to squash that flat because it means that all the energies are being directed in the wrong way. The energies should be directed into a making a success of getting a stadium that is multi-sport, massive in terms of its location in improving infrastructure so that it brings people up from the south to spend their money in the north. The potential is enormous. But if all those energies are diverted into saying, ““Oh, it won’t really happen. We can get it into Belfast””. We can equivocate on this, but 2012 is not far away; it is around the corner in terms of building stadia, as those who tried to build Wembley can attest—which should have been in the Midlands near Birmingham anyway. It is in the wrong place.