On Thursday night, John Prenty and three of his Connacht GAA staff hung on in the Air Dome until they knew they’d be risking their own safety by staying any longer. Storm Éowyn was barrelling in at full speed by the time they decided to head for home. The wind had been howling all night but it was strengthening now and if they left it any longer, the roads wouldn’t have been drivable.
“There were four of us there until half-past-two in the morning,” said Prenty down the phone at lunchtime on Friday. “If we had stayed for another 45 minutes, they’d be looking for us.”
As he spoke, Prenty was standing by the side of what was the Connacht GAA Air Dome, looking out at its state-of-the-art pitch now strewn with the remnants of the tent that had been covering it. The storm decimated the whole structure, reducing the world’s largest sports air dome to a mess of torn canvas and battered ambition.
The Air Dome is – was – a kind of bespoke west of Ireland miracle. When Connacht GAA went to set up a Centre of Excellence in Bekan, Co Mayo in 2010, there was talk of building an indoor arena as part of it. But even the most modest version of a bricks-and-mortar version was going to cost somewhere around €20 million – and that was in the depths of the crash. You could probably double that now, at least.
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So Prenty and his brains trust came up with something that nobody had asked for, nobody had proposed, nobody had even really heard of. Starting in 2018, and only costing €3.1 million in total, they built a state-of-the-art pitch with a knee-high concrete base around it and covered the whole thing with a pressurised canvas dome.
It would be wrong to say they were hailed as geniuses from the start. Nobody had done anything like this in Ireland before. There weren’t all that many examples of it worldwide, come to that. There was no shortage of sneering though. “Any sign of Prenty’s Tenty?” was the question you’d often hear around the place during its construction.
[ Inside the world’s largest sports air dome just outside KnockOpens in new window ]
“It was mad when we thought about it,” Prenty says. “It was mad when we built it. People thought we were daft. But it proved to be one of the biggest successes the association ever had.”
On the face of it, the dome was a place for teams to train and play indoors when the west of Ireland weather decided not to play nice. But it became so much more than that. It’s very likely that no sporting arena in the whole country has had more use made of it.
“Every single day of the week, it’s in use from nine o’clock in the morning until 10 o’clock at night,” Prenty said. “People come from all around the country to use it. We had a team up here a fortnight ago from Clyda Rovers in Cork (a 450km round trip). We’ve had St Vincent’s of Dublin here in the past few weeks. Everybody comes to use it.”
On any given day through the winter, it could be hosting a couple of schools matches in the morning, an under-12 blitz at lunchtime, a Sigerson match in the afternoon and training for three or four different teams through the evening. The Irish Frisbee Championships were down to take place there this weekend. The Irish Softball Association had games in it before Christmas.
Nobody could have dreamed it would be such a success. But they went and made it one anyway, a unique piece of self-starting, to-hell-with-the-smartarses vision that paid off. Along the way, Connacht GAA made a lot of people look foolish and a lot of others seem unambitious. If they could build a modern, sustainable wonder like this in the middle of a few hairy fields between Knock and Ballyhaunis, what was stopping everyone else?
Prenty lives three kilometres away. As he noted wryly on Friday, the storm somehow knocked out the electricity in his house but left the lights on around the dome. The tent was ripped off but the electrics in the building still work just fine.
When they knew the storm was coming, their original plan was to stay the night in the dome. That’s what they had done through previous storms, working through the night to make sure that the four platforms that supply the air pressure to keep the tent inflated were managed. Adjusting them, keeping them going if one of them got knocked out of kilter, tending to their tent like a family pet. But they couldn’t stay this time.
“We’ve never deflated it,” Prenty said. “You can’t do that because there’s lights hanging off the side of it. We were making all the arrangements that we could do to try and keep it safe. We were managing the pressure inside the dome, trying to leave it in a situation where it might be safe through the storm. When we left, we thought it would be okay.
“But nothing was safe from this big beast of a wind. I’ve been around a long time. I’ve never seen wind like this before. There were big storms when I was a young fella, and even Storm Ophelia was a really big one, but we’ve never had wind of that magnitude before.”
They can’t tell yet what it will cost to build it back up again but they’re confident it will be done. For one thing, the cost of the pitch and the stands and the dressingrooms was built into the original €3.1 million so they don’t have to spend that money again. For another, it has become far too vital a resource to do without.
“From a Connacht point of view, it’s a huge blow to the whole province,” Prenty said. “All the young kids that were due here for the coming weeks, they’re not going to get into it. Not this year anyway. But they’ll get into it again. It’s disappointing but everyone’s safe and we’ll keep going.
“We’ll rise again.”
