I asked myself that question again this week after reading that Liverpool football club is building a state of the art stadium, which will presumably knock spots of anything that has gone before in Britain. The cost? A modest £400m and the site, we are told, will also include as big a store as Tesco can squeeze onto it.

If close on £400m is the price we have to pay for a sports complex then how in heaven's name have so many wonderful arenas been built in so many poorer corners of Europe in recent years? Is this figure really realistic or is there more to the Stormont sums than meets the eye?

Here we have little Northern Ireland apparently unable to afford the kind of attraction which is commonplace all around the world. And unable to afford an arena on a site that we got for nothing!

I'm not prepared to take these figures at face value. I believe neither should the sports fans of this country. A couple of weeks ago I devoted an open letter to our great goalscoring soccer hero, David Healy, sadly reflecting that he will probably never get the chance to represent Northern Ireland in other than a third-rate, run-down soccer ground.

When David and his team turn out at Windsor Park, there's now a fire engine parked close to the south stand, in case someone drops a cigarette and sets the whole out-dated structure ablaze. Imagine 4,000 fans fleeing for their lives from a burning grandstand.

That would be some story for the outside world, some reflection on our failure to provide 21st century sports facilities for our local stars.

We are told it will cost between £20m and £40m to bring Windsor Park up to modern day European standards. Of course, that doesn't mean an expansion of its current paltry crowd capacity to anywhere near what a successful national team should attract in the forthcoming World Cup.

Nor will it mean that the leafy avenues of south Belfast will be freed from the traffic jams and kerb parking which occurs on international occasions. But, of course, compared to the whopping £379m which Stormont has computed as the cost of the Maze, a figure of £40m can look very attractive.

The problem is we have little idea how the Department of Finance and Personnel made their calculations and it would be a great help to all of us, if the full detailed breakdown was published as soon as possible.

I say that because I am told that the Maze costings from the private property developers from home and as far away as the United States bear no resemblance to the figure of £379m. They are said to amount to not even half this figure. And what I find even more baffling is why these developers have not been engaged in debate to see how and where the disparities rest between their figures and Stormont's.

So what does £379m cover and how was it computed? The answer as I understand it is NOT the simple cost of the stadium but the cost of a much wider development of the Maze's 360 acre site. It includes the cost of the International Centre for Conflict Transformation and it also includes the cost of development of the roads and other infrastructure required on the Maze site, including the purchase of additional acres of land skirting the motorway for this purpose.

I'm told it includes also an extraordinarily high contingency figure — adding substantially to the basic costs — to allow for doomsday scenarios if, in the most unlikely event, the whole project were to fail or to collapse.

If a stadium on land that cost nothing at the Maze cannot be made to pay for itself, what hope was there ever for a Belfast-based development on a site which might have cost as much as £100m? So now we come to the end game. If the Maze stadium is not developed, what happens to the rest of this 360-acre complex? And what is the cost of doing nothing other than pumping many more millions in existing sports facilities for soccer, rugby and gaelic games? This is not simply a question of subsidising Windsor Park to the tune of £40m.

To keep everything equitable, probably the same amount will be expected for rugby and gaelic grounds development.