Rebuilt Casement Park, costing £150m, to open by 2025? Not a chance...

And it was the former NI Sports Minister’s party who persuaded Sinn Fein that rebuilding Windsor Park, Ravenhill and Casement was a more efficient use of taxpayers’ money.

The revamped football and rugby grounds have been up and running for years now but, due to various legal wrangles, not a single sod has been cut at Antrim’s gaelic games venue on Belfast’s Andersonstown Road.

Now, with a residents group having lost its legal battle to shelve the 34,500-seater project (their objection was the size, not the stadium itself), Antrim County Board chairman Ciaran McCavanagh and his colleages say they expect work on the redevelopment to begin next year, and be completed in 2025.

Dream on, guys.

Even allowing for the as-yet unforeseen but inevitable delays in stadium construction, Stormont has yet to sign off on the massive funding — and, courtesy of the DUP’s ongoing issues with the NI Protocol, there’s currently no functioning Executive in place.

The DUP say they’ll return — and acknowledge the concept of a Sinn Fein First Minister —when the protocol is scrapped, which is akin to saying they’ll be back when hell freezes over.

Maybe it’s time to rethink that invitation to Gregory Campbell...

I jest, obviously, but this is no laughing matter.

If and when our political institutions are up and running again, this project — which all five main parties have committed to — is going to be a major headache.

It’s not the politicians’ fault that Antrim’s dilapidated home ground has lain empty for a decade but the projected costs are now running at almost double the original £77.5m estimate.

And, post-Brexit, there won’t be any EU money to throw at it.

Not only that, but the GAA have said they’ve no plans to increase their £15m investment pledge — which was around 20% of the budget when the new Casement was first proposed but is now looking more like 10% of the overall cost

The only thing you can guarantee is that the final bill for the proposed Casement — the only local stadium big enough to host Uefa tournament ‘soccer’ games should the UK-Ireland 2028 bid be rubber-stamped next year — will dwarf the £126m earmarked in the late Noughties for the abandoned Maze project.

If you recall, the former site of the Maze/Long Kesh prison, which was demolished in 2006, was the Government’s preferred option, (ahead of a north foreshore site in Belfast), following a business case compiled by PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

A 38,500-seat multi-purpose stadium (with extendable ends to accommodate the three sports’ differing pitch lengths), designed by HOK Sport and Mott MacDonald, was to be built on 350 acres of government-owned land where ‘H-Blocks’ once stood, prior to their demolition in 2006.

It was estimated that, through hosting six Northern Ireland internationals, a similar number of big gaelic games, three Ulster Rugby fixtures, boxing matches and numerous concerts, it would attract around 500,000 spectators a year.

Full Ireland rugby matches — and other big international events such as Uefa finals — were also envisaged as taking place at the transformed site, and all three sports bodies happily jumped on board the good ship Maze.

But then the politicians got involved; Sinn Fein wanted a “conflict transformation centre” as part of the overall plan.

Unionist parties objected, on the grounds that, despite having been home to notorious loyalists such as Michael Stone, Billy Wright, Lenny Murphy, Robert ‘Basher’ Bates and Johnny Adair, the place where ten hunger strikers starved themselves to death in 1981 would end up being perceived as a “republican shrine”.

The DUP later hitched their wagon to a lobby of Belfast-bases Northern Ireland fans who viewed the prospect of travelling nine miles down the road as unthinkable.

{I remember getting a lot of stick for my pun-tastic ‘H marks the spot’ headline in this newspaper the Maze project was announced}.

Clearly, the same mindset doesn’t exist with the tens of thousands who flock to the Royal Ulster Agricultural Society Show every year, despite it being relocated from Balmoral Showgrounds (1.7 miles from Windsor Park) to the still-underdeveloped Maze site in 2013.

With no resolution imminent — and £5m already blown on consultancy fees over five years — the project was scrapped “due to costing issues” in 2009, nine years after the prison was closed for good.

Windsor Park and Ravenhill are both fine stadiums now, but age-old problems remain.

Windsor (capacity 18,600) is far too big for Irish League matches, and far too small for when Northern Ireland are doing well.

Ravenhill, which has a similar capacity to Windsor, simply isn’t big enough to host major rugby internationals.

Both were originally built in residential areas when few people had cars, hence the lack of modern-day access and car-parking space which Casement Park also experienced in the past, and will again.

That wouldn’t have been an issue at the Maze, which was to follow the American model of building stadiums on out-of-town greenfield sites with scope for getting in and out of the place and plenty of room for pre-match ‘tailgate parties’.

Windsor and Ravenhill may look dramatically different now, but the surrounding areas look exactly the same.

I thought at the time (and still do, by the way) that, rather than being a huge white elephant, the Maze stadium would have been something we could all have been proud of.

In the meantime, exiled Antrim players will continue to use their crumbling, weed-ridden traditional home — as a meeting point prior to getting a lift elsewhere.

PS: When the magnificent new Casement Park is eventually completed, it will have cost more than the multi-purpose Maze project — and the rebuilding of the existing Belfast stadiums — put together.

And no doubt it will still be regarded by detractors as a “republican shrine.” The clue is in the name...