To redevelop Thomond into a stadium that could accommodate 26,000 fans, the Irish Rugby Football Union needed to buy and demolish 16 houses behind the east side of the ground, but negotiations had stalled. The union had offered €200,000 to residents of Knockalisheen Road, a take-it-or-leave-it offer couched in polite language, but underpinned by arrogance. It was, at a push, €40,000 more than the market value, a pitiful premium for those obliged to uproot their families and find new homes.
The residents told the union what they were looking for and waited for a response. By last weekend the union had yet to make a move. Consultants had been called in, feasability studies had been commissioned, reports were awaited. Maybe they did their sums and found the new Thomond was viable; maybe they saw the scenes that followed Munster’s destruction of Sale and figured that leaving was no longer an option.
In the aftermath of victory, Anthony Foley, the Munster captain, questioned the idea of moving. In every pub in Limerick that night, the very thought of it was heresy. It would have been the hardest of hard sells.
By Tuesday morning the letters to the residents were in the post. The union wanted to talk. “Unanimous agreement” had been reached and they wanted to do a deal for the sale of the houses, once and for all. The residents were invited to a meeting on Thursday night “to finalise an agreement to sell”.
In Limerick, the news was out even before the meeting happened. One resident was reported as saying: “I think it’s just a matter now of signing on the dotted line. We’ve been offered just under half a million.”
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Two of the residents had been identified as hard-liners. They began to think they had won the day, that they had been right to throw the original offer back in the union’s face.
“The brother rang me the day before the meeting,” one said yesterday. “He says to me, ‘I hear the deal is gone through.’ I says to him, ‘We’ve haven’t even spoken to them yet. I don’t know where all this has come out of.’”
But still, all the indications were that it was a done deal. “I thought I was going up there to sign,” the resident admitted. “I thought it was going to be done and dusted with at last.”
At the meeting, the residents quickly found that reports of their new wealth had been greatly exaggerated. Instead of the suggested €450,000, the union’s top offer was €300,000. For the majority, though, it was enough. They were given contracts and asked to return them within seven days. Three of the 16 houses are owned by the Limerick Corporation and officials there had long made it clear they would support any plan to redevelop the ground. The union were nearly there.
Both hard-liners, however, refused to even take the contracts away for consideration. They flatly reject suggestions that they had demanded €450,000. They had gone to the meeting expecting to be offered what they had requested in writing in December: €350,000.
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“If we were bad-minded we’d be looking for four or five hundred thousand,” one said yesterday. “We’re not looking for that. All I want is enough to buy another place and do it up. I’m not being greedy, I’m being realistic. I know there’ll be nothing left after that.
“They’re only playing around with us at the moment. That’s all they’re doing.”
The second hard-liner had another reason for refusing to sign. “I had problems with the legally binding contract they wanted me to sign,” he said. “It was binding on me but not on them. Up until May 1 they can turn around to me and say they’re cancelling the deal, but if I sign it’s binding straight away. I mean, they’re opening all the doors for themselves and shutting them behind us.
“Now, I’m not saying that we would pull out of it, if we had the same option as them — but who knows what the hell could happen? The point is they’re reserving the right to pull out and we won’t fully know where we stand for another four months. I think a contract should be binding on both parties. There should be a level playing field.”
John Hartery of the Munster branch who opened negotiations with the residents six months ago (along with the former Munster and Ireland hooker Pat Whelan) declined to say if the union was prepared to up its offer to the residents who are holding out for €350,000. “They can say what they like but we promised the negotiations would be confidential and we’re sticking to that,” he said. “I’m not going to talk figures — good, bad or indifferent. We’re just trying to get the deal done.”
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Now that they’ve come this far, it seems unlikely the deal will fall apart now. The residents holding out are not expecting to spend another Christmas at Knockalisheen Road.
“I’ve a feeling they’re going to come back,” one of them said.