As the Paris Olympics wound to a close last weekend the press coverage in this country was unanimously favourable, lauding the performance of home-grown competitors. The sports bodies, especially those concerned with athletics, took a narrower focus.

They need more money from the Exchequer, as do the elaborate plans for GAA and soccer stadiums listed here last week.

The athletics people were quick off the blocks with their funding demands but were beaten to the punch by the politicians, who waded in straight away with quite specific commitments.

Tánaiste Micheál Martin announced on Sunday that the sports budget, already doubled since the last Olympics, will double again to €400m.

He was flanked as this news was revealed by junior sports Minister Thomas Byrne who promised to firm up the velodrome and badminton plans for Abbottstown in Dublin, announced by their ministerial colleague Catherine Martin two weeks ago.

Vision

None of the ministers could compete for vision with Fianna Fáil senator Malcolm Byrne, who suggested that planning should commence for the Dublin Olympics, which the senator has pencilled in for the year 2072. Aside from the date, no further specifics were offered and there was no mention of costs. The senator might be interested in the inquest already underway in Paris, where the €10bn bill is roughly 25% over budget. This almost ranks as an achievement – a study stretching back to 1960 from academics at Oxford University found average overshoots on summer Olympic facilities at 160%, a figure reached in Ireland only by the National Children’s Hospital.

Costs

Paris was selected from a field of one: Budapest, Hamburg and Rome pulled out, fearful about costs, and Los Angeles was happy to accept the 2028 award.

But there is a lively debate underway in Los Angeles about keeping costs under control and the intention is to avoid entirely the construction of single-use disposable sports venues.

There are enough venues in LA; the intention is use them and to keep costs about €3bn below the Paris figure.

Relics of building sprees for summer and winter Olympics are to be seen in many host cities around the world and there will be a few in Paris.

My favourite was the abandoned baseball stadium in Athens, a city less than passionate about this most American of games. It was used for the Olympics in 2004 and then left to rot, but sadly it has now been demolished, becoming an ex-relic.

Money-wasting

The all-time money-wasting gold medal was scooped by Vladimir Putin’s Russia for its performance at the 2014 winter Olympics in Sochi, where $50bn of public money went west in cost overshoots and corruption scandals.

American cities are nowadays sensitive to wasting money on stadiums and other sports venues.

The reason is that the city, not the national government, picks up the tab. Owners of baseball and American football teams are permitted by the rules of their leagues to relocate to new cities – the Los Angeles Dodgers, hugely popular and commercially successful in LA, were once the Brooklyn Dodgers in New York and there are many other examples of migrating sports teams.

Stadiums are usually built with local taxpayer support and some team owners have tried to blackmail their current home city into financing a shiny new stadium by threatening to up sticks.

But capitulation would hit local pockets through property taxes, much steeper in the USA than in these parts. City borrowings have to get prior approval by referendum and some cities have called the owners’ bluff by voting no.

Enthusiasm

It would be fun to test the enthusiasm of the people of Belfast for a new Casement Park stadium, financed via local taxes on each household, through an outing at the ballot box for all citizens.

As the current epidemic of stadium projects around the country attests, the incentives for local politicians are skewed by the absence of significant local raising of revenue from households.

Any councillor or TD would be foolish to oppose a local project when the perception is that the cheque comes down from Dublin, and that there are no local downsides to lobbying for marginal, or even downright silly, projects.

In the current pre-election atmosphere, an illusion has been propagated that the State is flush, there is a budget surplus, and the politician’s duty is to divert as much as possible to the constituency.

Questions need not be asked about where’s the money coming from, as long as ‘it’s not coming from here’. Ultimately this cannot be true: the money will be borrowed or raised in taxes when the revenue buoyancy dies away, or gets overtaken by the sheer pace of spending growth.

Perhaps more local, and less national, taxation would encourage politicians to think more seriously about spending priorities.