When U2 conclude the first leg of their Elevation tour at their second Slane show on September 1, the soap opera that has surrounded the show will also conclude, and the Byzantine planning laws relating to concerts will return once more to the background.

The planning laws that are so roundly condemned by concert promoters are a minor problem for concert goers, however, affecting only a small number of shows a year. A larger problem, and one that the government now has a prime opportunity to remedy, is the absence of a medium-sized arena - an Enormodome, if you will - of the sort that even modest conurbations in the United States, the UK and elsewhere possess. The Enormodome is the staple of rock tours; small enough to have a roof, big enough to allow handsome profits from events. For the generic name for such a venue we have Terry Ladd, Duke Fame's handler in This Is Spinal Tap, to thank. The Enormodome typically accommodates 20,000 people, has difficult acoustics and is used mostly for sports events. Dublin's Point theatre has only half the capacity of such a venue and the next size up, an open-air show in a sports stadium, is an antisocial solution to a routine problem. The proposed Abbotstown development offers a more attractive alternative, but a better solution would be a centrally located arena, Dublin's docklands being the obvious site. With the Abbey's hubristic and poorly thought out proposal to move to the Grand Canal basin dead in the water, and with office development in the quarter promising to overwhelm the minimal residential element, a cultural focus will be needed in the south docks to help prevent it becoming a glass tundra outside office hours. A venue for sport and music would have far greater appeal than a theatre on such a site, and could scarcely cost any more than the £100m for which the delusional board of the Abbey is looking. As a rational solution to an obvious problem, one would be forgiven for thinking that the Enormodome option ought to have been exercised already. However, the country's top sporting bodies stand to lose out from such a development. Their lobbying power, sufficient to extract tens of millions of pounds from the government for the promise of precisely nothing in return for the paying public, could squash such a proposal like a bug. Which is rather a pity, because those top sporting bodies, the Football Association of Ireland, the Irish Rugby Football Union and the Gaelic Athletic Association, exercise enormous influence over what big acts play the country, when and where. Despite its rhetoric the GAA, for example, has prevented U2 from playing Croke Park since 1987, though it has allowed numerous other acts to play there over the years, notably Garth Brooks, who played several series of shows there. While the demand for a development on the mammoth scale of the proposed Abbotstown complex has yet to be shown to exist, the demand for a medium-sized, roofed, centrally located and flexible venue is evident from the number of acts that are either squeezed into the Point or else have to wait until the summer to visit Ireland. An arena in the docklands, built with public money so that Ireland's sports bodies could impose no veto on acts seeking to play it, may not have the Napoleonic appeal to the government that the Abbotstown campus has. But with a site available, a public demand waiting to be met and the likelihood of commercial viability for such a project, an Enormodome would be a sensible answer to a perennial problem. Michael Ross