Future
A monitoring group was set up on 14 January 2003 to debate the future of the 360-acre (1.5 km2) site. With close motorway and rail links, there were many proposals including a museum, a multi-purpose sports stadium and an office, hotel and leisure village. In January 2006 the government unveiled a masterplan for the site incorporating many of these proposals, including a 45,000 seat national multi-sport stadium for football, rugby and Gaelic games. The Government's infrastructure organisation, the Strategic Investment Board (SIB) was tasked with taking forward the proposed Stadium idea and appointed one of its senior advisers, Tony Whitehead, to manage the project. The capacity of the proposed Stadium was later adjusted to first 35,000 and then 38,000 and the organising bodies of all three sports - Irish FA, Ulster Rugby and Ulster GAA - agreed in principle to support the integrated scheme.
In October 2006, demolition work started in preparation for construction on the site.
In January 2009 plans to build the new £300 million multi-purpose stadium on the site of The Maze were cancelled, with politicians saying plans to start the construction of the stadium would not be reconsidered until at least 2012.
Discussion is still ongoing as to the listed status of sections of the old prison. The hospital and part of the H-Blocks are currently listed buildings, and would remain as part of the proposed site redevelopment as a "conflict transformation centre" with support from republicans such as Martin McGuinness and opposition from unionists who consider that this risks creating "a shrine to the IRA".
Read more about this topic: HM Prison Maze
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)
““Dark times” is what they call it in Norway when the sun remains below the horizon all day long: the temperature falls slowly but surely at such times.—A nice metaphor for all those thinkers for whom the sun of mankind’s future has temporarily disappeared.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)