The stadium had convenient public transport links as the Lansdowne Road station of the Dublin Area Rapid Transit rail system is adjacent to the site and passed directly underneath the West Stand.

However, competitive international football matches could not use the entire capacity because the stands at both ends of the ground (North and South) were standing-only terraces.

Leinster also used the ground on a number of occasions when crowd size meant their traditional home of Donnybrook was not large enough.

The stadium had also hosted huge concerts from artists such as Michael Jackson, Robbie Williams, Oasis, U2, The Corrs, Westlife and others.

Dunlop, a decorated track walker and engineering graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, founded the Irish Champion Athletic Club in 1871.

Some 300 cartloads of soil from a trench beneath the railway were used to raise the ground, allowing Dunlop to utilise his engineering expertise to create a pitch envied around Ireland.

The first international soccer match at the venue took place between Ireland and England on Saint Patrick's Day, 17 March 1900, when the Belfast-based Irish Football Association controlled that game throughout the island.

The day after the United Kingdom declared war in August 1914, 350 rugby players, of middle-class and professional backgrounds with solicitors and barristers and many working in banks and insurance companies, assembled on the ground.

The Irish poet Louis MacNeice evokes the atmosphere at Lansdowne Park in the late 1930s in Rugby Football Excursion, a poem first published in 1938.

MacNeice does not specify the actual occasion, but the details provided in the sixth stanza of the poem - "Eccentric scoring - Nicholson, Marshall and Unwin, / Replies by Bailey and Daly" - suggest that MacNeice was at Lansdowne Park on 12 February 1938 for a match between Ireland and England in the 1938 Home Nations Championship.

[2] The newsreel shows the English and Irish teams running onto the pitch, watched by a huge crowd, followed by various shots of the match in progress.

In 1930, Lansdowne LTC left the ground to move across the Dodder river to Londonbridge Road, taking the turf from the tennis courts with them.

The reason for this was that Dalymount Park, the traditional home of Irish soccer was no longer considered an adequate venue for hosting internationals due to its lower capacity and fewer seats.

It was primarily to allow midweek international soccer matches to take place in the evening that floodlights were installed in Lansdowne in 1993.

On 15 February 1995, following the 1994 IRA ceasefire, English football hooligans caused the referee to abandon a friendly international after just 27 minutes.

English spectators threw debris (including seats, wood and metal) down at Irish fans in response to a goal being scored by Ireland's David Kelly.

The match finished 0:0, and following defeat in Spain in the second leg, Shels would host their UEFA Cup first round tie against Lille at Lansdowne as well.

The last football game ever before redevelopment was Derry City's FAI Cup Final win against St. Patrick's Athletic on 3 December 2006.

Croke Park is owned by the Gaelic Athletic Association, whose previous rules did not allow foreign sports to be played on their grounds.