The current worldwide economic crisis has forced officials to postpone plans to build a new indoor athletics arena, an elite competitors’ accommodation and a cycling velodrome on the site in West Dublin before the London Olympics in 2012.

Ireland's Sports Minister Martin Cullen said spending restrictions would force the Government to postpone part of the €160m (£149 million) second phase of the sports campus.

He said: “I would love to have one or two more facilities [for the Olympic build-up] but I can’t do them all, sadly, in the financial situation that we find ourselves in.

“The athletes need to be aware of that at this stage.

"They need to know what it is we are going to do.

"There is no point in sitting down crying about it for three or four years.”

Cullen promised, however, to continue with plans to build an indoor training centre with sports-medicine facilities for leading athletes, and to give Irish Olympians access to the kind of prolonged, elite coaching programme that proved successful for Irish boxers in Beijing, where the team won three medals.

Cullen said: “They [sports] need the resourcing, and world-class coaching.

“They need the money to hire in these people and to know that they can keep them for four years and have them on a full-time basis.

"Some of the sports are caught because they don’t have the resources, or they have them for 100 days and then the elite guy is gone somewhere else.

"That is really not going to deliver.”

The Abbotstown project started in 2003 with the construction of the €70.5 million (£65.6 million) National Aquatic Centre and was eventually supposed to be a centre for all of Ireland's elite sports.

Cullen promised to press ahead with plans for an international-standard indoor training and gym facility that could facilitate 20 or 30 sports.

He said: “My dream would be to have the indoor athletics facility built out at Abbotstown and I want a velodrome.

"I think that would be the key to transforming our ability to compete on the world and Olympic level of cycling, for instance.

"They are all planned into the next phase.

"I simply don’t have the resources to do that.”