DUBLIN — Queen Elizabeth II will visit Dublin’s famed Guinness brewery and the scene of the original Bloody Sunday massacre during a long-awaited May visit to Ireland designed to demonstrate modern-day reconciliation between Britain and its rebellious former possession.
Buckingham Palace and Irish President Mary McAleese jointly unveiled plans for the May 17-20 visit after more than a decade of speculation about its timing. It will be the first trip by a British monarch since 1911, a decade before Ireland won independence from Britain following a cutthroat guerrilla war.
The unexpectedly long trip will focus on Dublin but span the Republic of Ireland, including Cork, known as the “rebel county” because of its role as the epicenter of rebellion against British rule 90 years ago.
The visit is expected to come just days before a one-day trip to Ireland by United States President Barack Obama. Ireland’s national police force has canceled all vacation leave in the second half of May to cope with the back-to-back security demands.
The queen’s most potently symbolic event appears certain to be her visit to Croke Park, an 82,000-seat Dublin stadium and hallowed ground for Irish nationalism. It was on that spot on Nov. 21, 1920, that the most infamous day of Ireland’s war of independence — Bloody Sunday — reached its nightmare climax.
An Irish Republican Army assassination squad commanded by Michael Collins had killed 14 British agents, mostly in their Dublin residences, that morning. Britain responded by sending troops and police into Croke Park, where a Gaelic football match raising funds for IRA prisoners was taking place. The British forces shot and killed 14 people, including two boys and a member of the visiting Tipperary team.
For decades afterward, the Gaelic Athletic Association barred the playing of any sports associated with England on its grounds and also forbid members of the Northern Ireland security forces, both soldiers and police, to join its clubs.
A second British Army mass killing — of 13 Catholic demonstrators in the Northern Ireland city of Londonderry in 1972 — also become known as Bloody Sunday.
But the GAA over the past decade has moved in response to Northern Ireland’s peace process. In 2007 it began allowing Ireland’s soccer and rugby squads to play at Croke Park. Since 2001 it has permitted Northern Ireland troops and police to play their games, Gaelic football and hurling.
And GAA leaders on Thursday welcomed the queen to the stadium. They noted how far peacemaking had come in Northern Ireland, where paramilitary cease-fires took hold in the mid-1990s followed by the Good Friday peace accord in 1998.
“The GAA is pleased to have been asked to receive Queen Elizabeth,” they said, saying that her planned visit “reflects and acknowledges the special place of the GAA in the life and history of the nation.”
Events outside Dublin include visits to Ireland’s national horse-breeding center in County Kildare and to the Rock of Cashel in County Tipperary, a hilltop medieval monument of exceptional beauty.
The queen is being accompanied by Prince Philip, also known as the duke of Edinburgh.
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