Queen Elizabeth to visit Croke Park

[snoopdog]

personally i dont see what the big deal is. She is an 85 year old woman and Philip is 90 they have no power whatsoever. Let them come and enjoy their wee holiday.
i wonder will prince philip have a pop at hurling. Will Sheff be brought out to give him a demo.
What s different, the last few Prime ministers have been over loads of times and nothing is ever said and he has all the power. All the clout and control of the British Army.

[ardal]

It's like the euro babies vs the punt lads here.

On page one of this thread someone refers to English and scottish people playing GAA; why no one from Wales? And they refer to respect for sports.

I agree, let's show here the same respect that the captain of the English rugby team showed  2 or 3 years again, whilst in croke park.

point 2

remember that wee rule we have (we being the GAA family that is the GAA via Congress and HQ), that more or less said something like that members of the Brirish armed forces were not allowed to register and play for local clubs? Pre-historic of course, that was changed a million years ago, wasn't it? Hill 16, Hogan stand, too long ago for you?  What about slippy fingers cleaning guns and shooting players walking to matches?

Should clubs not have to vote to allow the head of the armed forces of a occupying enter OUR stadium?

[Hereiam]

The queen in croke park should not happen. Think of the history book lads later down the line, this will surley be used as a way of sayin Ireland lay down to the british empire once again. Its all about symbolism here and its wrong to have them anywhere the country never mind croke park

[aontroim]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/08/queen-britain-croke-park-ireland

Can the Queen win over Croke Park?

There are few more hallowed corners of Ireland than Croke Park, home of Gaelic sport and the ground where British forces slaughtered 14 people in 1920. Yet next week the Queen will visit the stadium. Leading Irish writer Fintan O'Toole charts this remarkable turnaround

Fintan O'Toole
The Observer, Sunday 8 May 2011

Jane Boyle went to the match with the boyfriend she was due to marry five days later. She died when the crowd stampeded in terror and she fell underfoot. John Scott, who was just 14, was so badly mutilated it was at first thought that he had been bayoneted to death. Thomas Ryan was kneeling down, whispering a prayer into the ears of another dying man when he was himself shot. Two little boys, one aged 10, the other 11, were among the dead.

The 14 people who were killed at Croke Park stadium in Dublin on 21 November 1920 were far from the only victims of the Troubles of 1916 to 1923 that led to the foundation of the Irish state. Indeed, 31 people in all were killed on that single day alone. Yet those killed when troops and police opened fire on the crowd at the headquarters of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) are remembered more clearly than many of the others. They died in the most traumatic of a concentrated series of violent incidents. There was another Bloody Sunday during the more recent Troubles in Northern Ireland, but this was the day for which the term was coined.

In the early morning, 14 secret agents, the core of the British Intelligence operation against the Irish Republican Army, were killed in their suburban Dublin homes by a squad organised by the IRA leader Michael Collins. In the evening, three prisoners, two of them senior IRA men, were killed by the British "while trying to escape".

But it is what happened in the afternoon that makes this month's visit by the Queen to Croke Park, the headquarters of the GAA in Dublin, so resonant. Tipperary and Dublin were playing a game of Gaelic football in front of a crowd of 5,000 people. Croke Park was surrounded by a mixed force of armed members of the Royal Irish Constabulary, regular troops and members of the Auxiliaries, an irregular force largely recruited in England and attached to the Irish police to help fight the IRA. Armoured cars blocked the exits from the grounds. The intention was that all the spectators leaving Croke Park would be searched for arms.

Military and police participants later claimed they were fired on by someone in the crowd. Whether or not this was true (and there was no independent inquiry), what happened next is broadly clear. Over the course of a few minutes, the police and Auxiliaries fired 228 shots, and an army machine gun at one of the exits fired 50 rounds. Fourteen civilians were killed, two of them trampled to death in the panic. Sixty more were injured. The secret military inquiry, which became public only in the past decade, concluded that the firing was "carried out without orders, and was indiscriminate and unjustifiable". The almost universal view among Irish nationalists was that the killings were a deliberate reprisal against unarmed civilians for the assassinations of the intelligence officers earlier in the day.

One of the victims of Bloody Sunday was the Tipperary player Michael Hogan. The Queen will meet GAA members under the Hogan Stand of the monumental new Croke Park stadium, rebuilt in the 1990s for a capacity of 82,000. That amateur sports played in just one country can fill such a stadium is extraordinary. Much more extraordinary, though, is that the stadium can now play host to a British monarch.

Even a decade ago, the idea would have been unthinkable. Now, the only official comment on it from the GAA is a discreet notice on the Croke Park website, concerning arrangements for the museum at the stadium, where the Queen will spend 45 minutes: "The GAA Museum will be closed from Saturday 14 to Wednesday 18 May inclusive." The studied pretence that nothing much is happening is itself testament to the reality that the unthinkable is coming to pass.

A century ago, if you asked a typical Irish nationalist what was distinctively Irish, they'd have listed the big forces that defined their culture: the Catholic church, nationalist politics, attachment to the land, the Irish language and the GAA. Today, almost all of those markers of identity are gone or weakened. The church may never recover from the child-abuse scandals that have destroyed its authority in the past decade. The Fianna Fáil party that captured mainstream nationalism and dominated Irish politics for half a century was decimated in February's election. Ireland has long since ceased to be a rural, agricultural society. The Irish language clings on but the aim of making it the everyday tongue is further from fulfilment than ever.

The one part of the package that still functions is the GAA, which is not merely surviving but thriving. If you want to give a foreign visitor a quick sense of something unique to Ireland, you bring them to Croke Park for a game of Gaelic football or, better still, hurling.

In spite of the glamour of professional sports such as soccer and rugby, the GAA's showpiece inter-county championships, played out over the five summer months, account for 60% of all attendances at sporting fixtures in Ireland. The vast majority of those fans also follow British football teams, such as Manchester United, Liverpool or Celtic, and many are passionate about, for example, the Munster rugby team. But the GAA touches a very different nerve. In a world where global sporting spectacles are packaged for passive consumption, the GAA appeals to something local, intimate and democratic. It doesn't just belong to Irish people, it gives them a sense of belonging.

The laureate of the GAA, Tom Humphries, captured this perfectly when he wrote: "The GAA player who performs in front of 70,000 at the weekend will be teaching your kids on Monday, or he'll be selling you meat or fixing your drains or representing you in court. The soccer player who performs in front of 70,000 people at the weekend will be moaning about too many games and trying to sell you his personalised brand of leisure wear."

The GAA evokes feelings that go so deep you can be completely unaware of them until something happens to reveal their power. The most recent revelation came in early April, when dissident republicans murdered a young policeman, Ronan Kerr, in County Tyrone. Kerr was a Catholic and a member of his local GAA club, the Beragh Red Knights. In killing him, the dissidents violated a community's sense of itself, the pride it takes in the young men and women who play on its local GAA teams.

The hero of the classic GAA novel, Charles Kickham's Knocknagow, published in 1873, is a farm labourer who goes on to the hurling field with the cry: "For the credit of the little village!" GAA players still take the field for the credit of all the little villages – not just the literal ones like Ronan Kerr's Beragh, but the psychological villages to which we cling in a globalised culture – the idea of a place, of a community, of something that is not yet owned by a TV company or a corporation.

Ronan Kerr's funeral produced an image that is in its own way even more powerful than any that will be captured at the Queen's visit to Croke Park: the pictures of his GAA team mates and the Tyrone county manager, Mickey Harte, passing his coffin from their shoulders on to those of his police colleagues. It was a picture of the dissidents' worst nightmares. The GAA was defining the police in Northern Ireland as "us" and Ronan Kerr's killers as "them". There is no other institution in Ireland, north or south, that has the authority to do this.

Kerr's funeral and the Queen's visit both point to the GAA's ability to grasp something that can be very difficult for organisations rooted in notions of tradition. Ideas of place, of community, of identity are hugely important, but they are not static. What has been remarkable about the GAA in recent years has been its capacity not just to respond to change but to create it.

The Queen's visit to Croke Park may have been planned only in recent months, but it is the culmination of a process that has been under way for more than a decade within the GAA. Very calmly and quietly, a series of the GAA's elected presidents, such as Joe McDonagh, Sean Kelly and Nickey Brennan, have set about modernising the organisation. That meant, in political terms, aligning it more closely to the mainstream of Irish nationalism, which had been disgusted by the IRA's violence and which hankered for ideas of Irish identity that were positive and open rather than embittered and embattled.

Change was driven from the Republic, but the leadership was careful not to alienate the more conservative membership in Northern Ireland. The GAA's democratic structures were a big help – the conservatives had their say and were never allowed to claim they had been railroaded. Bit by bit, the GAA took down the barriers that protected the old exclusive attitudes. It lifted the ban on its members playing other sports. It opened up Croke Park to the "foreign games" of rugby and soccer whose infiltration of 19th-century Ireland it was founded to oppose. It allowed God Save the Queen to be played on its hallowed turf in 2007 when the England rugby team came to play Ireland. (It helped that the money the GAA made from renting out Croke Park was channelled back to its own local clubs.)

Most importantly, in 2001, the GAA deleted its Rule 21, which barred members of the Northern Ireland police or armed forces from joining. It is worth recalling that, at the time, the delegates to the GAA congress from five of the six Northern Ireland counties voted to keep the rule in place. Within a decade, those same people were embracing Ronan Kerr as one of their own. The GAA managed a shift in attitudes so gentle that it took a terrible murder for everyone to realise that a quiet revolution had taken place.

The shift was hard for two reasons. One is that the GAA was embattled for a long time, especially in Northern Ireland. The grounds of the famous Crossmaglen club in south Armagh, regular winners of the All-Ireland club football championship, were occupied by the British Army from 1974 until 1999. There were arson attacks on GAA clubhouses by loyalist paramilitaries. GAA members were easily identified as Catholics and therefore made clear targets for sectarian killers. In 1997, for example, Sean Brown, chairman of the Wolfe Tone club in Bellaghy, County Derry, was kidnapped as he locked up the clubhouse after a match and murdered shortly afterwards.

But the GAA has also been psychologically embattled. Its games have a very long history, but also a long history of disparagement.

In 2009, when the Cork county goalkeeper Donal Og Cusack came out as gay, the novelist Colm Tóibín hailed him as "the first gay hurler since Cúchulainn", a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Iron Age mythological warrior-hero whose feats with stick and ball make him the precursor of today's hurlers. The odd thing about this mythology is that it doesn't seem at all ridiculous. If you watch a top-class game of hurling, the speed, strength, dexterity and personal courage on display do remind you of warriors in the hurly-burly of war before armour and technology.

But hurling has not always been appreciated. Arthur Young, the English economist, who witnessed a game in the 1770s, called it "the cricket of savages". A 1936 MGM documentary movie called Hurling was advertised with the slogan "Shillelaghs in Swing Time as 30 wild Irishmen demonstrate their game of athletic assault and battery". In John Ford's 1957 movie The Rising of the Moon, an English tourist, seeing injured players carried by on stretchers, asks nervously: "Charles, is it another of their rebellions?"

The question was not entirely stupid, for the GAA undoubtedly was part of a cultural rebellion that could not be cleanly separated from a military one. In its own mythology, the GAA saw itself, in the words of IRA leader Harry Boland in 1919, as having "drawn the line between the garrison and the Gael" – separated the native Irish from English influence. The GAA was effectively taken over by the revolutionary Irish Republican Brotherhood (forerunner of the IRA) in the late 1880s. More moderate nationalists subsequently regained control, but the IRB influence remained very strong. It was not entirely illogical for the police and army to attack Croke Park on Bloody Sunday – senior figures in the GAA at the time included IRA leaders like Boland, Austin Stack, Eoin O'Duffy and Michael Collins himself.

It's not surprising, therefore, that it's taken a long time to completely disentangle the GAA from violent republicanism. But there is another reason why the shift has been slow: it is quietly audacious. For the task that the GAA will complete when the Queen visits Croke Park is a momentous one – that of creating a distinctive and proud Irish identity that is not anti-British. The GAA came out of a time when the easiest answer to the question "what does it mean to be Irish?" was "not British". It takes real courage to replace that easy negative with something more positive and fluid.

But there is something pleasingly neat in the way it is happening. The irony is that the GAA is a quintessentially Victorian institution. It is a classic creation of the late 19th-century English drive to codify sports with written rules and centralised organisations. The men who established the GAA in 1884 saw themselves as traditionalists and cultural nationalists, preserving the ancient games of the Gael from the new vigour of rugby, soccer and cricket. But their reaction took the form of emulation – they did for Gaelic football and hurling what the English were doing for other sports.

There is a further irony that the Queen might appreciate, however. Not only is the GAA a classic Victorian organisation, it has been much more faithful to its origins in late-19th-century sporting culture than the English sports that influenced it. If you want to get some sense of the ethos of English sport before the rise of professionalism, without the snobbery that went with it, the best place to look is probably the GAA. The Queen will find many of the notions that characterised the old Corinthian spirit – character, community, playing for the sake of it – alive and well and living in Croke Park.

[Ulick]

http://www.anfearrua.com/story.asp?id=3212

Be Advised My Passport's Green
Next week the unthinkable will happen for many grassroots GAA members. The Queen of England will visit Croke Park. Apparently our President, Mary McAleese asked Her Majesty to attend the headquarters of the GAA as part of her first official visit to the Republic of Ireland.

So how do people feel about this? Well, the GAA hierarchy seems happy enough, they released a statement indicating that the Queen along with her gaffe-prone husband Prince Philip will attend Croke Park:

The GAA is pleased to have been asked to receive Queen Elizabeth, accompanied by President McAleese, at our headquarters in Croke Park and to showcase our stadium and facilities to the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and their accompanying party. We believe that this request reflects and acknowledges the special place of the GAA in the life and history of the nation.

It's politically incorrect these days, frowned upon even, to object to institutions like the British Royal Family. With their privileged status, the silver spoon in the mouth, their sectarian laws of succession, and their unfortunate entanglement with things Irish. Any dissent is dismissed as the ravings of backwoodsmen, flatearthers and bog savages. We have had Fintan O'Toole writing in the Guardian cheerleading the visit. Even Paddy Heaney from the Irish News is writing calling for a new national anthem.

The mantra? We need to move on and get over it already. Apparently if we cannot forget the past there is something wrong with us. We need to embrace the 'new dispensation'. In the GAA we need to reach out to people.

Sorry, but for me, that does not wash. I am plenty capable of embracing new dispensations and reaching out all I want. But the Croke Park Queen thing troubles me.

My GAA celebrates its heritage and its past more than any other organisation I know of. Our heritage is its fabric – games, music, language, culture. We treasure it, nurture it. And pass it on. That is what the GAA is about. But in issuing its statement about this visit, Croke Park has indicated it would make no further comment on the matter. Why is that?

What they really mean is that there will be no debate. I suppose that is in case we, the members, make a royal bollocks of ourselves. Because we are incapable of intelligent debate on the matter. Aren't we?

When Croke Park says the "GAA is pleased" they are not speaking for me. I'm not pleased. Ambivalent at best. At worst, I will studiously ignore the entire farrago as an example of spin.

I can see it now, the line up of men in suits kow-towing to the Queen of England. Explaining what a sliotar is. The carefully choreographed words, perhaps even an apology or two.

We do not need the endorsement of anyone to 'reflect and acknowledge the special place of the GAA in the life and history of the nation.' Every time our sons and daughters pull on a jersey with the GAA proudly on the right breast, and the club badge on the left, and go out to kick ball or hurl a sliotar, we know the GAA's special place in our home and my Irish culture. That doesn't need endorsement.

And lest we forget? Seamus Heaney wrote: "Be advised, my passport's green, no glass of ours was ever raised, to toast the Queen."

And here's another thing you can't say anymore, not to the Western British, but the cynic in me wants to say it anyway. That the British Establishment was fully aware of the GAA's special place in Irish life when they occupied Crossmaglen pitch in the name of Her Majesty. Likewise, the roadside was a very special place to stand and wait for any carload of players unlucky enough to carry a few hurls through an Army checkpoint. A fella carrying a hurl down the street in Cork is just a young lad going to training; in the north it meant he should be stopped and searched. But we have to move on. Let's pursue another agenda.

The nation, and I use that word carefully, was engrossed with the recent nuptials of Prince William and Kate Middleton. He born into riches, she what is described in the language of the Royal Court as a 'Commoner'. Not such a bad thing being a 'Commoner' – it could be worse. She could have been a Catholic.

Indeed, imagine if Prince William's wandering eye at St Andrew's University had been attracted to young Cáit from Midleton and wished eventually to marry her instead of Kate Middleton. Well the fact she was a Convent girl who attended mass regularly would have immediately disbarred him from the throne, simply because he cannot marry a Catholic.

I ask you, speaking as a Catholic, how can that fundamental sectarianism not be offensive to me? The romantic in me tells me that Love Conquers All, Amor Vincit Omnia. Indeed. Except, that is, when it concerns the sectarian and very British Right to Succession. If Cáit were a daughter of Islam, there would be no problem. Or indeed a Jew; a Buddhist or a Hare Krishna. But a Catholic? Need not apply.

And finally. The advantages of being born into privilege. Royalty the world over is testament to a belief that someone is deserving of a life of privilege because of where they were born and who their parents are.

In my world, where children play hurling, football and camogie, I like to tell them that if they work hard and be the best they can be, there is no limit to what they can achieve. This is fundamental to the ethos of the GAA. That the lad or girl from our parish can one day lift a cup on the steps of the Hogan Stand having earned the right to be there, by virtue of hard work, application, and the use of the skill and ability that God gave them.

The Queen of England and The Duke of Edinburgh will come along next week to Croke Park. And they will stand on the steps of the Hogan. They will in all likelihood also be allowed onto the hallowed Croke Park grass. And photographs will be taken, perhaps with Sam Maguire and Liam McCarthy. The Philip fella will maybe swing a hurl. And a trail of GAA stars will be wheeled out to meet them. They will see no harm in that. In fact the players may even be honoured to have been asked.

But the fact remains, that unlike the players, the British Royalty have not earned the right to be where they are. And they never will. And that, my friends is all the difference.

Be advised...

[fer fox ache]

For me the big issue here is not so much the visit but rather the way that our new squires at Croke Park have decreed that no dissenting voices be heard among the association.
I really couldn't give a flying f**k about these inbred anachronisms, I ceratinly won't be protesting against it. I do however resent the fact that we have to pretend that we are delighted about it.

[muppet]

The Crossmaglen argument is the only think AFR says that I agree with.

The bit about excluding catholics from the Royal family (fair point) while then arguing to exclude Royals from Croker as apparently Lizzy doesn't deserve it as she didn't play Camogie for the parish, has the look of double standards.

If we only allow people into Croker who played for the parish I doubt if we would have a stadium like we do, although on the plus side it would be a lot easier to get tickets.

[Tubberman]

For me the big issue here is not so much the visit but rather the way that our new squires at Croke Park have decreed that no dissenting voices be heard among the association.
I really couldn't give a flying f**k about these inbred anachronisms, I ceratinly won't be protesting against it. I do however resent the fact that we have to pretend that we are delighted about it.

Who said you can't dissent??
And who said you have to pretend you are delighted about it?
Because the GAA upper echelons have not kicked up a stink, does not mean that they expect all GAA members (with their varying political and socio-economical backgrounds and views) to think and react in a uniform manner.

[fer fox ache]

Yes we have the right to dissent as individual members but county boards across the country were instructed that there was to be not a single word of comment on this.
I don't see why our elected officials have to be gagged in this manner.

[muppet]

Yes we have the right to dissent as individual members but county boards across the country were instructed that there was to be not a single word of comment on this.
I don't see why our elected officials have to be gagged in this manner.

If this is correct this shouldn't happen either.

Having said that some of us accuse our CBs of being too vocal. 

[fer fox ache]

Well the silence has been deafening on this one, usually you could rely on someone somewhere to have said something about the visit.

[Ulick]

Well the silence has been deafening on this one, usually you could rely on someone somewhere to have said something about the visit.

The AFR article pretty much sums up my attitude to the whole thing. The lack of consultation and debate has pissed me off more than anything.

[Rossfan]

about excluding catholics from the Royal family .

Surely you mean the BRITISH Royal Family ??

We in this State do not have a THE Queen or a THE Royal Family.
The only people who could be described in those outdated feudal terms are Mrs O'Connor Nash and her Family in Clonalis House as her husband " The O'Connor Don" is descended in line from the last High King.
I hope to ignore the whole boloxology of Mrs Windsor's visit but have to go to a Dublin Hospital next week and hope I am not inconvienenced as I hear the M4 will be closed at different times plus whole streets in Dublin will also be.
It's a bit much that free citizens of an Independent Republic can have their travel rights interfered with so that this lady can be trawled about as if inspecting her territories.
Why couldnt she have just gone to the Aras , the Dáil and have a big feed in Dublin Castle as is usual for these kind of Head of State  visits?

[deiseach]

Why couldnt she have just gone to the Aras , the Dáil and have a big feed in Dublin Castle as is usual for these kind of Head of State  visits?

And what ''kind of Head of State visit" would this be? This is the first time ever that the British Head of State is coming to an independent Ireland. The fact that it has taken nearly 90 years should tell you this is significant - not that I seriously think you need it spelled out to you. My wife is getting increasingly tetchy at the prospect, afraid that her hosts will snub her beloved Queenie in some way. Or worse.

[Rossfan]

Why couldnt she have just gone to the Aras , the Dáil and have a big feed in Dublin Castle as is usual for these kind of Head of State  visits?

And what ''kind of Head of State visit" would this be?

A normal one between two friendly neighbouring States FFS.