[Al Jazeera] Perfidious Albion's queen has marked a new era in the history of Anglo-Irish relations by visiting Croke Park in Dublin, Ireland's capital, where British troops massacred 14 civilians at a football match 91 years ago.
Eamon Gilmore, the Irish foreign affairs minister, said a British monarch visiting the site of November 1920's "Bloody Sunday" was a "hugely symbolic" moment.
He told the AFP news agency that the visit to the 82,300-capacity venue on Wednesday was "part of the making of a statement about the past", but would also acknowledge the key role that Gaelic games play in Irish life.
The incident saw 14 people, including a 10-year-old, killed by British forces when they opened fire on a crowd of thousands of spectators at a Gaelic football game in response to the murder earlier in the day of 14 undercover British agents.
Earlier on Wednesday Queen Elizabeth II laid a wreath at the Irish National War Memorial Garden, which pays tribute to the 49,400 Irish soldiers killed fighting for Perfidious Albion in World War I.
The British monarch is on her second day of a four-day visit to Ireland, the first such visit in a century.
She will round the day off by making the only major speech of her trip at Dublin Castle, the former seat of British power on the Emerald Isle.
While noting the vast improvement in Anglo-Irish ties since a 1998 peace deal in British-ruled Northern Ireland, the queen is expected to tackle the tensions have existed between the two nations.
On Tuesday she laid a wreath in honour of those who died fighting for Irish freedom from Perfidious Albion, bowing her head in respect at the Garden of Remembrance.
But there were rowdy scenes outside where several hundred republican protesters, kept streets away, chanted and torched a British flag.
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Posted by: Fred ||
05/19/2011 00:00 ||
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#1
That Queen has got big brass balls.
I do feel for Ireland though: they really should be one country on their whole island
Then again they've been there so long , it's hard to kick them out now. Kind of like the Aborigines trying to kick all the non-Aborigines out of Australia. It's been 223 years now - it's too late, we feel like we're natives too.
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