Irish, English set to tackle history

DUBLIN -- The last time a large group of Englishmen walked into Croke Park, they started shooting.

What happened Nov. 21, 1920, when English forces opened fire on unarmed spectators watching a Gaelic football match, killing 14 and injuring nearly 100, was one of the worst atrocities committed during Ireland's bitter War of Independence.

All of which makes today's Ireland vs. England rugby match more than just a game.

Towering over Dublin's gritty north side, Croke Park is ground zero for Gaelic games, which in a nation that for centuries chafed under the rule of its bigger, imperial neighbor were always more than just sports. Here at Croker, as its denizens affectionately call it, the games of hurling and Gaelic football were a defiant expression of Irish identity long before the Irish fought for and won independence from their English colonizers.

One of the four stands at Croke Park is named for Michael Hogan, a Tipperary player who was among those killed 87 years ago on a day that became known as Bloody Sunday. A section of Croke Park was built from the rubble left behind after the Easter Rising of 1916, which ignited a wider revolution, so rebellion is in the very ground itself.

But in a measure of how much this society has changed, the Gaelic Athletic Association rule prohibiting the playing of non-Gaelic games at Croke Park was temporarily relaxed to allow international rugby and soccer matches to be held at Croker while the Lansdowne Road stadium that normally hosts those games is refurbished.

As peace takes root in Northern Ireland, and as Ireland and the United Kingdom enjoy the most cordial relations in eight centuries of their often tortured history, the GAA's gesture in allowing England's rugby team to walk onto the same pitch that English forces used as a killing field has taken on a political and cultural significance that goes far beyond sports.

Ireland's president, Mary McAleese, the first head of state for the 26-county Republic of Ireland to hail from the six counties of Northern Ireland still under British rule, considers the game a watershed moment in the rapprochement between two historically antagonistic neighbors.

"It is hugely symbolic," said McAleese, whose family fled Belfast after her father's pub was bombed and her brother was attacked and nearly beaten to death by sectarian thugs in the 1970s, at the height of The Troubles.

Not everyone, however, thinks the game is something to celebrate.

Terence Browne was a 7-year-old boy when the English irregular troops known as the Black and Tans set off on their murderous excursion to Croke Park. The Tans, so named for their odd mixture of both military and police uniforms, were stationed near Browne's home, and they regularly descended on a nearby pub. The Tans would emerge drunk and belligerent, randomly firing their weapons.

As a little boy, Terry Browne knew the Tans were around when his father shook him and his brothers awake, instructing them to pull the mattresses from their beds to cover the windows and front door. The boys slept on the floor on one mattress while their parents watched over them, praying a stray bullet wouldn't enter the house.

The Tans killed several people the Brownes knew. So Terry Browne, now 94 and living in a nursing home just south of Dublin, finds the prospect of England's rugby team standing, arms around shoulders, as "God Save the Queen" is played at Croke Park especially distasteful.

"I don't think it should be allowed to happen," said Browne. "It's a disgrace."

J.J. Barrett, a former Gaelic football star, last week wrote to the GAA, demanding that his father's medals be removed from the Croke Park museum and returned to the Barrett family.

"I cannot reconcile the provocative words of 'God Save the Queen' being sung in the very stadium where Michael Hogan and others died at the hands of the crown forces on Bloody Sunday," Barrett wrote.

His father, Joe Barrett, won six All-Ireland medals and was a hero in the War of Independence.

The Croke Park that was attacked 87 years ago was a humble sports ground with stands for just 15,000 spectators. Today, Croke Park is a gleaming, state-of-the-art stadium that holds 82,500 and is more modern and magnificent than any venue in England.

Rugby, meanwhile, is the only major sport in which Ireland's national team is comprised of players from both sides of the border. Once derided in parts of Ireland as the sport of Protestants and upper-class Catholics, rugby has become increasingly popular, especially among those not traditionally associated with the sport.

The circumstances surrounding the slaughter at Croke Park are not especially well understood, even in Ireland, where there has always been a reticence to embrace and discuss its revolutionary roots. Even the name given to the event -- Bloody Sunday -- was appropriated by a more recent atrocity, in Derry in 1972, when British paratroopers opened fire on unarmed Catholic civil rights demonstrators, killing 14.

The morning before the match, Michael Collins, the Irish Republican Army leader, had dispatched a group of rebel assassins known as The Squad, who systematically executed 14 suspected British military and intelligence agents all across Dublin.

It was a devastating attack on the counterinsurgency, and British commanders believed they might be able to find some of the assassins among the 10,000 spectators who had gathered at Croke Park for that afternoon's match between Dublin and Tipperary. Historians are divided on whether the gunfire was planned. But what some commanding officers may have envisioned as a massive detain-and-search operation quickly descended into an act of mass murder by trigger-happy Black and Tans and police Auxiliaries bent on avenging the morning's losses.

The first victims were a pair of boys who, as boys are wont to do, were watching the game from non-paying perches. William Robinson, 11, was shot as he sat in a tree that gave him a view of the field over the stadium wall. Jerome O'Leary, 10, was shot in the head as he sat on a wall at the southwest end of the field. The boys were shot even before the Tans and Auxiliaries got into the park, suggesting that whatever the English officers had planned, the enlisted men had other ideas.

Besides Hogan, another player, John Egan, was wounded. A man who knelt to whisper an Act of Contrition in Hogan's ear was shot dead, too, as was a woman who was to be married in five days. Postmortems showed that most of the victims were killed after they turned their backs and ran. Among the spectators who ran for their lives was the playwright Sean O'Casey, whose work would later lament the human cost of war.

Brian Hanley, a lecturer in history at National University of Ireland-Maynooth, says the British authorities were mistaken in their belief that the GAA was a front for the IRA. While the GAA was strongly nationalistic, and some of its members were also in the IRA, it was also fiercely independent, Hanley said. Founded in 1884 to organize the games that had been played in Ireland for centuries, GAA members were divided on the wisdom of armed rebellion, Hanley said. The GAA had refused to let rebels who staged the Easter Rising use Croke Park for drills, he said.

Hanley said Collins wanted the Croke Park match called off, fearing a reprisal. But GAA officials insisted on holding the match, the proceeds from which were to help the families of imprisoned Irish rebels. Hanley said the massacre was a tipping point in the war, especially because it took place at a sporting event.

"The British never recovered from the negative publicity," he said.

A truce followed eight months later.

It has been said the Irish know their history too well, while the English don't know their history in Ireland well enough. But that, too, seems an outdated axiom. A few days ago, England coach Brian Ashton had former Ireland captain Conor O'Shea meet with the English team after practice, to explain the historical significance of today's match.

The English side will also be aware of the England team that defied IRA threats to play Ireland at Lansdowne Road in 1973. The Irish crowd gave the English team a five-minute standing ovation before the game. Ireland won, 18-9, prompting England's captain, John Pullin, to offer a postgame assessment that is one of rugby's immortal lines.

"We may not be any good," Pullin said, "but at least we turn up."