QUEEN ELIZABETH will lay a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin and visit Croke Park, headquarters of the Gaelic Athletic Association, underlining the historic nature of her first visit to the Republic next month.
Yesterday’s announcement of the programme for the first State visit by a British monarch to the Republic next month marks a new phase in the peace process.
The Queen will be accompanied by her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, when she visits Ireland at the invitation of President Mary McAleese from May 17th to 20th.
The historic nature of the visit is emphasied by the fact that the British monarch will also lay a wreath at the National War Memorial Gardens in Islandbridge, Dublin, a site dedicated to the 49,400 Irish soldiers who lost their lives in the first World War.
The British royal party will also visit the Irish National Stud in Kildare as well as the Rock of Cashel and a number of locations in Cork city, believed to include the English Market and the Tyndall technology research institute.
The programme also includes visits to Trinity College Dublin, the Guinness Storehouse and a State dinner at Dublin Castle, former home of British rule in Ireland, where both the Queen and the President will deliver speeches.
In an unprecedented development, the GAA said it was confident that the “historic visit to Croke Park will be welcomed by those who play, administer and support our games, at home and abroad”.
The statement added: “We hope also that it will encourage a greater interest and participation in our games by our fellow Irishmen and women of the unionist tradition.”
The programme was jointly announced yesterday evening by Buckingham Palace and Áras an Uachtaráin. The British ambassador, Julian King, described it as “a wide-ranging and exciting celebration of the close ties between our two countries”.
Thanking “the large number of people who have written in support of the visit, and who have invited the Queen to see other parts of Ireland during her stay”, he added: “We shall look to see if it is possible to include some of those who have kindly extended invitations in other parts of the programme.”
Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams TD said later that the scheduling of the visit on the anniversary of the May 17th, 1974, Dublin and Monaghan bombings, in which 33 civilians died, was “particularly insensitive”.
“Sinn Féin wants to see the normalisation of relationships between our two nations, and republicans have been in the leadership of this process, but that can only be based on mutual respect and equality and on the ending of the partition of Ireland.”
The left-wing republican group Éirigí (Arise), said it would oppose the visit “in as robust a manner as possible”, and called for the British royal couple to be met with “protest and defiance”.
“For as long as the British occupation of the six counties continues, the prospect of a British head of state attending a ceremony at the Garden of Remembrance is as insulting as it is provocative,” Éirigí chairman Brian Leeson said.
