That moment in February 2007 when the band strikes up God Save the Queen before the first international between Ireland and England at Croke Park will be one of the most significant in the lifetimes of those who have lived sentient lives in 20th-century Ireland, writes John Waters
It will be a chilling moment, though, for good reasons, a moment of healing, great emotion and remembering. We are ready for it now, though not everyone will understand this.
There will be those who will mistakenly grieve what they see as a sell-out. Others will welcome the moment as a victorious culmination of their efforts in persuading the Irish people to snap out of the greatest grievance in our collective psyche. They will be mistaken too. The skilful manner of the GAA's handling of the question of whether to allow soccer and rugby into Croke Park has ensured that the significance of that moment has the potential to transcend all such tribal positions.
By allowing time and space for a comprehensive debate within the organisation and without, they have enabled the event to dovetail with others in our time - the peace process, the commemorations of the Great Famine, the changing economic relationship between Ireland and Britain - to acquire significance far beyond the sporting context.
For too long, those we somewhat euphemistically call revisionists have scolded us about our "duty" to forgive and forget. The murderous campaign of the Provisional IRA made it difficult to argue this point, but really we had no such duty. What the revisionists were advocating was not forgiveness but amnesia, and that would have been bad for everyone. Final reconciliation with England/Great Britain could come about only when we were ready to reach out as an equal nation. We are now.
The British anthem will be played at Croke Park not as an apologetic concession of our responsibility to "get over it", but a proud acknowledgement that, together, our two nations have grown into a better way of living side by side. But the healing balm will go deeper than that. In the case of soccer and gaelic football, each represents something discrete and important in the Irish psyche. When you've been colonised, invaded, violated, traumatised by radical interference, you ever afterwards crave two distinct forms of self-expression.
On the one hand you have a need of something unambiguously indigenous, a way of telling yourself that you are what you have always been. Gaelic games have met this need in Irish culture far more effectively than might have been expected. But you also desire something that articulates the inculcated compulsion to be other, to show you have learned well from your masters, to repudiate yourself.
Usually this idiom will have been received from the violator, and will provide a way for the violated to seek the approval of he who has tried to persuade him he is nothing. In a parallel part of himself, the colonised man needs to assert his cultural progress in the face of the continuing contempt of his masters, to say he is not, or not wholly, that which he has been told is no more than savagery. And so soccer became a vehicle for the unashamed expression of our post-colonial imagination, a sort of surrendering to that which, in other contexts, the national project of de-Anglicisation sought to eliminate.
I don't mean any of this in a cynical, green-tinted way, but simply as a description of the psychiatric reality. Gaelic games are our means of affirming ourselves to ourselves, a way of expressing our relief at the departure of the invader and celebrating his banishment. And, in a sense, soccer is the expression of that part of us that remains colonised, and possibly always will.
The two forms have until now operated at cross-purposes. Gaelic games, however satisfying they might be of themselves, never had the capacity to make us feel truly whole. Soccer, no matter how much we enjoy it, is not truly in our blood. For generations, the same men and boys played the two games, sometimes on the same afternoons, while managing to keep them, in a cultural sense, completely separate. This sundered approach to something as basic as sport has had a profound resonance in the national imagination and consciousness.
The "Ban", which for many years prevented not only the playing of soccer on Gaelic pitches, but forbade the playing of soccer by those who played Gaelic games, stood as an emblem of the wrong-headed post-independence determination to revert to some idealised pre-existing state of Irishness.
At the back of this doomed initiative was a refusal to see that the nature of Irishness had been altered by its experience of Englishness and that, unless we could reconcile these diverging aspects of ourselves, we could never be whole. That refusal is now melting away. When the British anthem is played at Croke Park next year, albeit at a rugby international, the world will know that we have left the past behind us - not because we must or because we have been told we must, but because we can and want to.