Croke Park: Warm welcome awaits at stadium built from rubble of Easter Rising

THE Queen is due to visit Croke Park, pictured, today, an 82,000-seater stadium and the scene of a massacre of 14 civilians by British soldiers in 1920.

It is the home of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), an amateur organisation set up in 1884 to promote Irish culture, which has pledged to give the monarch a warm greeting.

The landmark stadium is a symbol of the strength of an organisation with a presence in every village and townland in Ireland.

Its famous terrace, Hill 16, is rumoured to have been built with the rubble from the 1916 Easter Rising.

The GAA said for over 100 years it had taken its stand with the mood of the Irish people, culturally, socially and politically.

This was highlighted last month when officers from the Police Service of Northern Ireland and GAA players and members stood shoulder to shoulder in the County Tyrone village of Beragh to pay their respects to Constable Ronan Kerr, a gaelic footballer and Catholic policeman murdered by a dissident republican booby-trap bomb.