Croke Park

This football stadium, Croke Park, is linked to Bloody Sunday.

Here, on November 21, 1920, the British murdered fourteen people, a Bloody Sunday that would echo a half-century later in Derry with a new Bloody Sunday. What happened that afternoon in the sports stadium was a reaction to the killings of British agents that same morning.

The response from the British was brutal. That Sunday afternoon, Dublin was set to face Tipperary in Croke Park for a football match, the proceeds of which were intended to support the fund for republican prisoners. It had been considered to cancel the match after the events of that morning, but that could have led to riots.

At around three o'clock, when ten thousand supporters had gathered in the stadium, British troops began to surround Croke Park. They later claimed they wanted to search the supporters for firearms after the match, but it never came to that. Without warning, soldiers and police opened fire. For two minutes, shots were fired at the crowd, which, in blind panic, ran in all directions. It was pure revenge for what had happened that morning.

When the guns fell silent, fourteen people were dead. Twelve of them died from gunfire. Two were trampled. One of the dead was Michael Hogan, a player from Tipperary (one of the stands in the stadium has been named after him since 1925).

Ierland - Peter Vandermeersch