Queen due at stadium in symbolic move

Dublin, Ireland (CNN) -- Queen Elizabeth II is due to visit Croke Park stadium in Dublin Wednesday on the second day of her landmark tour to Ireland.

The visit to Croke Park is another significant symbolic gesture of reconciliation -- British troops opened fire on a crowd watching a Gaelic football match there in 1920, killing 14.

On Wednesday morning the queen met the Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny and senior cabinet ministers at Government Buildings as part of her state tour, the first by a UK monarch since the country gained independence in 1921.

Gerry O'Regan, editor of the Irish Independent, said: "This is a triumph of really careful planning and shows a strong intent on both sides to make it work."

On Tuesday the queen laid a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin in a joint ceremony with Irish President Mary McAleese. The Garden of Remembrance honors those who fought for Irish freedom from British rule.

During her stay, the queen will also visit the National War Memorial Gardens in Islandbridge and on Wednesday evening, accompanied by British Prime Minister David Cameron, the queen will attend a state banquet at Dublin Castle.

The visit has prompted police to mount a major security operation amid threats of dissident republican violence. Ireland has spent $42 million on security for the visit, according to officials.

On Tuesday scuffles between protesters and police broke out in central Dublin, 22 people were arrested.

The Irish military Tuesday defused a bomb Tuesday morning on a bus headed to Dublin. The military had stopped a private bus in Maynooth, evacuated the passengers and found a "viable device" in the luggage compartment, a spokesman for the Irish national police said.

The queen's visit is one that many in Ireland believed would never happen, and marks the reconciliation between two neighboring countries that once viewed each other with suspicion and hostility.

Ireland's fight to free itself from its former imperial master is likely to form much of the narrative of the visit.

There will be constant reminders of the violent past. The queen's plane touched down, for example, at Casement Aerodrome, a military airfield named after Roger Casement, who was executed for treason in 1916 for conspiring with the Germans. His fate was sealed when the queen's grandfather, George V, refused to commute his death sentence.

The Irish War of Independence that the killing was a part of directly led to the partition of Ireland in 1921. The majority of the island gained independence, but six of the nine counties of the province of Ulster chose to stay in the United Kingdom, eventually becoming the country of Northern Ireland.

In the late 1960s the conflict between mainly Protestant unionists who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the UK and largely Roman Catholic nationalists who want the North to be reunited with the rest of Ireland exploded into a political and sectarian war, known as the Troubles.

The ensuing three decades of violence between the Irish Republican Army and loyalists claimed the lives of more than 3,000 people, most of them north of the border, and while the Good Friday Agreement, signed in 1998, effectively ended the conflict, suspicions remain. It is for this reason that the queen's visit is more than symbolic.

Under the terms of the accord, terrorist groups on both sides dumped their weapons, and political allies of both sides now work together in Northern Ireland's power-sharing government.

The change has been so rapid that, even as recently as the late 1990s, one journalist said he could never have imagined a state visit by the queen. Toby Harnden, who covered Ireland for the Daily Telegraph, said while some people on both sides still have their doubts over the visit -- for different reasons -- more significant is the peaceable language used in the debate.

"Some Catholics will see this as Britain cementing its claim over the Irish territory of the six counties of Northern Ireland," Harnden said.

Meanwhile "the Protestants will see the queen's visit as ratification of a state that they believe is constitutionally hostile to any British presence in Ireland. So on both sides there'll be qualms."

Gerry Adams, a pivotal figure in Northern Irish history as long-time leader of Sinn Fein, the IRA's political arm, said the queen's visit was "premature." Compared with incendiary language he had used in the past, Adams' comment speaks volumes, Harnden said.

For instance, "when the queen's cousin Lord Mountbatten was killed by the IRA in 1979, (Adams) said it was an execution that was fully justified."

"When I was there the IRA cease-fire had collapsed, there was violence and killings, no surrender, no compromise. In those days there was no likelihood of the queen ever visiting."

CNN's Fionnuala Sweeney and Peter Wilkinson contributed to this report.

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