Britain's Queen Elizabeth takes part in a wreath laying ceremony at the Irish War Memorial Garden in Dublin, May 18, 2011.Reuters/Reuters
It was a somewhat inauspicious moment, in the midst of a financial crisis and just after a royal wedding, that the Queen and the Irish President chose to descend together, at long last, into the deepest black hole of collective guilt and victimhood.
But there they were, Elizabeth II and Mary McAleese, the British monarch and head of the Anglican Church standing beside the Roman Catholic, Belfast-born Irish head of state, in the Croke Park soccer field where Britain's response to Irish independence first descended into barbarity. The silent observance, a ceremony meant to honour the Irish fighters who had died at British hands, was a quiet atonement for Britain's considerable role in 70 years of mutual violence.
"To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy," the Queen said at a state dinner later Wednesday night, the closest thing to an official apology Britain is likely to utter.
"It is a sad and regrettable reality that through history our islands have experienced more than their fair share of heartache, turbulence and loss. … With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently, or not at all."
Both heads of state, through attacks on their families, have been victims of that violence.
The Queen lost her cousin, Lord Mountbatten, when his boat was blown up by an Irish Republican Army bomb on Aug. 27, 1979, killing four people including two children. She was also the subject of several IRA assassination plots, and a 1982 bomb attack on her Household Cavalry.
Ms. McAleese was forced to flee her home of north Belfast, along with her parents and eight siblings, when Unionist guerrillas began terrorizing them and expelling Catholics after the Troubles broke out in the early 1970s.
This mutual victimhood may have allowed the two women to step above their symbolic titles and put the final seal on what has been a long odyssey of peacemaking, reconciliation and normalization.
The Irish war of independence, often fought as a guerrilla campaign with terrible atrocities committed on both sides, occurred before the age of truth and reconciliation commissions or war-crimes courts. After a century of silence, this was an opportunity to set things right.
It was at Croke Park, on Nov. 1, 1920, four years after the independence struggle began with the 1916 Easter Rising, that relations between London and Dublin first descended into brutality, when British soldiers and police burst into the stadium during a Dublin-Tipperary Gaelic football match and fired into the stands, killing 13 spectators and a player.
That event, an act of revenge after Irish independence fighters killed 14 British officers that morning, led to even bloodier violence on a day that would become one of Ireland's Bloody Sundays, and set the tone for seven decades of violence.
Some Irish figures on Wednesday wished there could have been a formal state apology for British conduct in Ireland. It would not be unprecedented: Last year, shortly after taking office, Prime Minister David Cameron rose in the House of Commons to apologize without reservation for another Bloody Sunday in 1972 in which 14 unarmed protesters were shot by British soldiers.
William Hague, the British Foreign Minister, said in Dublin Wednesday that, while short of an apology, the Queen's words and actions should be considered a formal state gesture of truth and reconciliation, if not total atonement.
"We are not glossing over the past here," he said. "It is about recognizing those events of the past, acknowledging those events, but also showing how we can move on to the future."
Of course, Britain and the Republic of Ireland have had cordial relations for decades; been fellow members of the European Union since the early 1970s, and they are one another's largest trading partners by a wide margin.
But relations have until recently been scarred by the violent Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Protestant-majority British province, which only came fully to an end in 2005, when the IRA formally disbanded, and in 2007, when the power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly became the province's government.
The extraordinary achievement of peace, rather than the horrors of the preceding seven decades, became the focus of the Queen's message Wednesday night.
"The lessons of the peace process are clear: Whatever life throws at us, our individual responsibilities will be all the stronger for working together and sharing the load," she said at the dinner, opening her remarks by speaking in Gaelic, Ireland's official national language. "The ties of family, friends and affection are our most precious resource ... the lifeblood of partnership across these islands, a golden thread runs through all our joint successes so far and all we will go on to achieve."