Mark Duncan: What's changed in the GAA's approach to the challenge of Bloody Sunday commemoration?

On a plaque erected on the newly-named Hogan Stand in 1926, the inscription read that it was in ‘memory of Michael Hogan and thirteen others who were shot in Croke Park on November 21st 1920’

REMEMBERING A DARK DAY: Actor Jack Galvin who played the role of William Robinson, one of the 14 victims of Bloody Sunday in a series of short films by the GAA. Picture: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile

It was a Saturday evening in June 1953 when the group of runners, all members of the National Athletic and Cycling Association, set off from Thurles.

They were on the first leg of a foot relay whose point of departure was the GAA’s birthplace at Hayes’s Hotel and whose ultimate destination was the new Roger Casement Park in Belfast, where their arrival was scheduled to coincide with an opening ceremony at which GAA and Catholic Church grandees would be represented.