Ireland's largest sporting organisation, which oversees the country's traditional games voted on Saturday, to temporarily allow soccer and rugby to be played at its 80,000-seater Croke Park stadium in Dublin, a spokesman said.
The historic decision by the annual congress of the amateur Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) comes as Dublin's Lansdowne Road stadium, the country's rugby union HQ and home to the national soccer team, is due to close for a three-year refurbishment.
By a vote of 227 to 97, the delegates backed a motion to allow soccer and rugby to be played at Croke Park for the duration of the Lansdowne Road closure.
A two-thirds majority was needed to get the change through.
The temporary lifting of the ban, known as Rule 42, means that Ireland's international rugby and soccer teams will not have to play their home fixtures abroad while Lansdowne Road is unavailable.
At the start of the meeting it was narrowly decided by 165 to 153 votes that the vote would be by secret ballot.
Ireland has no national sports stadium. A plan by Prime Minister Bertie Ahern for such a stadium never got off the ground.
The scrapping of the ban will mean a major cash injection for the GAA, which with over 750,000 members has spent 2.6 billion euros on a network of grounds and facilities, including Croke Park.
One newspaper suggested rugby and soccer games at Croke Park while Lansdowne Road is closed would bring in about 45 million euros for the GAA.
Delegates from all the 32 counties on the island of Ireland were entitled to vote as well as representatives of Gaelic sports amongst emigrant communities in Britain, the US, Canada, Australia and continental Europe.
All six counties in British-ruled Northern Ireland mandated their delegates to vote against a lifting of the ban.
The GAA, which was founded in 1884 when Britain ruled the whole of Ireland, established the ban when it saw its traditional games of Gaelic football and hurling under threat from so called 'foreign' games, such as soccer, rugby union and cricket, - many of them seen as the sports of the occupying power.
Ireland gained its independence in 1922.
The association has been a mainstay of Catholic and nationalist culture with its basic aim of the "strengthening of national identity" in all of Ireland's 32 counties.
The GAA has had a tradition of being protectionist.
In the past it prohibited British soldiers and Northern Irish police officers from membership as well as those who played or even attended rugby, soccer, hockey and cricket. These bans have since been removed.