One Bloody Sunday
50 years ago, British soldiers opened fire on Irish protesters: It’s an old story of many times, many places
Originally published in The National Catholic Reporter in 2007 to mark the 35th anniversary of Bloody Sunday
He should have died that day. His hands were in the air and an assault rifle was pointed directly at his head. Around him, people were so terrified that they were tripping out of their shoes as they tried to run away. Mismatched loafers and pumps and sneakers lay scattered across the road as bullets continued to zip around the courtyard. Many of the wounded were pulled to safety. A priest, Father Edward Daly, would soon wave his handkerchief as if signaling surrender.
Liam stood there — his hands in the air — while a British soldier a mere twenty feet away squinted down the barrel of gun. It was a 7.62mm self-loading-rifle. For several long seconds Liam didn’t know what would happen next. He had already seen his friends, Joseph Mahon and Jim Wray, shot within minutes of each other. This British paratrooper, known today as simply “Solider F”, examined Liam carefully. Time stopped. The seagulls overhead screeched.
And then slowly, very slowly, Soldier F lowered his gun and seemed to shrug. He turned on his heel and strolled back to the armored barricade as if nothing had happened. Maybe he felt that his job was done or maybe he was satisfied with his tally for the day. Sirens began to fill the air. When it was all over, seventeen people were wounded and thirteen were dead.
This happened many years ago but, now, I’m standing in Derry with Liam (not his real name) where it all took place. Bullet holes are still in the wall and if you look hard you can almost see the body of Jim Wray on the curb in front of us. I’ve been trying to make sense of Bloody Sunday for a long time now. My family is from Northern Ireland and what happened on that day changed the country forever. Most of my professional life has focused on the history of Northern Ireland, I know all the facts and figures, I can talk confidently to reporters and students about the Troubles, but I can’t really say that I understand what happened here between 1972 and 1998. Not really. My head understands, but not my heart.
I’m in love with Northern Ireland. It’s my ancestral home, my genealogical grounding, and if things had gone a little bit differently, I might have been raised here and not in Minnesota. Back in 1620, my family settled outside of Belfast in a little village called Aghalee. My clan got a charter from King James and began to build a home, which would eventually become a massive farming estate known as Beechlawn. It was eventually sold to another family in 1952 when my family decided to immigrate to Canada. There is a Protestant church nearby which holds the bones of my ancestors and, whenever I visit Beechlawn, I make sure to linger at the family plot. I try to wrap my imagination around the idea that my relatives have been buried here, bone upon bone, for three long centuries. My people, deep in the soil.
Fifty years ago, Catholics in Northern Ireland were marching for voting reform, fair employment, fair housing, and education. They were inspired by the Civil Rights Movement in the United States [...] The march that was organized for January 30, 1972, appeared to be no different.
I went to Northern Ireland for the first time in 1986. I was a teenager back then and I didn’t know what to expect. The American news made it seem like bombs went off every hour and that just about everyone had a machine gun hidden in their house. Catholics and Protestants were at each other’s throats. British troops patrolled the streets, tank-like police cars lumbered down the road, and there was the constant thumping of military helicopters in the sky. My relatives welcomed me like a prodigal son and not one of them seemed to care that I was Catholic. It surprised me then. Northern Ireland was not what I expected.
Ever since that first trip I’ve returned to Belfast almost every year. I’ve seen car bombs, a number of riots, burning buses, the aftermath of two murders, and, I hasten to add, I’ve also seen a world brimming with laughter and good friends and kindness and hospitality and clemency. Belfast is a good place with a painful history chained around its legs. I’ve worked hard to straddle the ideological divide in Northern Ireland and I’ve listened to both sides carefully. In 1993, I became a citizen of Ireland. I lived in England for three years. My wife is British. I’m not exactly sure how all of this influences my relationship with Northern Ireland, but I know that it does.
The facts behind Bloody Sunday are documented in both the Widgery Report as well as the more recent, and more accurate, Saville Report. Fifty years ago, Catholics in Northern Ireland were marching for voting reform, fair employment, fair housing, and education. They were inspired by the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the protests in Belfast and Derry were largely peaceful because of this. The march that was organized for January 30, 1972, appeared to be no different.
The British Army had initially been brought into Northern Ireland to protect the Catholics from the Protestants. Even those labels — “Catholic” and “Protestant” — conjure up a backwards society that is still grousing about a religious schism that occurred more than 400 years ago. Northern Ireland didn’t experience a holy war. No, we would be better served to see Catholics as largely wanting a united Ireland, and Protestants largely wanting to remain a part of the United Kingdom. Regardless of what labels we use to discuss the two communities (and there are plenty of nasty labels we could use) a civil war has been smoldering in Northern Ireland ever since it was first created in 1921. It is a civil war that has been fought in slow motion. I suppose you could say that it began when Protestants created laws that prevented Catholics from assuming positions of power. By the late 1960s, Catholics were demanding their civil rights but the Protestants, who controlled virtually everything from politics to education to housing to policing, were reluctant to give it to them. It’s an old story. The haves versus the have-nots. The entitled versus the dispossessed.
All of this came to a head on January 30, 1972. Nearly 10,000 Catholic protesters gathered at the Creggan Estate where many of them talked about football and the weather. It was a crisp day, cloudless and invigorating. The protesters marched towards the Guildhall, they turned towards Free Derry Corner, and then several of them moved towards the Army barricade at the end of William Street. The British soldiers had placed rounds in their rifles. It was 3:55 in the afternoon.
Like most atrocities, no one is exactly sure how this one began. The British soldiers of the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment claimed they were fired upon and believed that nail-bombs were being used against them. The protesters have vigorously and repeatedly denied such claims. What we do know is that shortly before four o’clock the rifles opened up. In the car park of Rossville Flats and near the Army barricade on Rossville Street and in area known as Glenfada Park, thirteen lives were taken in less than twenty minutes. Five of the dead were shot in the back. No weapon of any kind was found on the marchers. When it was all over, twenty-one soldiers had fired 108 rounds. Altnagelvin Hospital became overrun with families desperate to hear news about their loved ones.
The next day, the entire Catholic community in Northern Ireland felt they had been targeted by the British Army. Whisperings of genocide began to fill the streets. Recruitment in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) skyrocketed and within a few short months bombs were going off all over the place.
Nothing would be quite the same ever again.
Liam is very tall, he smokes too much, and he talks in the high and flat accent that is typical of Northern Ireland. When he walks around Derry it’s hard to keep up with his long strides, with the easy glide of his lanky legs, and he seems to know just about everyone. He pats old people on the shoulder, he shouts happily across the street to a group of kids, he stops to light someone’s cigarette, and he asks everyone how they’re doing. It’s obvious Liam is in love with Derry, and I envy how he wears his hometown so easily and affectionately upon his soul.
Liam was born and raised in Derry. He studied engineering for a while and then the 1960s happened. Marches and political rallies were going on, his community was being intimidated, their doors were being kicked-in. He joined the IRA and eventually became the Quartermaster of Arms for the Derry Brigade. He’s told me about these years, about some of the things that he did when he wore a balaclava. The tone in his voice is a mix of regret, pride, and a longing for his lost youth.
We got drunk one evening in a pub and he explained to me, while looking over his shoulder, how to hide hundreds of machine-guns on short notice. The solution was so ingenious that I just shook my head and wondered why I hadn’t thought of it myself. Holding such secret knowledge in my head is, I fully admit, oddly alluring and it makes me feel weirdly special. There is a seductive charm to violence and covert operations. Against our better judgment, we are drawn all too easily towards the cloak and dagger. The promise of intrigue tugs towards our own destruction.
I’ve never been able to pinpoint what made Liam give up the gun and the mask, but give them up he did, forever and definitively. Perhaps he had buried too many friends, comforted too many families, or seen too many tears. Regardless of the cause, he turned his back on violence in the late 1970s and has since then channeled his energy into peaceful cross-community reconciliation. I admire him for this because he embraced peace at a time when such thinking was not exactly popular in Northern Ireland. It is one thing to leave the IRA but it’s an entirely different proposition to question its deadly modus operandi. Liam has worked tirelessly and bravely for peace during a time when Protestant extremists tended not to trust him and many Catholics took issue with his new attitude. Now, after almost thirty years of the persistent and dogged promotion of peacemaking on a grass roots level, he has been singled out by several agencies for his good work, including Buckingham Palace where he met the Queen. His past, however, is never far behind. In spite of nearly three decades of peace work he is routinely flagged at airports in the United States as a former member of the IRA, a terrorist. He is pulled aside into tiny rooms. Questions are asked.
Study abroad programs have the ability to teach students more about themselves, and their place in the world, than a lecture in a classroom even can. For this reason, I like taking students overseas, and this often means returning to a place that has deeply shaped and influenced me: Northern Ireland. Whenever I take students across the Atlantic to study the Troubles of 1969–1998, we visit London and Dublin where we learn about the thorny intersections between British and Irish history. We read James Joyce, Seamus Heaney, and Mary Beckett. We talk with former paramilitary leaders of the Irish Republican Army and the Ulster Volunteer Force in Belfast. We have meetings with politicians and peace activists. And then, we’re off to Derry.
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For most of my students, I suspect that Bloody Sunday is little more than something that Bono sings about in a U2 song. What do the killings and maimings mean to them? This is a question I wrestle with often, and by the time we get to Derry, I want them to see Northern Ireland as a microcosm of other divided societies around the world. Liam promotes such thinking as we walk around Derry. He waves to people, he points out where the city gates were closed by the Apprentice Boys in 1689. He mentions that the Protestants have their moment of historical importance — the Apprentice Boys for example — and that Catholics have theirs. He points to the Bogside where Bloody Sunday occurred. History is divided in this city, and this keeps the people divided from each other.
“Divisions are still around,” Liam says lighting a fresh cigarette. “If you’re from over there you call the city ‘Derry’, and if you’re from back there, you call it ‘Londonderry’. There’re two names for this place: one Catholic, the other Protestant.”
“What do you call it?” a student asks.
“I just call it home,” Liam smiles. He pulls on his cigarette, thinks for a long moment, and points down the hill. “That’s where it happened. It was like today. A bit cold, sunny, a light wind. The British were over there.”
And with that, we turn down the hill and walk towards the memorial.
When it was all over, Liam says, “Bodies were there, there, and there. One of my friends was shot in the back just there.”
Liam helps my students see the world through a wider lens and it’s obvious he enjoys showing them around. I also get the sense that it helps him talk about that day in 1972. This isn’t a one-way flow of benefits because in sharing his experiences he purges his emotions in some way. It’s cathartic for him. As we stand where his friends were gunned down, and as Liam points to bullet holes and puts his hands in the air as if surrendering, he seems to undress memory.
This is a powerful educational moment because as Liam holds up his hands the past and present collide. I can almost hear people screaming, I can almost smell the cordite hanging in the air, and there are shoes scattered in the street. Liam mentions blood on handkerchiefs, the sound of military vehicles revving their engines, young men begging not to be shot, women screaming. He talks about that moment when a young British paratrooper lowered his gun. Liam lowers his own hands and squints hard into the past. When it was all over, Liam says, “Bodies were there, there, and there. One of my friends was shot in the back just there.”
He lights another cigarette. “An hour after it was over, flowers were everywhere. The whole city became a funeral.”
My students huddle together in order to hear what he is saying.
“After Bloody Sunday there were no rules. Chaos was king. None of us — Catholic or Protestant — can hold our hands up and say that we had a clean war. Catholics killed Catholics, Protestants killed Protestants, Protestants killed British. We killed innocents. It was all a big bloody mess.”
Northern Ireland has changed a lot since the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, which bound both sides to abandon violence in favor of democratic power-sharing. A money-pump was turned on and Northern Ireland was flooded with dollars and pounds and euros. Investors moved in and the smaller stores — the ones that had stayed open during the Troubles, the ones that had been firebombed and forced to pay extortion money — were quickly run out of business. Massive new warehouses were thrown up. House prices soared. And for the first time in decades, college graduates stayed in Northern Ireland rather than go south to Dublin or east to London. Gone are the British troops, the armored police-tanks, and the thumping military helicopters. To this day, whenever I hear a helicopter I’m immediately back in Belfast — it’s odd for me to visit the city and not hear that sound, a sound which was so common you didn’t notice it.
Derry has enjoyed an astonishing financial rebirth. Hotels are moving in and shopping centers are plump with retail chains. I suppose this is progress, but I miss the smaller shops that toughed it out during the lean and dangerous years. This is why I bring students to Northern Ireland and why I write about the place. It’s important to see a society rise above its history and begin the hard work of coming together. I treasure the uneasy parable that exists in Northern Ireland because what happened here in the 1990s can be applied to the wider world. The furious sectarianism that once fired bullets and sparked bombs has been dulled, perhaps even tamed.
Northern Ireland helps me to understand the Iraq War in new ways and, in fact, I see many similarities between Belfast and Baghdad. I was an early and vocal opponent of the war because I saw the sad repetition of Northern Irish history before a single American boot hit the sand. The divisions between Sunni and Shiite are familiar to me even though I know zip about Islam. Now that America is stationed in Iraq — where, I’m sure, helicopters shake the skies of Baghdad just like they did in Belfast — what comfort is there in being right?
I see in places like Londonderry/Derry lessons that we, in the United States, don’t seem to care about learning. What Bloody Sunday represents doesn’t mean much in America, but it should mean a great deal. After all, we have versions of it littered throughout our history. There is the patriotic version we learn in grade school, the one that took place on March 5, 1770, when British soldiers killed five demonstrators in front of the Old State House. The Boston Massacre, as it has become known, took place on a Monday.
But we also have plenty of shameful versions of Bloody Sunday lurking in other decades of our history. For example, on the morning of December 29, 1890, five hundred troops from the 7th Cavalry slaughtered one-hundred-and-fifty-three Lakota in Wounded Knee, South Dakota. It too was a Monday. Or how about the version of Bloody Sunday that involves a young Lieutenant named William Calley. He, along with other members of Charlie Company, murdered as many as five hundred souls in My Lai on March 16, 1968. Hundreds and hundreds of rounds were fired from American made M16A1 air-cooled rotating-bolt rifles. It was a Saturday. Or Kent State? That happened on a Monday. More recently, on April 16, 2003, a group of US soldiers killed twelve Iraqis and wounded nearly one-hundred in Mosul. This happened on a Wednesday and, according to observers, the protest against American occupation began peacefully but one soldier — just like his counterparts in Derry, Boston, Wounded Knee, My Lai, and Kent — claims that he was fired upon first. I’m sure that in all of these events, people tripped out of their loose-fitting shoes as they tried to run away.
I don’t mean to diminish what happened in Derry. When I’m with Liam I see how deep the psychological wounds run but, now that I look for it, I see hundreds of Bloody Sundays magnified throughout history. We have calendars packed full of Bloody Sundays in places like Germany, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, and Darfur. The narrative of Bloody Sunday is an old and insidious one. The story, as Liam often says while standing near Rossville Flats, continues on somewhere else. Hutu and Tutsi. Israeli and Palestinian. Sunni and Shiite. On and on.
Talking about that day in January is still difficult for Liam, and he reaches a point when he gets quiet, pensive. It usually happens when we reach the memorial and look at the names of the dead. I write them out here because they deserve to be remembered: Jackie Duddy, Patrick Doherty, Bernard McGuigan, Hugh Gilmore, Kevin McElhinney, Michael Kelly, John Young, William Nash, Michael McDaid, James Wray, Gerald Donaghy, Gerald McKinney, William McKinney, and John Jonston. I only know their names, but Liam knew how these men laughed, what their mannerisms were like, what music they listened to. For those of us on the outside, it’s easy to forget that Bloody Sunday happened to real people, not just to names carved into stone or inked onto the page of a book.
I’ve tried to understand the souls behind these names. Whenever I look in particular at the grainy photo of William Nash, I can’t help but see a passing likeness to my own face when I was nineteen. He has the same haircut and — perhaps this says something about our need to empathize in order to make sense of senselessness — I see myself in him. It’s like looking into a mirror at my own teenage self. We have the same puffy bangs, the same part in our hair, the same hidden forehead. Who knows, maybe we would have liked the same music too?
We leave the memorial behind, climb up the steep street towards an area of town known as the Diamond, and we break off into smaller groups. Some of my students return to the hotel to work on their journals, others decide to catch a meal, and a few others stay with us. Liam points to a pub just beyond a streetlight. There is an Irish fiddle painted on the window and, as we enter, Liam shouts hello to the young woman with dreadlocks behind the bar.
…a large group of unarmed individuals, when standing before a smaller group of armed individuals, often has the same ending. Gun. Flesh. Blood.
As one of my students, a hockey player with massive shoulders, asks Liam more about Bloody Sunday, I watch the muted TV in the corner. I get a feeling of déjà vu as American soldiers patrol the streets of Baghdad. Helicopters are in the sky and even though I can’t hear what is being said I can hear those machines thumping above the buildings, rattling the windowpanes, disturbing sleep and dreams.
This hockey player who has never been outside the United States nods at what Liam is saying. They talk about the allure of violence and Liam explains what he is doing to help the two communities heal. I watch this young man make connections that cut across Irish history and move into the realm of injustice that exists between differing groups all over the world: South Africa, Israel, Rwanda, Darfur, Afghanistan, Iraq. The narrative of Bloody Sunday is indeed an old and insidious one, but ignoring it seems morally repulsive. The story of Bloody Sunday needs to be told and retold. It goes something like this: a large group of unarmed individuals, when standing before a smaller group of armed individuals, often has the same ending. Gun. Flesh. Blood. The look on my student’s face reinforces what I already know to be true: I will return here next year to help tell the story again, and again.
I point to the TV and tap my student’s shoulder. I say one word: “Look.”
We’re in a square in Baghdad. There is the puff of a bomb and the torn carcass of a truck. People are running away and a young man trips out of his loafers. There is a red stain on the street and shiny bullet casings are everywhere. The next scene shows a mother, her arms over a body, her mouth open in a wail. What, I wonder, is the name of her freshly dead son? Then, there is an advertisement for a new car. It’s so shiny and desirable and fast that, for a moment, I almost forget that I am in Derry.
Patrick Hicks is the author of The Commandant of Lubizec, The Collector of Names, Adoptable, and Library of the Mind. He is the Writer-in-Residence at Augustana University as well as a faculty member in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada University. His latest book is In the Shadow of Dora: A Novel of the Holocaust and the Apollo Program.
