Cannon arrayed along the city walls of Londonderry
On Tuesday the UK government released a long-awaited report on its investigation of the “Bloody Sunday” events of January 30, 1972, when British troops fired on unarmed civilian street demonstrators in Londonderry (Derry), Northern Ireland, killing 13 people (BBC news story). We visited the Bloody Sunday sites while on vacation less than a month ago, so this is interesting and exciting news for me — and an excuse to share some vacation photos with the world.
Our visit to Derry (Londonderry) was an interesting one. Although Bloody Sunday is recent history, we learned that its roots are centuries old. The city was built on high ground and encircled by fortified walls that protected the city’s English residents — notably, in the siege of 1689, when the city’s Protestant English defenders held out for 105 days against the forces of England’s King James II, who was Catholic.
Looking down on the Bogside from the walls of Derry. Free Derry wall is in the lower right, and two Bogside murals are in view.
Through much of its history, the walled city was the home of the city’s English rulers, while many of the Irish people from the countryside who came to the city for employment settled in the boggy lands west of the city walls — an area known as the Bogside.
When, almost 90 years ago, the Republic of Ireland became independent of the UK, the UK kept Derry/Londonderry as part of Northern Ireland, and the divisions within the city (and the violent “Troubles”) continued through the 20th century. A significant political issue in the late 1960s and into the 1970s was that city electoral districts were gerrymandered in a fashion that largely deprived Bogside residents of a voice in city government.
Free Derry wall and the first of the Bogside murals
The street march on January 30, 1972 was one in a series of protests against this kind of policy — protests inspired in part by the U.S. civil rights movement. The Royal Ulster Constabulary (Northern Ireland police) and British military were deployed to keep the peace, but they often clashed with residents (there were many deaths both before and after Bloody Sunday).
On our visit to Derry, our overnight lodging was in the Bogside and we walked freely — and safely — through places where barricades stood 40 years ago, and where people died on Bloody Sunday and in other incidents. The 1998 peace agreement finally brought normalcy to the city after decades of “Troubles.”
Two of the Bogside murals
Local artists have covered the walls of several buildings with huge murals (the “Bogside murals”) depicting and commemorating the violence of the past and the city’s hopes for the future. We talked with one of the original artists, while he was overseeing touch-up work on one of the murals, and heard about the artists’ interest in using art to help the city heal — and to understand and learn from its history.
In the midst of relative normalcy that characterizes Derry today, we heard repeatedly about people’s impatience for the government to release the report on Bloody Sunday (and the hope that it would provide some sort of justice for the survivors). At the Museum of Free Derry, we saw the clothing of victims with bullet wounds in the back, and other evidence that the dead had not been combatants. I hope that the families of the victims were gratified to hear Prime Minister David Cameron express his sorrow, and say that the deaths were “unjustified and unjustifiable.”
