Seeing Red

Bloody Sunday Lives
by Roger Collins

[Editor's note: The Irish freedom struggle has its own lexicon, which unfortunately tends to exclude those not in-the-know. Here words like "Republican" and "Unionist" have meanings utterly different than in common usage. Readers are advised to refer to the useful footnotes, which appear as (x).]

BOSTON (28 January)--In Northern Ireland, where the river Foyle broadens into its estuary, Lough Foyle, stands the port city, Derry ("Londonderry" to its British occupiers and their local supporters).

Derry, with some 100,000 residents, is a city of narrow streets, picturesque 17th &18th century architecture, a bustling commercial center in the old walled city … and on 30 January 1972, the site of an infamous massacre of civil rights marchers by the British Army.

The origin of that massacre--dubbed perhaps for eternity "Bloody Sunday"--lay in the 1922 British partition of Ireland and setting up of a Protestant confessional state in six of Ulster's nine counties.(1)

In this sectarian state (often referred to as a "statelet"), privilege based on religion was used to divide the working class, very much as race was (and is) used in the United States: Catholics and Nationalists (2) were denied access to jobs, housing, education and social benefits.

Terror, the gerrymandering of electoral districts, and a class-biased electoral law guaranteed that pro-British candidates would win most elections in the six county statelet. For example, in 1967 the Unionist/Protestant minority of Derry's electorate--about 35%--elected 14 out of 19 members (74%) of the city council.(3)

The Unionist majority in local government ensured that Unionists got the majority of public jobs, that Unionists were allotted public housing, that Unionist towns were funded for municipal improvements…and so on.

In the mid 60's a number of young radicals, inspired by the civil rights movement in the USA, began a parallel struggle in Northern Ireland. Between 1966 and 1972, a series of mass marches and a civil disobedience campaigns by the oppressed nationalist population undermined the stability of the Protestant sectarian state.

By 1969 the local police, the local militia, and the Protestant pogrom mobs had been chased out of the Nationalist communities. In Derry, after a pitched battle between the police and military on one side and Nationalist people on the other, even the British forces were driven out of the Catholic ghettos of Bogside and the Creggan.(4)

In this liberated area, the people set up organs of self government. At the entrance of Bogside, on the gabled end of a row of 18th century slum houses, was painted the slogan: "Now Entering Free Derry." A barricade was built and Bogside became "off limits" to the British Army; even though "Free Derry Corner" is only a few hundred yards from Rosemount Barracks, the main British base in Derry.

Obviously, such a situation could not be allowed to continue, and so in August 1971 the British army began a round up of all teenaged male Catholics. Main battle tanks were used to invade the "No Go Zones" of Derry and Belfast. About 2500 suspects, mostly teenaged boys, were thrown into concentration ("internment") camps in a vain attempt to quell Nationalist resistance.

The Nationalist population responded to this repression with larger street actions. On 30 February 1972, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association called for a protest march on the old walled city of Derry, with a rally scheduled for the "Diamond", the park in front of the Guild Hall. The demands of the march were for an end to imprisonment without trial, for the right to vote, for housing and jobs.

The march was of course forbidden by the British government, and troops were ordered to stand by.

Sunday, 30 February was a bright sunny day--unusual in Northern Ireland--and a large crowd, perhaps 12,000, formed up on the football field in the Creggan. Around noon, the crowd moved out, down the hill, through the Bogside, and towards St. James' Gate in the old city wall.

Soldiers from the 1st Parachute regiment (the "Paras") had blocked the gate with razor wire and armored vehicles, so, after a bit of shoving and a thrown brick or two, the crowd retreated a few hundred yards to "Free Derry Corner," and began a speakers rally. Fenner Brockway, a Labor Party member of the British House of Lords, had just begun to speak when elite British Army snipers on the wall and in an abandoned house began to fire into the crowd.

The paratroops joined in the firing, which continued for twenty minutes; at the end, 13 men lay dead and another few dozen were wounded.

For a few days Ireland seethed with outrage. Mass protests took place in every major city. The British embassy was burned by protesters in Dublin. In the British Parliament, Bernadette Devlin, a socialist member and civil rights leader from Derry, physically assaulted Mauldin, the Interior Minister, as he spoke in defense of the shootings.

Even before the dead were buried, the British propaganda machine went into action to justify the slaughter. The dead and wounded were branded as armed terrorists, the soldiers were said to have come under heavy fire. The Queen decorated and praised the "heroic" killers.

A special inquiry was set up under the chairmanship of British judge Lord Widgery. The inquiry only took testimony from those who supported the government's claims and quickly cleared the soldiers of any blame. Of more than 500 potential witnesses, the inquiry only interviewed 15….

Within a few months, the Civil Rights campaign was swept from the streets, the mass movement defeated. It seemed that the British government had been able to shoot the Civil Rights movement out of existence.

Of course there was one drawback to the smashing of the Civil Rights campaign: peaceful protest was replaced by the armed resistance of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and the British army was unable to stop the bombings.(5)

At the same time, the friends and families of the Bloody Sunday victims didn't just accept the lies of the Widgery inquiry, they organized and began a long fight for truth and justice.

Recently, this long struggle has begun to pay off and the cover-up has begun to unravel. In the last two years, the suppressed testimony of eyewitnesses, and audio and video tapes have all been brought to light, by the publication of "Eyewitness Bloody Sunday" by Don Mullen and through several investigative programs on BBC TV. The 26-County government (of Southern Ireland) has completed its own investigation, which will be released in the next few weeks.

Last year 45,000 protesters marched down from the Cretan, to Free Derry Corner, to demand truth and justice for the victims of Bloody Sunday. This year, the march might well be larger still and it now--at last--looks very much like the present British government will be forced to re open the events of 26 years ago.

The unraveling of the cover-up takes place in the context of a renewal of mass Nationalist street protests in Northern Ireland. In the last two years, a series of mass mobilizations and election victories have shifted the balance of power in Northern Ireland. The pro-British forces, the Orange Order and the various Unionist and Loyalist parties have been forced on the defensive. For the first time, the pro-British parties have lost control of Belfast City Council and the republican party, Sinn Fein is the largest party in the city.(6)

Mass pressure has forced the British and their political allies to enter negotiations with Sinn Fein and other Nationalist forces. But while peace talks have opened, pro-British death squads are carrying on a sectarian murder campaign.

Still, the Nationalists have never been in a better political position since the 1922 partition of Ireland. The current mass upsurge in Northern Ireland is not simply a return to the Civil Rights days of the 1960s, when hundreds of thousands of oppressed Nationalists fought for basic democratic rights within the United Kingdom.

Today, hundreds of thousands of Nationalists--convinced that democratic rights are impossible within the United Kingdom--are fighting for a 32-county Irish Republic, for the completion of the Irish democratic revolution that began in 1916.

Read Roger's addendum to this aritlce.

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Notes: 1) The 1922 partition divided Ireland's 32 counties into 26 under the rule of the Irish and 6 under the rule of the Crown. Ulster is the northeast portion of the island, one of the centuries-old four parts, or areas, of Ireland. Had the 1922 partition included all of Ulster, there would have been too many nationalists in the North for effective British control.

2) Nationalist: a supporter of the reunification of Ireland. Nationalists are not necessarily Catholic; some of the most important leaders of the Nationalist movement have been Protestant.

3) Unionist or Loyalist: a supporter of maintaining the Union of Northern Ireland with England, i.e., the United Kingdom.

4) Creggan, Irish for a rocky hill, is the name of a large Nationalist housing estate overlooking Derry; Creggan was developed as segregated housing for Catholic working class families in the mid-1960's; it consists of thousands of tiny, semi detached brick houses. Bogside is the name of an older Nationalist housing area, much of it 19th century row housing, located between Creggan and the walls of Derry City.

5) Republican: a supporter of reunification by any means necessary; the radical wing of the Nationalist movement. The IRA is the main republican armed force; its stated goal is the reunification of Ireland as a 32-county, democratic and socialist republic.

6) Sinn Fein ("ourselves" in Irish) is the main republican party… a mass revolutionary nationalist party, third largest party in Northern Ireland

Roger Collins is a veteran Irish Republican activist and life-long Red. Collins regularly travels to Ireland, most recently visiting the occupied North in August 1997 where he was one of the international observers at the "Apprentice Boys" march (an annual triumphalist, and often violent, parade by Loyalists through the Catholic neighborhoods). Collins claims residence in the Boston area..

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