Days 9&10

After a brief tour of the Derry Police Department, the group retired for the evening in preparation for our guided tour of the Bogside, the site of Bloody Sunday, the next day. Bloody Sunday is recognized as the event which sparked the era in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles. On a sunny January afternoon in 1972, a civil rights march was organized in Derry/Londonderry to protest the British governments introduction of internment laws.

The internment laws were a response to rioting and violence which had ramped up significantly in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The British government gave the Northern Irish Unionist government the authority to enforce the internment laws which basically allowed Unionist forces the ability to arrest rioters and protestors and hold them indefinitely without trial. The introduction of the internment laws was met with outrage from the Republicanist movement and was used as a recruiting tool by the IRA. During the infamous civil rights march which became known as "Bloody Sunday", 13 unarmed protestors were shot and killed by British paratroopers.





The violence gained international attention and sparked a series of violent, tit for tat exchanges between Loyalist groups and Nationalist groups which lasted over thirty years and claimed at least 3,500 lives. The response on the ground from Nationalist groups in Derry to Bloody Sunday was so immediate that the British Prime Minister Edward Heath determined that the Unionist Government was ill-equip to handle the groundswell. Heath imposed a direct-rule government wherein power was concentrated in Westminster rather than Stormont. Direct rule lasted until the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

Obviously, Bloody Sunday triggered events which were, historically, very significant for Northern Ireland. The opportunity to be guided through the hallowed Bogside ground where Bloody Sunday took place by someone who was actually there was an invaluable experience. Our guide, Mr. McCourt was a member of the IRA at the time and was there protesting alongside hundreds of others on that fateful day. McCourt vividly described that day and provided us with personal context. McCourt was part of a large Catholic family during the period of Catholic oppression in Northern Ireland. Because of this, McCourt's mother had trouble finding gainful employment and housing, so she sent him away to a Catholic Boys home. McCourt suffered various abuses during his time at the boy’s home. By the time he was old enough to live on his own (which happened to be the time when the civil rights movement was reaching a fever pitch), McCourt was young, angry, and determined to avenge the discrimination which had plagued his mother. All of this led to McCourt joining the radical IRA, and being present for Bloody Sunday. McCourt described close friends who lost their lives that day. He also described a brush with death he himself had that day. Hearing McCourt describe the events of that day from his standpoint caused me to consider what sort of decisions I might have made if I had lived there and then and under the same conditions. Would I have been involved? Would I have participated peacefully or violently? The tour brought to life, not only the events of Bloody Sunday, but the conditions and the contexts of the times.