It’s been a long Good Friday, not just in Northern Ireland, so can the UK City of Culture, 2013, help us turn Bloody Sunday into a Day of Resurrection? In ‘Derry Days (Extracts from a Diary)’, Myra Dryden muses on Sunday routines:
Why do I hate Sundays so much? I think if I were in a coma for thirty years and woke up on a Sunday I would instinctively know what day of the week it was…
….there’s a wealth of material in this twenty-four hours of misery for any writer worth her salt. I mean, right at this minute, I am contemplating a play on the subject. I’ve got the title ready and waiting, ‘SUNDAY BORING SUNDAY’, and I’m directing it at Radio Foyle. It’s about an old man, living alone in a council flat. Everybody I know is in it (and a couple I don’t), and they all decide to visit on the same Sunday afternoon, each thinking he or she will be the only one there…the pensioner can’t wait to get back to his old boring Sunday routine by the end of the play… I’ll never understand why the Boomtown Rats hate Monday so much.’
(Published in Borderlines: A Collection of New Writing from the North-West, edited by Sam Burnside, 1988.)
Bob Geldof in 1991. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Myra Dryden was born in Derry and went to live in Singapore, England and Cork for eighteen years, before returning to Derry, with her family, to run her own business and study at Magee College. Perhaps someone should have told her, on her return, that it wasn’t the Irish punk group who hated Mondays, but a senseless teenage killer, one of the first of many to open fire on US schoolchildren. She can be forgiven for not knowing this if she was in Singapore at the time the record was released, as it was banned from most US radio stations, despite its popularity on the other side of the North Atlantic. According to Bob Geldof, he wrote the song in 1979, after reading about the shooting spree of 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer, who fired at children in the playground of Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California on 29 January 1979, killing two adults and injuring eight children and one police officer. Spencer showed no remorse for her crime and her full explanation for her actions was “I don’t like Mondays: This livens up the day”.The song was first performed less than a month later. Geldof explained how he wrote the song in Atlanta, where he was doing a radio show. He had just heard about the shooting and was on the way back to the hotel when he thought of the brilliant line, ‘the silicon chip inside her head had switched to overload’. The journalists interviewing her said, ‘Tell me why?’ because it was such a senseless act and this was the perfect senseless reason for doing it. So Geldof wrote the perfect senseless song to illustrate it, not as an attempt to exploit tragedy. The other famous line, ‘the lesson today is how to die’ was later applied (by him) to the situation in Ethiopia during the Live Aid concert, but it could equally well be applied to Bloody Sunday and the bombings in Belfast and Birmingham, as well as to the more recent school shootings in the US. All have been senseless deaths of children and young people.
Bloody Sunday mural in Derry on Free Derry Corner (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
For those who don’t remember or don’t know about the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’, 30th January 1972, it followed on from the sending in of British troops in 1969 to protect the Catholic minority from Protestant violence and intimidation. To begin with, the majority of Catholics were welcoming towards the soldiers, but the Irish Republican Army was not. It began to shoot soldiers and policemen, and the Army responded by making intrusive house-to-house searches in Republican areas, locking up suspects without trial. This was called internment, and the Army frequently imprisoned the wrong people. Protest marches were organised by the Civil Rights Association, such as the one which led to ‘Bloody Sunday’. Twenty-six unarmed civil rights protesters were shot by British soldiers in the Bogside area of the City. Thirteen died of their wounds on the day, including seven teenagers, and another man died of his later the same year. Five of those wounded were shot in the back. Two other protesters were run down and injured by Army trucks.
Mural of victim of Bloody Sunday (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The event is commemorated in U2’s well-known 1983 song, the lyrics of which, while condemning the Army, are not at all supportive of ‘the battle call’ of the IRA:
Broken bottles under children’s feet
Bodies strewn across the dead-end street
But I won’t heed the battle call
Puts my back up
Puts my back up against the wall
And the battle’s just begun
There’s many lost, but tell me who has won?
The trench is dug within our hearts
And mothers, children,
Brothers, sisters torn apart.
The UDA marching through Belfast’s city centre in a massive show of strength, summer 1972 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Thirty years after this song was recorded, perhaps we are all in danger of retreating into our own communal trenches. Last year, forty years after Bloody Sunday, with the sectarian battle(s) seemingly over, and following many investigations and official enquiries, British PM David Cameron finally made a formal apology in Parliament in 2012. At the time, the soldiers from the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment claimed that they had been fired upon first, and that some of the demonstrators had guns. However, no weapons were ever found at, or near to, the site. On Bloody Friday, 21st July 1972, the ‘Provisional IRA’ placed 22 bombs all over Belfast, in shops and cars on the streets, killing nine people and maiming 130. These were ordinary citizens, not policeman or soldiers, who had been targets in the past. The Ulster Defence Association (UDA) also began a campaign of terror with bombs and bullets, killing many innocent people.
28.01.2007 Derry, Ireland Bloody Sunday 35th year’s commemoration. At the end of the march people gather at Free Derry corner where the names of the victims are recalled; on the top of a building members of the bogside republican youth show anti-Sinn Fein signs, calling for a vote in favour of independent candidate Peggy O’Hara. Watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LoJcsO3SxY Part of Occupied Ireland set (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
However, In 1974, the IRA took their campaign a stage further, by placing bombs in pubs in ‘mainland Britain’, killing many innocent teenagers. On 21st November, they placed three bombs in Birmingham. Two were in city centre pubs, and the third outside a bank along one of the main roads into the city, along which I and my friends travelled every Saturday night on our way to ‘Youthquake’ gatherings at St. Philip’s Cathedral. I remember returning from the city centre, where I had been eating in the Wimpy Bar next to ‘The Tavern in the Town’, where a bomb went off in the underground bar, getting off the bus at the terminus at the top of the avenue in Edgbaston where we lived, some four miles out of the city, and hearing the blast. The bomb which had been placed on our bus route had failed to detonate. After that, almost every Saturday for the next four weeks before Christmas, we were called out of the city-centre department store I worked in, for bomb alerts. Our next-door neighbours were Irish, and I also remember the backlash they and many other faced in the large Birmingham Irish Community, which led to the wrongful conviction and sixteen-year imprisonment of ‘the Birmingham Six’. The twenty-one victims killed in the two explosions, eleven at ‘the Tavern in the Town’ would now be, like me, middle-aged, with grown-up children of their own. Many of the hundreds who survived the blast suffered horrific, life-shattering injuries. Yet the real bombers have never been charged, despite the accusation that the then leadership of the IRA, now ministers in the Stormont Government in Belfast, know who they were. A petition has been started by one of the victim’s family to get the case re-opened, so that they can be brought to justice.
Bloody sunday mural by the bogside artists showing Father Daly escorting injured marchers to safety using a white handkerchief. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It took another ten years after the publication of Borderlines and our visit to Northern Ireland from Birmingham for the Agreement to be reached on Good Friday 1998 which ended the fighting in the Province, hopefully for good, though recent events in Belfast show that the sectarian cultural conflict between Unionists and Republicans is still deeply rooted in many communities, despite all the efforts made in the eighties and nineties in ‘Education for Mutual Education’. Through the Christian Education Movement, Religious Education teachers from a variety of schools throughout the West Midlands of England and Northern Ireland came together to exchange resources and produce a pack for use in secondary schools dealing with the themes of ‘Conflict and Reconciliation’. It was based on the principle that pupils needed to work on their own identities, both as individuals and members of communities, before they could develop the skills to span religious, cultural and ethnic divisions. The pack was published by CEM in 1991, and for a time proved very popular with schools in both ‘regions’. One wonders if, following the Good Friday Agreement, the politicians took over and the real architects of peace were pushed into the background, depriving a new generation of any sense of ownership over the peace process and forcing them back onto the streets to express their identities in limited symbolism and violence.
mural waterside Derry (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Myra Dryden’s ‘Extracts from a Diary’ end with the following entry for a Friday, which reminds me of the irrational trepidation I felt when I saw my first Army patrol on the streets of Londonderry, around the same time as the incident she describes here:
This morning I heard the sound of shooting in Bull Park. I’ve been shaking ever since.
Then, the knock. It was somehow undemanding, soft. A badge was waved by way of explanation.
“Strand Road.”
“Did you hear anything?”
“See anything?”
(Feel anything)
I heard cars back-firing: thirty of them. I saw the frightened faces of children, through spinning bicycle spokes. I felt a volcano erupt inside my head, and splatter over Friday’s ‘Journal’.
Aloud I lie.
“Nothing.”
Retreating footsteps echo through the frosty night air. Low voices carry over from next door.
“Did you hear anything?”
“See anything?”
(Feel anything)
I cool my brow on the vestibule glass.
Another Year.
Do I feel anything? Nothing that a bottle of Valium and a one-way ticket to Australia wouldn’t cure…
The final verse of U2’s song doesn’t pull any punches about the real solution to ‘the Troubles’. They don’t put their faith in ‘Victory for the IRA’ but in the Resurrection Day Victory of Christ:
Sunday Bloody Sunday (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The real battle’s just begun
To claim the victory Jesus won
On Sunday, Bloody Sunday.
The politicians have claimed their victory, but have the people of Northern Ireland claimed their victory over death? Having learned today’s lesson of how to die, isn’t it time for all societies on both sides of the Atlantic to outlaw the bullets as well as the bombs, and to move on to learn the lesson of how to live securely without them? Good Friday is behind us, but Easter Sunday has yet to dawn. Perhaps Derry/ Londonderry, as the UK City of Culture can show us all, in 2013, how to treasure our traditions without remaining slaves to them.
Related articles
- Bloody Sunday by Douglas Murray – review (guardian.co.uk)
- ‘Sunday’ Outrage (fiannaiochta.wordpress.com)
- Families continue Bloody Sunday march for justice (belfasttelegraph.co.uk)
- N Ireland open Bloody Sunday probe (bigpondnews.com)
- A view of UK City of Culture from the near abroad (sluggerotoole.com)
- Derry launches City of Culture year (belfasttelegraph.co.uk)
- Curtain To Rise On UK’s First City Of Culture (news.sky.com)
Andrew James 