Abstract
The killing of 14 unarmed demonstrators by the British army in Derry in what became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ (30 January 1972) has been seen as a turning point in the history of the Northern Irish conflict insofar as it epitomised the gulf between Northern Catholic-nationalists and the British government. For example, one historian has written of how the events of the day pushed Anglo-Irish relations to ‘breaking-point’ and that the subsequent ‘lies, evasions and blatant propaganda’ on the part of the British state were only remedied in the judicial inquiry process announced by Tony Blair in 1998 and concluded in the summer of 2010.1 This chapter traces how that particular framing of history arose and how it is being mapped on to contemporary academic and political projects.
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Notes
Shane Alcobia-Murphy, ‘Remembering Bloody Sunday’, in Recovering Memory: Irish Representations of Past and Present, edited by Hedda Friberg, Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Lene Yding Pedersen (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), p. 37.
Dave Duggan Scenes from an Inquiry, in Plays in a Peace Process (Derry: Guildhall Press, 2008[2002]). See also www.tricycle.co.uk/about-the-tricycle-pages/aboutus-tab-menu/about/, accessed on 9 November 2010.
Dermot, P.J. Walsh, Bloody Sunday and the Rule of Law in Northern Ireland (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2000), p. 12.
Aaron Edwards and Cillian McGrattan, The Northern Ireland Conflict: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2010), pp. 57–80.
Paul Bew, Peter Gibbons and Henry Patterson, Northern Ireland, 1921–2000: Political Forces and Social Classes (London: Serif, 2002).
David Cameron, ‘Statement to the House of Commons on the Saville Inquiry’, The Times, 16 June 2010, p. 8.
Niall Dochartaigh, ‘Bloody Sunday: Error or design?’, Contemporary British History, 24:1 (2010), pp. 89–90.
Alan F. Parkinson, 1972 and the Ulster Troubles: ‘A Very Bad Year’ (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), p. 150.
See, for example, Brian Conway, Commemoration and Bloody Sunday (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and Graham Dawson, Making Peace with the Past? Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
Michael Laffan, ‘Insular attitudes: The revisionists and Their critics’, in Revising the Rising, edited by Maíre Ní Dhonnachadha and Theo Dorgan (Derry: Field Day, 1991), pp. 106–21.
Brian Friel, ‘The freedom of the city’, in Brian Friel Plays: I (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).
Hansson, ‘Memory’, pp. 94–5; Eamonn McCann, Bloody Sunday in Derry: What Really Happened (Dingle: Brandon, 2002); Joanne O’Brien, A Matter of Minutes: The Enduring Legacy of Bloody Sunday (Dublin: Wolfhound, 2002).
For example, speaking in 1992 Bishop Edward Daly, who as a priest attended the victims on the day, remarked that ‘[w]hat really made Bloody Sunday so obscene was the fact that people afterwards at the highest level of British justice justified it …’; quoted in Don Mullan, Eyewitness Bloody Sunday: The Truth (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1998), p. 29.
Tom Herron and John Lynch, After Bloody Sunday: Ethics, Representation, Justice (Cork: Cork University Press, 2007), p. 6.
Ibid., p. 20.
P.J. McLoughlin, John Hume and the Revision of Irish Nationalism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), p. 217.
Ibid., p. 25.
Richard English, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003), p. 151; Patrick Magee, Gangsters or Guerrillas? Representations of Irish Republicans in Troubles Fiction (Belfast: Beyond the Pale, 2001), p. 65.
Arthur Aughey, ‘Stewart on history’, in From the United Irishmen to Twentieth Century Unionism: A Festschrift for A.T.Q. Stewart, edited by Sabine Wichert (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), p. 18; see also Michael Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
Malachi O’Doherty, The Trouble with Guns: Republican Strategy and the Provisional IRA (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1998), p. 25.
Ó Dochartaigh, ‘Bloody Sunday’; Tommy Graham, ‘Bloody Sunday: Who was responsible?’, History/Ireland, August 2010, p. 3.
Thomas Hennessey, The Evolution of the Troubles, 1970–1972 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), Bew, ‘Historical background’.
Sarah Campbell, ‘New nationalism? The SDLP and northern nationalism, 1969–1975’ (Dublin: University College Dublin, unpublished PhD, 2010).
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The garden of forking paths’, in Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 121.
See, for example, Colm Tóibín’s account of violence in the border region, Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border (London: Picador, 2010 [1987]).
Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature & Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1994), pp. 177–86.
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© 2013 Cillian McGrattan
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McGrattan, C. (2013). Irrevocable Futures: Tracing the Dynamics of Conflict, Bloody Sunday and Bloody Friday. In: Memory, Politics and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291790_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291790_5
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