Our only full day in Derry (regrettably). Derry is a beautiful city with a rich history, the second largest city in Northern Ireland, but it still has a small-town feel. We started the day with a walking tour to learn about The Troubles from the Derry perspective. This was a much smaller, more intimate tour than our Belfast experience, and our tour guide had a much more intimate connection to The Troubles. He told us about how the Ulster Special Constabulary (the police force at the time) began breaking into people’s homes at night on suspicion of them being members of the IRA and beating the inhabitants, sometimes taking them away and putting them in jail without charges and without telling their families where they were going (internment). He said when he was 14 his aunt and his disabled cousin were beaten in the middle of the night. This made him very angry and influenced him to join the resistance to try to fight back. He was present during Bloody Sunday.
Bloody Sunday was the name given to January 30, 1972, when 26 unarmed civilians were shot by the British Army. Before we get into that, a little background. On 18 January 1972 the Northern Irish Prime Minister banned all parades and marches until the end of the year, four days later in defiance of the ban, an anti-internment march was held to protest the policy of internment without trial. Only a couple hundred people showed up for this march and they marched to an internment camp. They were stopped by soldiers of the British Army Parachute Regiment who were deployed in the area in response to prior attacks from the IRA. The Parachute Regiment had a reputation of using “excessive physical violence” and they lived up to that reputation. In response to stones being thrown, the paratroopers fired rubber bullets at close range and charged the protesters with batons. They badly beat a number of protesters and some soldiers had to be restrained by their own officers. Reports of this brutality were widely reported on the news and 8 days later, another protest was organized, this time almost 20,000 people showed up, but this time things would become even more violent.
The IRA promised the march organizer that no armed IRA members would be anywhere near the march, but the British Army believed that there would be armed IRA members in the crowd and they thought if they started shooting CS gas into the crowd and rubber bullets then the civilians would disperse and the IRA members would be easy to pick off. The march was supposed to go to the Guildhall in Derry, and the soldiers attempted to prevent that from happening by blockading the street. Young people from the crowd started throwing stones at the soldiers and they responded with the CS gas and rubber bullets. Since there were no armed IRA members in the crowd, their plan to draw them out did not work as the soldiers expected and they just began indiscriminately shooting into the crowd. 26 people were shot, 13 died instantly, one died 4 months later as a result of his injuries. Many victims were shot while fleeing the soldiers, others were shot while trying to help other wounded. Our tour guide, who was 16 at this time, was one of the protesters. He said he was shot at, but was fortunate enough to find a spot to hide. He witnessed one of his schoolmates, who was just 15 years old, get shot, and when he attempted to get up to help him he was shot at again, he said he heard and felt the bullets fly right over his head. He was eventually able to flee and showed us his escape route.
He told us about each victim of the shooting and showed us the spots that they were killed. The most poignant thing to me from this tour was when he showed us the memorial to the fallen, unlike Belfast, Derry doesn’t shy away from its history. There were memorials all over Derry and the Bogside in particular was decorated with symbols and adornments showing support for the IRA. The Bloody Sunday memorial itself was beautiful, but even more beautiful to me was the fact that the families of those killed and individuals who were there, including our tour guide, meet at the memorial every year on the 30th of January at 10 after 4 (the time the shooting started on Bloody Sunday) to lay wreaths and remember those that were lost. Every. Single. Year. This year is the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday and he said this year was the biggest year yet, a crowd of over 20,000 people showed up to pay their respects this year and he said he was given the job of manning the gate around the memorial, insuring only the family was let into the memorial area to lay their wreaths and pay their respects. It’s a sign of true dedication and love to continue this ritual every year.
The British Army’s version of events was that the paratroopers returned fire at gunmen and bomb-throwers. This narrative was supported by the Ministry of Defence and later repeated by the Home Secretary Reginald Maulding in the House of Commons. Bernadette Devlin, a civil rights activist, and the independent Irish socialist republican Member of Parliament (MP) for Mid Ulster, who had been present at the Bloody Sunday massacre and witnessed the paratroopers firing on unarmed civilians was so offended by this statement she slapped Maulding and was temporarily suspended from Parliament. She was repeatedly denied a chance to speak to Parliament about the events despite convention decreeing that any MP who witnessed an incident under discussion would be allowed to speak about the event in question.
The funerals for 11 of the victims were held on 2 February 1972, our tour guide was in attendance and said it was one of the saddest things he’s witnessed in his 66 years of life. The Republic of Ireland observed the day as a national day of mourning, memorial services were held in Catholic and Protestant churches as well as synagogues throughout the country, schools closed, and public transportation stopped running. Tens of thousands of protesters marched on the British embassy in Dublin and thirteen symbolic coffins were placed outside the entrance, a Union Jack was burned and Molotov cocktails and stones were thrown at the building and the embassy eventually burned to the ground.
There were two separate inquiries into the Bloody Sunday massacre, the first one was ordered two days after Bloody Sunday, Prime Minister Edward Heath commissioned Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery to undertake the inquiry. Ten weeks later the Widgery Inquiry was completed and was published on 19 April 1972. This inquiry supported the British Army’s account of events that the British Army returned fire from gunmen and bomb-throwers. The report said that “None of the deceased or wounded is proved to have been shot whilst handling a firearm or bomb. Some are wholly acquitted of complicity in such action, but there is strong suspicion that some others had been firing weapons or handling bombs”. The report also said there was no evidence to suggest that the paratroopers were sent to flush out any IRA gunmen in the Bogside or to punish the residents for opposing the British Army. While this was the official position of the British, most of the witnesses to the event and the family members of those killed disputed this report and regarded it as a whitewash slogan. In 1992, John Hume, an Irish nationalist politician who is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in helping to end The Troubles (he even won a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts) requested a new inquiry and was denied by then PM John Major, but Major was succeeded by Tony Blair whose chief aide, Johnathan Powell, described Widgery as a “complete and utter whitewash”. In 1998, PM Blair ordered a new public inquiry into Bloody Sunday.
This inquiry, chaired by Lord Saville, heard testimony in the Guildhall in Derry from March 2000 to November 2004. This inquiry was more comprehensive than the earlier one and included a wide range of witness interviews from local residents, soldiers, journalists, and politicians, and reviewing large amounts of video and photographs. Over 900 witnesses were interviewed and in the end the process took 12 years to complete. In June of 2010, the Saville report concluded that the firing by the paratroopers on Bloody Sunday caused the deaths of 13 people and injury of 13 others, none of who were posing a threat of causing death or serious injury. The families rejoiced, their loved ones had been cleared and declared innocent, something they waited for almost 40 years. Unfortunately they wouldn’t get complete justice as most of the soldiers who committed these atrocious acts were deceased by the time these inquiries made their decisions, and those that were still alive prosecution would be delayed until they were dead. But the families were still overjoyed, especially when they heard the current PM David Cameron say the words “There is no doubt, there is nothing equivocal, there are no ambiguities. What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong.”
Sorry for that long history, I just thought it was very interesting, and quite important for understanding the history of Derry. Our tour guide told us that he was also beaten one time and arrested by the Ulster Special Constabulary, he said they took him to the jail and made him walk through a gauntlet of officers beating him with batons and then they beat him up pretty badly again. He said he was later interviewed during the inquiries and they asked him if he was a member of the “Bogside Young Hoodlums” which was the name the British Army gave some of the young Catholic men involved in the resistance in Derry. He said he told them that he resented the name “hoodlum”, his aunt was beaten, his disabled cousin was beaten, and he was beaten for no other reason that they were Catholic and Irish. He said he wasn’t a hoodlum, he was a republican. It was very interesting and very sad to learn about the atrocities that happened in Derry, and it was made even more striking when you look at the Derry of today, which seems like a very peaceful place with very friendly, happy people.
The tour took us through a bunch of murals in the Bogside including the famous “Free Derry” wall, which started during The Troubles when a protester spray painted “Welcome to Free Derry” on a wall near the gate that walled off the Catholic Bogside from the Protestant area. The sign has gone through a few iterations since then and now proudly welcomes you to the Bogside. The tour ended at the Free Derry Museum, which provided even more information about the Bloody Sunday massacre and even included the jackets of some of the individuals shot in the massacre, and the Civil Rights banner that was used to cover the body of the first person shot that day. There were also letters from the families of victims and videos. For a nominal 6 pound fee after our tour, this was well worth the visit!
After our tour we took a walk around the city to find lunch, we’ve found that there are some weird hours for restaurants here and a lot of times when we’re looking for food we’ve been unable to find anything that’s open! We wandered along and finally found a restaurant called The Old Docks, near the river. It was a great little lunch spot, I had a baked potato with a salad and an Old Fashioned that was actually quite good. We took a short walk back to the Guildhall. Where they were offering a free exhibit on the history of the Ulster Plantation (which was the era that the city walls were built in). We walked through there and then decided to do our own tour along the City Walls. In total it’s about a mile walk around the walls and we got some beautiful views of the city and found some hidden gems, like the Derry Girls mural (we also watched Derry Girls while we were here since Gina had never seen it). We decided to continue walking around so we took the peace bridge across the river and while on the way over I decided to check to see if there were any geocaches around (spoiler, there are a ton in Derry and I wish we had checked for them sooner!) We decided to find a few and we found one right near the Peace Bridge and one in a park nearby. Then we walked back across the Peace Bridge and attempted to find one near the Guildhall with no luck.
After all that walking (per my FitBit we were over 21,000 steps for the day!) we were pretty tired and decided to go back to our AirBnB and order a pizza. We ordered from a pizza shop we walked by called Paolo’s Pizza. It was delicious and we finished watching Derry Girls. There’s a nearby coffee shop called The Cottage so we’re going to pop in there for breakfast tomorrow and then head to the train station for one more day in Belfast before we head to Dublin! Hope you enjoyed reading about Derry as much as I enjoyed visiting it! I’ve decided that so far out of the three cities we’ve been to, if I were to move over here I’d be moving to Derry :).