Commemoration and Bloody Sunday: Pathways of Memory (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies)

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Commemoration and Bloody Sunday

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies General Editors: Andrew Hoskins and John Sutton The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to that of memory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory; panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to an intensification of public discourses on our past over the past thirty years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This groundbreaking series tackles questions such as What is ‘memory’ under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination?

Brian Conway COMMEMORATION AND BLOODY SUNDAY Pathways of Memory

Forthcoming titles: Richard Crownshaw THE AFTERLIFE OF HOLOCAUST MEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE AND CULTURE Mikyoung Kim and Barry Schwartz (editors) NORTHEAST ASIA’S DIFFICULT PAST Studies in Collective Memory

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–23851–0 (hardback) 978–0–230–23852–7 (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and one of the ISBNs quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Commemoration and Bloody Sunday Pathways of Memory

Brian Conway

© Brian Conway 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN: 978–0–230–22888–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For my parents and in memory of the Bloody Sunday dead Patrick Doherty, Gerald Donaghey, John Duddy, Hugh Gilmour, Michael Kelly, Michael McDaid, Kevin McElhinney, Bernard McGuigan, James McKinney, William McKinney, William Nash, James Wray, John Young, and John Johnston

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Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Preface

xi

Acknowledgements

xv

Spatiotemporal Chronology of Bloody Sunday Commemorative Activity, 1972–2009 Abbreviations

xix xxvi

1 Introduction: Actors, Contexts and Temporality

1

2 Bloody Sunday in Historical Perspective

23

3 A ‘Simple People Who Want a Simple Memorial’

41

4

On the March

68

5

‘The Holocaust that was the Bogside of Sunday’

95

6

The Politics of Visual Memory

118

7 Conclusion: Trajectories of Memory

142

Methodological Appendices

161

Notes

170

References

192

Index

207

vii


Illustrations Figures 3.1

3.2

3.3 3.4

3.5 3.6

3.7

3.8

4.1

4.2

4.3

Sculptor’s designs for Bloody Sunday memorial, Rossville Street. (Courtesy of Adrian Kerr, Museum of Free Derry) An artist’s impression of the proposed Bloody Sunday memorial. (Courtesy of Adrian Kerr, Museum of Free Derry) NICRA poster for unveiling of memorial. (Courtesy of Adrian Kerr, Museum of Free Derry) Crowds assemble at the Bloody Sunday memorial prior to the start of the 2005 memorial service and wreath-laying ceremony. (Photograph by the author) The Bloody Sunday Memorial, August 2004. (Photograph by the author) The families of the dead lay wreaths at the Sunday morning memorial service during the 2009 commemoration. (Photograph by the author) Speakers address the assembled crowd at the Sunday morning memorial service during the 2009 commemoration. (Photograph by the author) The Bloody Sunday memorial shortly after the memorial service and wreath-laying ceremony during the 2009 commemoration. (Photograph by the author) Crowds assemble at the Creggan shops, Derry, for the start of the 2008 Bloody Sunday commemorative march. (Photograph by the author) The front of the march being photographed by local photographers at the start of the 2008 Bloody Sunday commemorative march. (Photograph by the author) Republican banners lined up along railings at the Creggan shops prior to start of the 2005 Bloody Sunday commemorative march. (Photograph by the author) ix

51

52 53

56 60

64

65

66

69

70

71

x

Illustrations

4.4

4.5

4.6 4.7

4.8 4.9 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

Crowds assembling behind a banner announcing state collusion at the start of the 2005 Bloody Sunday commemorative march. (Photograph by the author) Families bearing white crosses and images of the dead assemble before start of rally at William Street during the 2009 commemoration. (Photograph by the author) Speakers address the assembled crowd at the rally during the 2009 commemoration. (Photograph by the author) Families bearing white crosses and images of the dead en route to Free Derry Corner during the 2009 commemoration. (Photograph by the author) Sea of Solidarity-Sea of Flags initiative during the 2009 commemoration. (Photograph by the author) NICRA commemorative poster, 1973. (Courtesy of Adrian Kerr, Museum of Free Derry) Bloody Sunday commemorative poster, 2002. (Courtesy of Adrian Kerr, Museum of Free Derry) Bloody Sunday commemorative poster, 1982. (Courtesy of Adrian Kerr, Museum of Free Derry) Bloody Sunday commemorative poster, 1986. (Courtesy of Adrian Kerr, Museum of Free Derry) Bloody Sunday commemorative poster, 1996. (Courtesy of Adrian Kerr, Museum of Free Derry) Exterior of Museum of Free Derry, Glenfada Park. (Photograph by the author) Bloody Sunday mural, Rossville Street. (Photograph by the author) Bloody Sunday mural, Westland Street. (Photograph by the author) Guildhall stained-glass commemorative window. (Photograph by the author)

72

73 76

77 78 82 106 111 112 113 123 130 131 134

Tables 1.1 2.1 5.1 6.1 7.1

Continuity and constructionist perspectives on collective memory Trajectory of social drama Commemorative discourses across three historical phases Comparing three sites of Bloody Sunday memory Framings of Bloody Sunday since 1972

16 24 102 122 144

Preface In the early 2000s I was enrolled as a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, the symbolic intellectual (and football) “home” of the Irish in America. The early part of the graduate programme involved taking various classes and I enrolled in a course under the title “Society and Identity” taught by Professor Andrew Weigert. One of the course textbooks, Eviatar Zerubavel’s slim and compact Social Mindscapes,1 contained a short chapter with the curious title ‘Social Memories’, and, serendipitously, reading this set off an interest in memory that has taken up a good deal of the last six years of my academic life. Earlier than I expected, my intellectual interests formed around collective memory. Casting about for an empirical case study to engage with the literature, naturally enough I was drawn to historical events close to home, and Bloody Sunday stood out as a particularly intriguing and fascinating empirical example from the Irish experience. Until then I knew little or nothing about the event apart from a skeletal knowledge one builds up from media coverage and school history textbooks. I subsequently wrote my class paper on Bloody Sunday memory, drawing on Zerubavel’s insights, and later published a revised version of this in Identity.2 About a year later, and now knowing more about the event, I set off on the difficult dissertation research and writing process with Bloody Sunday as the ‘case study’ and collective memory as ‘the literature’. The answer to the “a case of what” question in relation to Bloody Sunday was not always straightforward or simple, though.3 I began with a theoretical interest in the complex relationship between official memory and vernacular memory4 – influenced by the thinking of historian John Bodnar5 – and this “frame” guided my dissertation work. This later extended – in an article co-written with Lyn Spillman – to looking at the dynamic relation between embodied and textual memory via Paul Connerton’s work.6 Over the last few years I have read more widely and drawn on other theoretical resources about difficult pasts, memorialization, commodification, and globalization, to help me make sense of the Bloody Sunday case before finally settling on mnemonic trajectories as a way of bringing these disparate topics together under one overarching idea. Bloody Sunday as a case study of longitudinal commemorative change explained via the concepts of actors, contexts, and temporality xi

xii Preface

then, is the result of my thinking about the event over a lengthy period of time and reading into other previously ignored literatures. Clearly, the way I “cased” Bloody Sunday – to use the language of Charles Ragin7 – has changed from my earlier engagement with it in my dissertation. A good number of times since then I’ve been asked the ‘why Bloody Sunday?’ question. However, I am not so much interested in, and this book is not so much about, Bloody Sunday as it is about remembrance and commemoration. It has less to do with what happened on Bloody Sunday and more to do with the trajectory of its remembrance and commemoration publicly articulated via a range of cultural practices and artefacts from street murals to memorials and marches. Put another way, this book is about what happened afterwards – in cultural and symbolic terms – rather than what happened materially and physically on 30 January 1972. For this reason it is intended to appeal not just to people who are interested in Bloody Sunday but also to people who are interested in collective memory. The question of “where I stand” in relation to the topic and whether I have any interests to declare deserves some comment. The fact that I am a white male of southern Irish identity and have some background knowledge about the event and the society in which it took place makes me something of an “insider” in relation to the topic though, equally, the fact that I was not born at the time Bloody Sunday happened, have no personal connection to the event, researched and studied it from the vantage of a sociology doctoral student at the University of Notre Dame, and was guided in my research by sociological concepts and methods, gives me some claim to “outsider” or stranger status as well.8 I hope that my sociological engagement with Bloody Sunday does not disavow or diminish the intensely emotional and morally charged nature of it especially for the families of the dead. Bloody Sunday may well be an international political symbol but this does not liquidate the deeply personal nature of the event for the relatives of those killed. Beyond serendipity, what makes the Bloody Sunday case so fascinating to me, and I hope others, is the possibilities it opens up for interrogating the kinds of intellectual things that sociologists of memory attend to: memorialization, the politics of memory, the relationship between global contexts and local conditions in shaping memory work, the visualization and materialization of the past, remembering difficult pasts, and the private remembrance/public commemoration nexus. More broadly, the case opens up a wide range of interesting questions that have to do with historical symbolism, meaning-making and interpretation, and how these undergo change and modification over time,

Preface

xiii

memory as a resource in grounding claims to power and authority, and memory’s role in constituting societal and group identities, three ‘big questions’ delineated by Jeffrey Olick and Joyce Robbins in their 1998 review of the literature as the canonical focus of the then (and still) emerging field of memory studies.9 Given all that has been written and said about Bloody Sunday over the course of the last thirty-seven years, one wonders whether there is anything left to say about it at all. Some people even suggested to me that the event has already been well catered for. Although ‘the afterlife’ of the event in terms of how it has been represented and commemorated symbolically has not been completely ignored by scholars,10 there is still a good deal about this aspect of the Bloody Sunday story that has not been investigated and scrutinised. Interestingly, most of this writing on or about Bloody Sunday was published in the 1990s as temporal distance from the event increased. Hayes and Campbell’s study investigates the emotional consequences of the event and employs the concept of trauma to analyze this among the victims’ families. They find that the families of the dead experienced trauma from what happened as well as from what happened afterwards via the Widgery inquiry and point to the difficulty of processing difficult pasts at an individual level even through a second British state inquiry.11 Journalists Don Mullan, Eamonn McCann and others have put together various accounts of what happened on Bloody Sunday drawing on eyewitness testimony, photographic evidence, and, in some cases, personal memories.12 Mullan’s work played a critical role in promoting commemorative activity around the 25th and 30th anniversaries and highlighted the important link between inscribed and embodied memory. It acted as an impetus for the Paul Greengrass directed docudrama Bloody Sunday13 – the front cover of Mullan’s book symbolically linked itself to the docudrama through a depiction of the lead actor Ivan Cooper played by James Nesbitt and the caption declaring it a revised edition of the book that was a key impetus for the Bloody Sunday inquiry and the docudrama – whose release date responded to and sought to shape the political context and ongoing Saville Inquiry. The Saville Inquiry itself has spawned more analysis of the event and Eamonn McCann considers the challenges and satisfactions of it for the families of the dead and their long and seemingly interminable quest for truth.14 Moving up to the collective level, the politics of Bloody Sunday memory is taken up by historian Graham Dawson and in his analysis Bloody Sunday is also interpreted as trauma and this is expressed through a range of spatial mnemonics mapping history onto geography.15 In other

xiv Preface

work Dawson documents the shift from local to global orientations in relation to the event through a detailed historical chronicle of the origins and development of the Bloody Sunday Initiative and Bloody Sunday Justice Campaigns – highlighting the 1990s pairing of commemoration to political mobilization – but lacks an account of the social forces that fuelled it.16 Seamus Dunn also considers of politics of Bloody Sunday memory and examines symbolic changes in the commemorative march but lacks a theoretical scheme through which to analyse it and,17 at a methodological level, relies on newspaper accounts. Herron and Lynch’s recent work interrogates the memory of the event from a theatrical, literary and cinematic standpoint through a close study of Bloody Sunday poetry, plays, docudramas and the use of clever visual iconography. This work offers an analysis of how visual and verbal resources are mobilized to underwrite claims to truth and authenticity and register variable challenges to the dominant inscribed state memory.18 They see fictional public representations of the past as playing an important role in articulating truths about the event – fiction speaking to truth – though one wonders about whether literature, theatre and film are appropriate spaces for communicating truths about the past. Because they read these representations mostly as texts, they are less interested in the human actors involved in putting them together and the social forces shaping them. Finally, Bloody Sunday commemorations get a passing mention in Ian McBride’s relatively recent edited collection on Irish memory but no sustained or extended treatment is given to them.19 Thus, Bloody Sunday has been studied from literary, theatrical, psychological, historical, and journalistic perspectives. Beyond academic literatures and media accounts, filmmakers, musicians, artists, and poets, have all turned their attention to the topic resulting in a rich diversification and diffusion of the event. To date, though, no detailed study exists of its commemoration and remembrance from a specifically sociological standpoint.

Acknowledgements As every sociologist knows well, writing books, as with most endeavours in life, is a social enterprise. In writing this book over the past number of years, I’ve been encouraged, supported and challenged – to write better work – by many people. My first important debt is to my dissertation advisor, Lyn Spillman, who helped me to think about how Bloody Sunday could contribute to the broader collective memory literature. When I finished my dissertation in the department of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, Lyn presented me a book about how to make ‘the book from the dissertation’ transition. I hope the pages between these covers are faithful to the wise counsel in it and to her scholarly example. I am especially grateful for her patience, encouragement and insights during the research and writing stages of my dissertation. She invited me to co-present with her at a mini-conference on symbolic interactionist approaches to collective memory organized by Gary Alan Fine and held at Northwestern University in 2004 and through this made me feel part of the small community of collective memory scholars. Dissertation committee members Luke Gibbons, Eugene Halton and Andrew Weigert also deserve special thanks for their time and commitment to my dissertation project. Luke Gibbons graciously gave of his time despite many demands on it from others. Eugene Halton and Andrew Weigert pointed me in positive directions and helped me to organize my emerging ideas. At the University of Notre Dame I had the privilege of working – either as a research assistant or teaching assistant – with several other professors. I thank Joan Aldous, Kevin Christiano, David S. Hachen Jr., Eugene Halton, David Klein, David Yamane and Michael Welch for their encouragement, generosity and hospitality on many occasions. Gene Halton kindly invited me to his house on several occasions for music and food and both in good measure. I thank David Hachen especially for working with me on my Master’s thesis and seeing it through to publication as a journal article. Through Michael Welch I came to know a lot more about the process of academic writing. I learned more sociology from Robert Fishman, Maureen Hallinan and Samuel Valenzuela. I got a strong training in social statistics from Richard Williams. Special thanks are also due to sociology staff Pat Kipker, Nancy Mitchell and xv

xvi Acknowledgements

Katie Schlotfeldt who were always cheerful, sympathetic and helpful in dealing with everyday concerns about graduate school. I thank Chris Fox for supporting my work and inviting me to become affiliated with the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies during the time I spent in South Bend. Together, the Department of Sociology and the KeoughNaughton Institute for Irish Studies created a rich intellectual environment for graduate study. Beyond Notre Dame, Michael Hill and Mary Jo Deegan at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln shared many important insights – via CD-ROMS, letters, and conversations – with me about my emerging research. I thank them as well for their warm hospitality at their Lake Michigan cottage. In Pittsburgh, the Cunningham family have been great friends since I first went there to study in 1997. I will always to be grateful to Jim, Rita and Steve for their kindness and support during my graduate studies at the University of Pittsburgh and ever since. Professors Morton Coleman and Hide Yamatani taught me much about community organizing and evaluation research. I thank Andrew Aurand, Rob Clark, Jill Moyer, Dan Norton and Matt Onorato – fellow M.S.W. students – for their friendship during the time I spent in Pittsburgh. I thank Barry Schwartz at the University of Georgia for encouraging me from early on to write a book about Bloody Sunday memory. At University College Dublin, I thank Gabriel Kiely for his support of my academic career. I thank my former sociology colleagues at The Robert Gordon University – Julian Bell, Rory Lynch, John Love, Val Sheach-Leith, Phil Sutton, Stephen Vertigans and Chris Yuill – for the welcome they gave me during my short Scottish sojourn in 2006. In Dublin I thank Frank Boucher-Hayes, Aidan Dennehy, Aengus Daly, Krisztina Kosma and Frank Sammon. The National University of Ireland Maynooth gave me my first job as a sociologist. I thank Seán Ó Riain for all his encouragement and advice and my sociology colleagues in Maynooth – Mary Corcoran, Laurence Cox, Colin Coulter, Pauline Cullen, Honor Fagan, Jane Gray, Aphra Kerr, Deirdre Kirke, Mary Murphy, John O’Brennan, Rebecca King-Ó Riain, Peter Murray, Michel Peillon and Eamonn Slater – for creating a department supportive of research about culture. Thanks to Áine Edmonds and Trish Connerty for their administrative help. In an earlier identity, I was employed as a housing liaison officer in Carlow Town Council and I thank my former colleagues – Michael Brennan, Dougald Fitzgerald and Joe Watters – and the local authority tenants and elected councillors I worked with for teaching me about the satisfactions and challenges of grassroots urban community organizing.

xvii

Several people took the time to read parts of the book and for their careful reading I thank Gary Alan Fine, John Walton, Stephen Vertigans, Seán Ó Riain and Rebecca King-Ó Riain. Each gave thoughtful comments and suggestions that improved the book. Máirtín Mac An Ghaill read an earlier version of the full manuscript, and I thank him for his suggestions and encouragement. Andrew Hoskins also gave very useful suggestions for revision. Anonymous reviewers for earlier journal articles helped me to think more clearly about Bloody Sunday. Feedback from participants at various conferences also helped me to write better work. At Palgrave Macmillan I was very fortunate to have a first-rate production team – Christabel Scaife as editor, Renée Takken as editorial assistant and Vidhya Jayaprakash as copyeditor, and I thank them for their patience, professionalism and efficiency in preparing this book for publication. Two anonymous Palgrave reviewers gave me important and thoughtful feedback on the book. I thank Andrew Hoskins and John Sutton for initiating the Memory Studies series and shepherding this book through to publication as its inaugural monograph. Earlier versions of parts of this book appeared in the Journal of Historical Sociology, Memory Studies and Cultural Sociology and I thank the publishers for granting permission to reprint this material. Field research for this book was carried out in Derry and the interviewees deserve particular thanks for their time and for sharing with me their memories of Bloody Sunday commemorations. Two people are deserving of special thanks for facilitating my research – John Kelly and Jean Hegarty. For granting copyright permission to use previously published material in this book I thank Martin McGinley, Gerry O’Regan, Colm MacGinty and Seán Mac Brádaigh, editor of the Derry Journal, Irish Independent, Sunday World and An Phoblacht newspapers respectively. I also thank Eoin McVey of The Irish Times, Eamon Sweeney and William Allen of The Sentinel and Bernadette Walsh, archivist for Derry City Council, for granting copyright permission. I thank Edwina Stewart, former honorary secretary of NICRA, for granting copyright permission to use material relating to Bloody Sunday contained in NICRA’a archive in the Linenhall Northern Ireland Political Collection. Thanks to Adrian Kerr of the Museum of Free Derry for granting permission to use commemorative posters and other important archival material and for supplying copies of them to me. Nell McCafferty granted permission to use an article she wrote in the Derry News and I am grateful to her for this. I also thank Martin McGinley for supplying me with a copy of a

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

photograph of the unveiling of the Bloody Sunday memorial from the Derry Journal archives for use as the jacket image of this book. Researching and writing a book costs money. A Zahm Travel grant from Notre Dame’s Graduate School supported my fieldwork in Derry in 2004. For funding the indexing, I wish to acknowledge the National University of Ireland for its Grant in Aid of Publication. I thank the library and archival staff at the Linenhall Northern Ireland Political Collection, Belfast, the Central Library, Derry, the Queen’s University Belfast, the University of Ulster at Coleraine and Magee and the Belfast Central Newspaper Library. Bernadette Walsh, archivist for Derry City Council, was very helpful in facilitating access to its archival repository. Pat Devine, Bobby Dobbins and Damien McMahon helped me to gain access to documentary material in Derry City Council. Charles Morrison told me about the construction of the Bloody Sunday memorial and helped me find interviewees involved in its planning. Finally, I would like to express my appreciation and gratitude to my brothers – Paul, Joe, Noel and Gerard – and in America, sister-in-law, Kelly, and nephews Cassidy and Colin – for their long-distance phone calls and visits during the time I spent at Notre Dame. My greatest debt is to my parents and for this reason this book is dedicated to them.



xviii

1972 27 February February

DWAC hold march along original route of Bloody Sunday march. Galway music group, Dinkeas, release song entitled ‘The Derry Massacre’.

1973 27 January 28 January 28 January

30 January

DCRA all-night vigil at Free Derry Corner. New record entitled ‘London’s Derry’ is released by music group, Blackthorn. Requiem Mass at St Mary’s Church, Creggan. Inter-denominational service at Rossville Street. Cutting of first sod on site of proposed memorial at Rossville Street by British Labour Party Peer, Lord Fenner Brockway. Recitation of Thomas Kinsella’s poem ‘Butcher’s Dozen’ by British film actor, Vanessa Redgrave. Singing of songs dedicated to Bloody Sunday. One-hour vigil organized by Newry Civil Disobedience Co-ordination Committee held outside Newry police station. First annual commemorative marches organized by DCRA and NICRA. SF march against internment takes place from the Creggan to Westland Street to Celtic Park where a rally is held. Recitation of ‘Have you Forgotten Bloody Sunday?’ poem by Kathleen Largy. First anniversary Mass at St Mary’s Church, Creggan. Laying of wreaths at graves of dead in city cemetery and at site of proposed memorial. Singing of songs in memory of dead. Observation of two-minutes’ silence at 4pm. Inter-denominational service at Rossville Street flats. xix



Spatiotemporal Chronology of Bloody Sunday Commemorative Activity, 1972–2009

Spatiotemporal Chronology

28 January – 30 January

4 February

Black flags flown in Creggan and Bogside. Black armbands worn by Bogside residents. Window blinds lowered. First candlelit vigil in Bogside at end of commemorative ceremonies. March from Derrybeg to town centre organized by NCDCC.

1974 26 January

1976 31 January 1978

Unveiling of Rossville Street Monument by Bridget Bond of DCRA. Two commemorative marches held – PSF and DCRA and NICRA. SF Commemoration theme: demand the release of all Republican prisoners. NICRA Commemoration theme: “Civil Rights – not – Civil War”. Provisional IRA display M-60 heavy sub-machine gun at Bloody Sunday march for the press. Only SF commemorative march held – NICRA held wreath-laying ceremony.

1983 22 January

Fourteen trees planted at Rossville Street by Derry SF.

1984 25 January

First Bloody Sunday Commemorative lecture, ‘The Road from Bloody Sunday: Reflections 12 Years On ...’ at Creggan Community Centre. Bloody Sunday march raised to the level of a national event by SF.

1985 January 27

January 27 January 22

American Red Indians participate in march and rally. Bloody Sunday Commemoration Committee organizes commemorative events. Relatives of Bloody Sunday dead placed wreaths at the memorial and recited a decade of the Rosary. Motion tabled at Derry City Council for Bloody Sunday commemorative plaque to be erected in the Guildhall.



xx

Spatiotemporal Chronology xxi

25 January 1988

1989 30 January –

3 February 7 December

Bloody Sunday Forum at Central Drive Community Centre, Creggan, addressed by Ken Livingstone. Seven days notice given to RUC of intention to hold commemorative march under Public Order Act (Northern Ireland) 1987 Establishment of Bloody Sunday Initiative Bloody Sunday photographic exhibition in Pilot’s Row Community Centre organized by Camerawork Darkrooms. Bloody Sunday memorial damaged by graffiti. Stained-glass commemorative window installed in porch of Guildhall.

1990 28 January

“Free the Birmingham Six” chosen as theme of commemoration.

1991 November

27 January

Gregory Campbell criticizes BSI as a ‘closet Sinn Féin type’ organization and declines support for application for funding by the BSI for two Bloody Sunday commemoration seminars on human rights. Plaque at Glenfada Park to Charles Love, who was killed by an IRA bomb intended for the security forces, unveiled by Love’s father, Patrick Love, as the march passes. Plaque was erected by the BSI.

1992 (20th anniversary) 26 January

30 January

March proceeds to Guildhall Square for the first time where white crosses and wreaths were laid at the steps of the Guildhall. Former NICRA executive committee members lay wreaths at memorial out of concern for people who wished to commemorate Bloody Sunday without it ‘being linked to any political party or paramilitary group’ (Derry Journal, 24 January 1992). March proceeds to Guildhall Square. Establishment of Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign. A mock High Court judge whitewashes over the Bloody Sunday victims mural on Westland Street.



1986


1993

1994

28 January

March returns to original route. Bloody Sunday Memorial Weekend on theme of “Bloody Sunday – Beyond Injustice”. Gregory Campbell criticizes BSI for inviting Robert McBride, convicted for killing three civilians in South Africa, as the main speaker at the rally. Ms Bernadette McAliskey delivers first annual BSJC Memorial lecture. “March for Peace” chosen as theme of annual commemorative march. Forum on “Just Peace”.

1995 28 January 1996

Unionist/Loyalist Perspectives on the Peace Process discussion forum held in Bogside. Third annual Bloody Sunday weekend commemoration.

1997 (25th anniversary) 30 January

31 January 2 February

18 April

Re-dedication of Rossville Street monument. Establishment of Bloody Sunday Trust. Two minutes’ silence observed throughout Derry marking beginning of weekend-long series of commemorative events. Concelebrated commemorative Mass in St Mary’s Church, Creggan. Derry Journal Bloody Sunday commemorative supplement published. Image of each victim is raised at Fahan Street as their names are called out. Fourteen trees planted at Creggan Reservoir. Seamus Heaney publishes poem, ‘The Road to Derry’. Bloody Sunday commemorative badges go on sale. Street drama of walking through a large-size reproduction of the front page of the Widgery Report at Westland Street. Banners depicting Bloody Sunday dead are displayed on embankment at Southway at start of march. Unveiling of new Bloody Sunday victims’ mural on Westland Street. Black flags flown at Free Derry Corner. Commemoration in Guildhall of publication of Widgery Report.



xxii

Spatiotemporal Chronology xxiii

September

‘Remember Rossville’ street exhibition in Bogside.

25 January 28 January

30 January

1 February

Sunday Business Post publishes eight-page supplement of photos of and interviews with victims’ relatives. Discussion forum on Unionist/Loyalist perspectives on the Peace Process at Pilots Row Community Centre, Bogside. Publication of Bloody Sunday booklet by BSJC. First SDLP political representative addresses the rally. Fourteen banners of the faces of the dead are raised along Rossville Street. Fourteen black flags flown at Free Derry Corner. BSJC booklet Bloody Sunday: A Miscarriage of Justice published. Six large paintings of British soldiers are hung from the Derry Walls at the Grand Parade section. Worldwide tour of exhibition ‘Hidden Truths: Bloody Sunday 1972’.

1999 30 January 27 September 2000

30 January

29 January

2001

Two-minutes’ silence observed by people of Derry at 4pm. Bloody Sunday Centre opens in Shipquay Street. March proceeds to Guildhall instead of Free Derry Corner. Service at Bloody Sunday Memorial attended by Bishop of Derry, Dr Seamus Hegarty, SDLP, and SF Assembly members. Commemorative garden added to Rossville Street memorial. Commemorative march changes traditional route and continues on to the Guildhall Square, Derry city centre. Free Derry Corner undergoes landscaping and rally takes place on the fringes of it. Discussion forum in Workhouse Museum, Waterside, on meaning of Bloody Sunday to Protestants (event cancelled). “Protecting the Guilty?” chosen as commemoration theme.



1998

xxiv


24 January Launch of Bloody Sunday black ribbons and programme of commemorative events 29 January Unveiling of Bloody Sunday mural at Free Derry Corner. Unveiling of plaque at the Bloody Sunday memorial. Launch of A Matter of Minutes: The Enduring Legacy of Bloody Sunday. 30 January Minute’s silence at Rossville Street memorial to mark time when British army opened fire. Bishop Daly officiates at rededication of memorial wearing stole he wore on Bloody Sunday. 1 February Derry Journal eight-page commemorative supplement published. 12 August ‘Hidden Truths – Bloody Sunday 1972’ photograph exhibition opens in Pilots Row Community Center, Rossville Street. 2003 2 February

2004 2005 2006

Banners and lighted torches at Free Derry Corner commemorate massacres across the world. Launch of ‘Open the Files’ campaign (campaign to force British government to make publicly available information about collusion between the state and loyalist paramilitaries in bringing about the deaths of people in Derry and Donegal). “Time for Truth” chosen as commemoration theme. “Time for Truth: From Bogside to Basra” chosen as commemoration theme “Towards Justice” chosen as commemoration theme

2007 27 January

2008

Official opening of Museum of Free Derry “Hold Power to Account” chosen as commemoration theme “Truth and Lies” chosen as commemoration theme

2009 31 January

Unveiling of DCRA banner in Museum of Free Derry.



2002 (30th anniversary)

1 February

“Justice Delayed Justice Denied” chosen as commemoration theme. Sea of Solidarity-Sea of Flags – expressing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza victimized by Israeli military attacks – involved carrying 1,000 Palestinian flags on the Bloody Sunday march. Rally takes place in William Street at spot where barricade was erected to stop the original march reaching the Guildhall.



Spatiotemporal Chronology xxv

AOH BBDA BBI BSJC BSI BST BSWC CAIN CRA DCRA DUP DCAC DCRA DHAC DWAC EU IF IIP INLA IRA LDC LHNIPC LVF NCDCC NICRA NIHE NIO OBE PUP PSF POW PFC RTÉ RUC SAS SDLP SF

Ancient Order of Hibernians Bogside and Brandywell Development Association Bogside and Brandywell Initiative Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign Bloody Sunday Initiative Bloody Sunday Trust Bloody Sunday Weekend Committee Conflict Archive on the Internet Civil Rights Association Derry Civil Rights Association Democratic Unionist Party Derry Citizens Action Committee Derry Civil Rights Association Derry Housing Action Committee Derry Women’s Action Committee European Union Irish Front Irish Independence Party Irish National Liberation Army Irish Republican Army Londonderry Development Commission Linen Hall Northern Ireland Political Collection Loyalist Volunteer Force Newry Civil Disobedience Co-ordination Committee Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association Northern Ireland Housing Executive Northern Ireland Office Order of the British Empire Progressive Unionist Party Provisional Sinn Féin Prisoner Of War Pat Finucane Centre Radio Teilifís Éireann Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Air Service Social Democratic and Labour Party Sinn Féin xxvi



Abbreviations

Abbreviations

Ulster Community Action Network Ulster Defence Association Ulster Defence Regiment Ulster Television Ulster Unionist Party Ulster Volunteer Force Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to University of South Florida - PalgraveConnect - 2011-05-25

UCAN UDA UDR UTV UUP UVF

xxvii


Introduction: Actors, Contexts and Temporality

Just a day after newspaper coverage invoked the memory of the Holocaust to make sense of the killing by British soldiers of thirteen civilians while peacefully marching against internment in Derry, Northern Ireland.1 An article in the nationalist Derry Journal newspaper under the title ‘The March That Ended in a River of Blood’ registered the deeply felt collective anger among Derry people and observed that ‘as more eyewitness accounts of the holocaust that was the Bogside of Sunday, 30 January 1972, became available deeper was the conviction that it was a day of deepest shame for the British army’.2 The very application of the term “Bloody Sunday”3 as a cultural shorthand for what happened symbolically joined the event to other previous Bloody Sunday events in Irish and world history. Some thirty-three years later, and looking towards the 2006 commemoration, well-known Derry journalist Nell McCafferty picked up on this parallel-drawing and pleaded against conceding too much to the global and not going too far in homogenizing memories of the event: ‘links with other struggles can be made – and rightly so – in linked events, but on the day itself, let us remember and concentrate on exactly what happened in 1972. Lest we forget.4 This question of whether something particular or something universal is being remembered – a unique Derry experience generating specific memories and metaphor for British state malevolence or a delocalized cosmopolitan event symbolically connected with other similar events – has been an ongoing question for the families of the dead and the wider nationalist community, which has sought to remember it and deal with its emotional, moral, legal and political consequences over more than three decades.5 On the afternoon of 30 January 1972 thirteen men were killed while taking part in an anti-internment march in Derry. Within a few hours, 1



1


the term ‘Bloody Sunday’ was attached to this event and a clear parallel drawn with earlier Bloody Sunday events highlighting the unsavoury side of British involvement in Irish colonial and imperial history and of state repression more broadly. It was soon claimed as a key spark of “the Troubles” and as a switchpoint in Northern Irish culture, society and politics. It became a frame of reference for denoting time – the past was partitioned into that which happened ‘before Bloody Sunday’ and that which happened ‘after Bloody Sunday’6 – and space – many people remember where they were when Bloody Sunday happened. Irish nationalists, and Irish republicans in particular, worked hard to embed and prolong this event in Northern Irish collective memory and to propagate, transmit and distribute its history. Throughout “the Troubles” – an oddly convenient discursive shorthand for over thirty years of violence, death and destruction in Northern Ireland – the event played a key role in “boundary work” between nationalists and unionists.7 And Bloody Sunday had a lot going for it in commemorative terms – a pre-existing commemorative tradition via street mural painting, resonance with historical grievances and experiences of oppression, a large number of people with direct experience of the event, and committed historians willing to work hard at keeping it fresh and up to date. But the story about Bloody Sunday is not as straightforward as this. It was a deeply contested and politicized event fuelling not just antagonism between nationalists and unionists but also within Irish nationalism itself. Bloody Sunday’s totemic stature as an example of the ill-effects of British colonialism and imperialism was never wholly accepted even among those who claimed the event for Irish republican nationalism. Six years after the event, an account of the 1978 Bloody Sunday commemoration was carried in an unlikely place – the pages of the yellow-press newspaper, the Sunday World. One of the families of the victims of the event strongly criticized the Irish Republican Army’s appropriation – or ‘capturing’ – of the event for narrow propaganda purposes. Margaret Doherty, sister of Barney McGuigan and then peace movement activist, questioned Sinn Féin’s claim to legitimacy as memory choreographer by asserting ‘no way will I allow anyone to use Barney’s name to justify more killing. Barney was the same nature as myself, trying to get on the best he could and never in any trouble. No one has ever asked the families if their names could be used in support of more violence.’8 This represented a strong critique of the IRA’s deployment of the event to mobilize and authorize public support for the use of violence



2

to bring about political change and underlined that vernacular memory is not as benign as one is sometimes led to expect. This family member “heard” Bloody Sunday in a very different way and showed that not everyone lined up neatly on one side of the interpretative mnemonic struggle. Instead of invoking it as a metaphor for the utility of violence, she articulated the view that Bloody Sunday stood for the futility of violence as a means of righting the wrongs of the past. Both interpretations articulated different strategies for change but converged in their taking issue with the hegemonic official interpretation of the event which defined it as one involving the loss of life for which the state carried no responsibility. This official British state memory embodied in the Widgery Report operated as a strong counterpoint against which the vernacular nationalist memory was constructed and reconstructed. This early rhetorical flourish revealed through this vignette – repeated again and again at various occasions of commemoration in the 1970s and 1980s – defined the terms in which Bloody Sunday was to be discursively narrated, understood and remembered among Irish nationalists and republicans in the 1970s, 1980s and well into the 1990s. Even among the families of the victims and within the vernacular nationalist memory, Bloody Sunday meant different things to different people. This internal differentiation was manifest at the annual commemoration. In the early 1970s, some families attended the commemoration marches while others stayed away and preferred instead to leave a floral wreath at the Rossville Street memorial to their dead son, father or brother. From the beginning, private remembrance did not easily map on to public commemoration and the vernacular nationalist memory was never homogenous or “all of-a piece”. Frequently the vernacular nationalist memory was a container for multiple and colliding interpretations. There was not one Bloody Sunday but many Bloody Sundays. To be sure, because the Northern Ireland conflict intensified shortly after it and other tragic events claimed attention, Bloody Sunday faded more and more into the background. But the exceptionalist nature of the event – and other aspects of its commemorability mentioned earlier – ensured its memory was not easily forgotten. Memory choreographers worked hard to ensure it wasn’t. Newspaper coverage in the mid-1970s around the time of the anniversary tended to recycle earlier original images of the public funerals of the dead and of their coffins lying in repose before the altar of St Mary’s Catholic church in the Creggan or images of the dead men. On the nearest



Introduction: Actors, Contexts and Temporality 3


Sunday to 30 January every year throughout the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, the memory of Bloody Sunday was activated and re-activated via a march along the route of the original march. At this event, most of the families of the victims were given pride of place and carried the secular symbol of a floral wreath or, in more recent times, a sacred symbol of a cross, at the front of the march. For Sinn Féin (SF), which was the dominant organizer of the commemoration throughout the 1970s and 1980s period, Bloody Sunday was pressed into service in the construction of a message of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. Bloody Sunday had “legs” as an event reminding people of the malevolent British presence in Northern Ireland and northern republicans seized upon it to turn public opinion away from the British state and attract support for its own goals. Even so, Irish republicans worried about it becoming a casualty of oblivion. Announcements in the republican press in the mid-1970s, for example, asked ‘Have you forgotten Bloody Sunday?’9 Part of this worry could be explained by the fact that SF did not have the discursive field totally to itself and that there were competing memories of other events as “the Troubles” deepened.10 Alternative interpretations of the event were put forward by other organizations and individuals – what Ronald Jacobs refers to as ‘communities of discourse’11 – but particularly by Roman Catholic sources such as the then Bishop of Derry, Edward Daly, and moderate constitutional nationalists. Bloody Sunday commemorations became rhetorical flashpoints between Irish republicans and the leadership of the Catholic Church and constitutional nationalism. Catholic Church leaders saw Bloody Sunday as a symbol of the evils of political violence and the sacred nature of human life. A discourse of peace, as we shall see, was also forcefully articulated by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association who protested against the use of Bloody Sunday as a metaphor to authorize political violence. In this early discursive battle, Sinn Féin succeeded in “capturing” the event and establishing its legitimacy as the key memory choreographer, while political actors from parties such as the Social Democratic and Labour Party and religious leaders, both Catholic and Protestant, tended to disavow and disidentify with it. As well as carrying different meanings within the broad Irish nationalist community Bloody Sunday also evoked different interpretations between nationalists/Catholics and unionists/Protestants. Protestant opinion on Bloody Sunday tended to be aligned with that of the British state and no Protestant organized commemoration took place, a register of the ‘our past’/’their past’12 dynamic shaping the sectarian political



4

constellation of Northern Ireland. Protestant political elites tended to stay away from Bloody Sunday commemorations and played little or no role in their organization. Bloody Sunday retained this internal past-oriented focus for much of the 1970s and 1980s. But what of the 1990s? This period was marked by a displacement of earlier enemy-making Otherizing discourse by a new emphasis on inclusivity and depoliticizing Bloody Sunday as a symbol. In the new moral economy of the “peace process”, a rhetoric of victimhood – so often highlighted in the 1970s and 1980s via Bloody Sunday – began to carry less plausibility and resonance in political claim-making. New memory choreographers came on board with strong legitimacy claims based upon familial ties to the dead and a commitment to dislodge the official British state memory of the event.13 A changing social-political-institutional environment provided a propitious context for the realization of this goal over time and the wrestling of “ownership” of the event away from Irish republicans. This story about the trajectory of Bloody Sunday memory provides a fascinating opportunity to bring to bear a sociological analysis of collective memory. Jay Winter’s recent work on World War I remembrance exhorts students of commemoration, against the long-standing emphasis on political elites, to take up the challenge of investigating the ‘small groups of men and women who do the work of remembrance’.14 With Winter I emphasize – via the memory work concept15 and the multi-level model used to understand it introduced in the next section – what non-elite social actors do and say to keep the past fresh in their own and other people’s memories and their connection to an interesting grid of local, national and global factors.

Memory work: A multi-level model At a basic level then, commemoration is work. In this book I propose that this memory work can be usefully understood at four distinct ideal-typical levels: (1) individual, (2) small-group, (3) social, and (4) institutional. Each of these levels of analysis corresponds to standard conceptual categories in the sociological analysis of social structure.16 At the micro individual level of analysis, memory work has to do with what individuals do to keep the past alive and fresh. Keeping photographs of the dead, attending commemorative events, and passing on stories about the past to one’s children, all constitute examples of individual-level memory work. Some individuals





bring first-hand experience of the past to their memory work – what Maurice Halbwachs refers to as autobiographical memory17 – and others bring experience of the past mediated through cultural artefacts or practices. When individuals come together at the small-group level to remember the past a second level of memory work is created. I refer to these human actors involved in creating and propagating commemorative discourses and strategies at the small-group level – what Iwona IrwinZarecki calls the ‘practitioners’ of collective memory18 – as ‘memory choreographers’. Other analogous terms include “students of the past”, “historians of the past”, agents of memory19 or more simply ‘commemorationists’. Memory choreographers are to historical events what ‘reputational entrepreneurs’20 are to historical figures. Republican activists, families of the dead, community leaders, academics, journalists and politicians can all constitute memory choreographers. These choreographers bring values, ideologies and resources to their work and these mediate how they represent the past and negotiate the spaces between local conditions and global contexts, private remembrance and public commemoration, and official memory and vernacular memory. Often they are guided by moral and legal imperatives21 – to seek truth for the dead and to heal the living – and political purposes – to make those in positions of power and authority in society accountable to ordinary people. Their day-to-day work encompasses a wide range of activities including planning for a memorial, organizing marches, constructing political discourse, lobbying political elites, collecting historical material and communicating with the media. Small-group memory work typically results in some kind of public act of commemoration that may be “successful” or not. This represents the third level of analysis – the social level – and has an identifiable temporal structure or “career”. Archives, monuments, docudramas, marches, tree-planting ceremonies, candlelit processions, and wreath-laying services, are the material and social manifestations of it. By contrast with the lower levels of memory work, this level of memory work brings struggles between different social groups over issues of ownership of the past to the fore. A second important feature of this level of memory work is that it is structured by the social calendar. In the example of Bloody Sunday, the commemoration takes place every year on the nearest Sunday to 30 January. The calendar regulates the commemorative cycle and defines appropriate times of remembrance. 22



6

One level above the social level is the institutional level. This has to do with the role state institutions and organizations play in “making” memory. Establishing a legal inquiry is one obvious form of state memory-making. State commemorative activity can also take the form of sponsoring its own commemorative activity – as in the example of the Guildhall stained-glass window discussed in Chapter 6 – or suppressing or simplifying individual, small-group, and social memory work. In the Bloody Sunday example, the Widgery Tribunal set up in February 1972 to establish the truth about what happened, suppressed the memories of civilian eyewitnesses and stood as the authoritative story about the event. From this time on, social-level memory work around Bloody Sunday was aimed at and sought to challenge this formal legal memory of the event initially via the annual commemorative march and much later through a wide range of social and material technologies of remembrance. Successful memory choreography in the 1990s resulted in a second official British state inquiry in the form of the Saville Inquiry, a symbolic suppression of the earlier Widgery Report. All four levels of analysis have two key properties – they are mutually embedded and exercise different levels of authority and power. By mutually embedded I mean that memory work at one level tends to be oriented towards memory work at another level. For example, memory work at the collective level tends to be oriented towards changing or affirming legal state-sanctioned memories of the past. Sometimes memory work at one level collides with memory work at another – consider, for example, that collective-level memory work can be incongruent with individual-level memory work – as in the example of the Bogside street mural considered in Chapter 6 – by homogenizing people’s memories of the past. State-level memory work can be opposed to the lower levels of memory work as well. Resolution of this conflict can take the form of legal inquiries, truth commissions and public apologies. These public acts provide formal legitimation of memory work at other levels. The second key feature of these levels of memory work relates to asymmetries of power grounded in claims to legitimacy. Together, they make up a hierarchy of memory work and state-level memory work tends to exert the strongest claim on power and authority. This power is based upon the state’s claim to legitimacy as the monopoly source of truths about the past.23 By contrast, the individual, small-group, and social level exert weaker claims on this ability to define the truth and struggle for the power and legitimacy to do this. As one moves from the micro to the macro levels of this memory work hierarchy, one moves from multiple individual memories of the





past that are the result of individual-level memory work to increasingly abstract and homogenized memory work at the social and institutional level. Successful social-level memory work runs up against the problem of the fragmentation and pluralization of individual memories and tends to suppress or simplify some of these in its quest to construct a shared group memory. Special attention is given in this book to memory work at the smallgroup level while bearing in mind its embeddedness in the other levels of memory work. Memory work at this level involves three key activities – political activity, social activity and cultural activity – and a brief discussion of each helps to make this clearer.

Activities of memory work Memory work as political activity From the beginning, Bloody Sunday was a highly politicized event and public quarrels over its meaning involved the playing out of power struggles between rival political groups. Partisan interests strongly influenced how different people interpreted, make sense of and mobilized the past to authorize political and sometimes violent action. Apart from interpretative struggles, the political side of memory work involves mobilization. This takes the form of a diverse range of activities: writing letters to and holding meeting with political elites, organizing fundraising activities, publishing material, conducting archival research, initiating postcard campaigns, engaging with legal experts and communicating with media professionals. A physical infrastructure such as office space in a prominent public building provides an important starting point for this work and gives it visibility. Mobilization also involves establishing an organization as a conduit for lobbying political elites with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the official state memory. Giving the organization a name that encapsulates its focus is a basic first step and meetings, recruiting a critical mass of followers, securing public petitions, lobbying and external communication follow from this.24 In time the organization develops an internal division of labour – different people take on different tasks of fundraising, internal organization, external relations, media campaigning, and so on. Compared to memory choreography in the 1970s and 1980s, a wider range of political and non-political interests were represented in the small groups involved in organizing the annual commemoration in the 1990s. The Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign,25 an organization established during this time and dedicated to the quest for truth about the event, for



8

example, tended to be less closely aligned with Irish republicans and represented a broad church. The 1990s did not entail the liquidation of Irish republican involvement in the commemoration’s organization but it did signal a new emphasis on de-coupling Bloody Sunday and republican politics. This depoliticization gave the organization currency in gaining legitimacy among political elites beyond Northern Ireland. Beyond these well-known movement strategies, memory choreographers also adopted framing devices to advance their project. 26 A frame is a “thought organizer”,27 and “victimhood” in the 1970s and 1980s and “justice” and “truth” in the 1990s were the major normative frames employed. Against many people’s expectations, political mobilization in the 1990s resulted in the successful outcome of a second British state inquiry into the event and the transformation of Bloody Sunday into a highly visible public event. Memory work as social activity Virtually all the sites of Bloody Sunday memory examined in this book resulted from a small cadre of dedicated people coming together to “do something” about remembering the event. Different people had different pathways to involvement – some people were aggrieved about the official memory of the event that dishonoured the victims by holding them to blame for what happened. Others came on board because they identified with and felt connected with a nationalist group identity. Still others became involved in the commemoration because they were recruited into it through their local social networks. Commemoration, then, is the outcome of social engagement – people developing ties with other people – and folding these ties into strong, long-term relationships with frequent interaction28 – to secure various kinds of needed resources from material to ideological ones. In the early 1970s, as we shall see in Chapter 3, commemorative activity in relation to the Bloody Sunday memorial involved a cadre of local people led by Bridgit Bond working with the local city bureaucracy to realize their plans for a memorial to the dead. Local ties and associations mattered in seeing this through. Later, and especially in the late 1980s and 1990s, global ties and networks became increasingly important in heightening the visibility of the event, marketing the cause of the families of the dead on a transnational level, and exerting claims on British state power. These transnational actors functioned as important frames of reference for understanding the Northern Irish context but they also constituted a source of funding to advance their goals as well as sources of information about bringing about political change.





One example of this was the visit in 1996 by a group of Mexicans from Guerrero, Mexico, who were invited by the Pat Finucane Centre to visit Derry on the basis of their shared historical past. In Guerrero seventeen civilian farm workers were killed by police in 1995, evoking strong parallels with the Bloody Sunday experience. During their visit the group of Mexicans forged links with Derry human rights activists and visited the Rossville Street memorial to the dead and laid a wreath there.29 Memory work as cultural activity Apart from alliances and association on the one hand and mobilization and contestation on the other, memory work also involves meaningmaking and interpretation in relation to the past and the mobilization of three key cultural resources: historical symbolism, political discourse and performative embodiment. Each year variable combinations of these are used in commemorative activity. While they are analytically separable, empirically they are often employed in conjunction with one another. Consider, for example, that during the annual commemorative march – an example of embodied memory – symbols such as black flags, white crosses, floral wreaths, or artistic representations of the faces of the dead are carried by participants and that the end of the march is an occasion of political discourse. Symbols are significant because they crystallize meanings in relation to the past in familiar objects and because through them identities are defined and social actions are motivated.30 Identity has to do with the answers to basic and standard “who am I?” who are we?” questions. Studies of the social construction of identity tell us that identities situate people in society and establish their belonging to a group and nonbelonging to other groups.31 The other is another self. Memories of the past tend to play a key role in people’s identity storylines – either at an individual or collective level – about what makes them different from or similar to others. Announcing one’s identity at regular intervals via symbols, myths and practices, serves to reinforce and strengthen ingroup attachment and out-group differentiation. 32 At the same time, identity storylines undergo change as people invest new meanings in symbols of themselves in the context of different presents. Symbols also play an important role in social categorization and delineating power differences in society. David Kertzer’s work,33 in particular, reminds us of the powerful role representations play in underwriting claims to authority and power and in creating ‘solidarity without consensus’. People may come together around certain symbols but this does not necessarily mean that they share the same interpretations of them



10

and one group’s rallying point is another group’s negative frame of reference. In the Northern Irish context, historical symbolism is employed to articulate claims on state power – for example, historically Orange marches symbolically announced the hegemonic position of unionists within Northern Ireland via regular reminding to nationalists of their previous battle victories over them. Whether symbolic representations – something that stands for something else34 – succeed or not in getting their intended meaning to “take hold” is variable. Symbols evoke different meanings for different people depending on their retrievability, rhetorical force, resonance, institutional retention, and whether or not the symbol motivates human action.35 The relationship between signifier and signified then is not always straightforward,36 and sociologists refer to this unstable and indeterminate nature of symbolism as multivocality, polysemy or semiotic openness.37 In the case of Bloody Sunday I look at such things as the crosses, floral wreaths, banners and flags carried on the march, the use of street theatre in the 1990s, and the symbols employed in commemorative posters, programmes and announcements and whether these “bounce off” one another or not. This is clearly in evidence in the case of the march which stops at strategic points – namely the Bloody Sunday murals along Westland Street and the memorial at Rossville Street – and both places, by virtue of being charged with emotional meaning, heighten the resonance of the march. Apart from symbols, discourses also crystallize meanings in relation to the past.38 A good deal of attention is paid in this book to the role of discourse – what people said about Bloody Sunday – particularly at commemorative rallies at which various actors engage in political claim-making and counter claim-making and seek to establish their legitimacy in the eyes of others. Discourses can be understood as simply the ‘talk’ or ‘rhetoric’that takes place at commemorations through political speeches. This ‘talk’ can be oriented to different ‘publics’ or ‘multiple public spheres’,39 either internal or external or both. In addition to symbolism and discourse, the past is also carried in and through people’s bodies. Collective memory research is dominated by a stress on texts of various kinds – memorials, monuments, museums and so forth. A regrettable consequence of this textual tilt, though, is that less attention has been given to the performance of the past through collective ritual, drawing on scholarship (mostly within anthropology) that treats the human body as an important object of enquiry for students of collective memory. Intervening in this debate, recent collective memory research makes a distinction between two





distinct though related approaches in this literature – on the one hand a ‘weak embodiment’ argument that points to the body’s capacity to function as a kind of text announcing identity politics. A second position, the ‘strong embodiment’ argument, focuses on the mnemonic capacities of the body itself – how the body remembers – as against the ‘outside-in’ orientation of the more common weaker argument.40 This study attempts to draw on these ‘weak embodiment’ and ‘strong embodiment’ arguments in understanding the meanings people give to the annual Bloody Sunday march.

The scope and limits of memory work I am not the first to employ a concept relating to the “making” of memory but I think about it somewhat differently to earlier usages by delineating the different levels of it and the activities it entails at the small-group level. The memory work concept implies that memory is something that involves human effort – that is accomplished – over time and that can be “successful” or not. Collective memory research posits a relationship – though not a straightforward or simple one – between society and memory,41 but provides few empirical accounts of the logics, understandings and decisions across time of those who set out to remember some past event or figure at the small-group level. At this level, three kinds of activities are involved: political activity in the form of engaging in interpretative struggles with other political actors as well as establishing and building organizations and lobbying political elites to give a hearing to vernacular memories; cultural activity in the form of mobilizing symbolism, discourse and embodiment in representing the past in the present; and social activity in the form of building ties and allies with others in securing needed resources. By attending to these political, cultural and social activities and delineating between these different levels of memory work, this book proposes a sociological understanding of Bloody Sunday that is missing from earlier analyses of the event. The theoretical payoff of conceiving of commemorative activity in this way is that it moves one away from conceiving of memory as a static fixed thing – akin to someone pointing to a memorial and saying ‘there’s memory for you’ – and invites an historical approach to commemorative forms and practices that is sensitive to temporal context.42 Put differently, the approach taken up in this book casts light on the long-term processes involved in remembrance and commemoration



12

and thus fits squarely with recent emphases on the usefulness of historical processional approaches in understanding collective memory.43 It is also closely aligned with a symbolic interactionist perspective on the past,44 by its attention to the human actors who co-produce the meanings of the past through a process of deliberation – and usually contestation in the case of problematic pasts like Bloody Sunday – with one another. As Gary Alan Fine and Aaron Beim neatly put it, ‘collective memory is a living concept, linked to the behaviors and responses of social actors who generate meanings.45 Admittedly, the approach adopted in this book involving an in-depth sociological-historical study of a single case and that takes long-run changes and developments in relation to commemoration seriously, runs up against some limitations and it is important to recognize and confront these head-on. First, studies of this kind, in line with most collective memory research, tends to be guilty of selecting on the dependent variable – sociologists study examples of historical events and figures that get remembered much more than they do events and figures that were a casualty of oblivion. In the Northern Irish context alone, there is no shortage of examples of non-remembered deaths during “the Troubles” period that received much less attention than Bloody Sunday. Certainly more attention should be given in the collective memory literature to “negative cases”46 as a basis for illuminating the conditions under which remembrance takes place – or not – and in this book I draw attention to examples of unsuccessful Bloody Sunday commemoration that help us do this. In Chapter 3, for instance, I provide detail on a proposed memorial to the Bloody Sunday dead in the Gasyard. This memorial did not materialize because it did not have wide symbolic resonance and its sponsors paid insufficient attention to the political exigencies influencing their ability to pull it off. In short, they poorly understood the social, political and cultural dimensions of memory work. Other commemorative activity, such as the Bloody Sunday memorial, was successful because memory choreographers were careful to ensure its resonance, minimize political conflicts via negotiation with city elites, and enlist the help and legitimacy of a wide range of local and international allies. A second potential criticism of this approach is that it could be perceived to fall short of the “gold” standard of more quantitatively oriented social scientific research involving the selection of one’s cases on the basis of a random sampling procedure.47 Historical happenings of the nature of events like Bloody Sunday or others such as revolutions,





however, do not typically occur with great frequency to allow for random selection from a wide range of possible cases. Social scientists are left with a small pool of cases to construct theories about their causes and consequences and to investigate interesting sources of empirical variation.48 A focus on memory choreography via in-depth, qualitative interviews, participant observation, and archival research also misses an important layer of meaning-making in relation to Bloody Sunday commemoration by largely sidestepping the important question of whether public opinion aligns or not with commemorative symbolism. To what extent changes in memory choreography register shifts in wider public opinion, to what extent changes in one occur at the same tempo as changes in the other, and to what extent they mutually influence one another are open empirical questions and ones which the use of a quantitative social survey alongside the qualitative data gathering techniques employed here would be much better positioned to answer.49

Direction of commemorative change Having elaborated what memory work entails one is still left wondering about why Bloody Sunday commemorations changed the way they did from an initial global idiom to a “long” period of local idioms and back again to a global idiom in the 1990s. A tripartite grid of changes coming together over a period of time fuelled redirection in the way Bloody Sunday was commemorated and help to explain its long-run career: (1) Changes from within Irish nationalist community: the families of the dead began to amplify their own voice and become more organized than before and to challenge republicans’ earlier ownership of the event, (2) Changes from within Northern Irish society: in the time period covered by this study Northern Irish society evolved from being deeply divided by a violent political quarrel to one in which its historically antagonistic social groups began to be play out their divisions more and more via normal mainstream politics, (3) Changes on the global contextual level: the changes within Irish nationalism and within Northern Irish society articulated with a newly emerging global normative language emphasising human rights, justice and peace. Taken together, these explanatory variables help us to better understand the mnemonic life cycle of this important international political symbol from a rallying point for inward-oriented victimhood to a poster child for the global quest for human rights.



14

Most people agree on certain basic things about Bloody Sunday – for example, that an anti-internment march ended in thirteen civilians being killed by British soldiers. A more detailed account of the event is taken up in the next chapter. Much less agreement exists about why and in what circumstances the people were killed and why the subsequent official British state inquiry said what it did. What prompted the deployment of elite soldiers to police an anti-internment march? What motivated highly trained British soldiers to open fire on large numbers of civilians in the middle of a bright Sunday afternoon? Was there firing on both sides or not? How did it happen that the victims were blamed for their tragic fate and the soldiers who killed them were publicly exonerated? These less-agreed-upon aspects of the event have fuelled the politics of Bloody Sunday memory and long-range variation in its meaning and interpretation.

The past–present nexus Collective memory has to do with how we corporately represent the past but this is always done in relation to some present. Thus, the collective memory concept brings the past–present nexus to the fore. This book’s emphasis on the role of memory choreographers in organizing the past may well seem to suggest that the past is constantly being renegotiated in the context of the present identity constructions and current politics. Students of collective memory know differently. No memory is wholly new or wholly old. Table 1.1 presents a capsule summary of the two approaches – a present-centred constructionist and past-centred continuity perspective – that structure and organize scholarly debate about the past–present relation.50 The constructionist theory of collective memory emphasizes the political nature of memory – meshing well with this book – and how contests over the past are related to relations of power within a given society at a particular point in time.51Asymmetries of power in society mean that some groups in society are better positioned than others to articulate and impose their preferred interpretation of the past. Social groups lacking in institutional power, and the discursive resources necessary to create documented history, create subordinate memories. These resistant memories tend to oppose themselves to the official history and are often carried through oral culture, ritual and the body, outlets less easily subject to hegemonic state or institutional control.52These subordinate groups sometimes have to wait a generation or more before their memory is given authority. Constructionist




16


Variable

Continuity perspective

Constructionist perspective

Nature of the past

Fixed

Fluid

Relation of past to present

Independent

Determinative

Source of change/ persistence

Institutionalization via museums etc.

Present concerns; generational turnover

Model of human actor

Custodian

Entrepreneur

Goals of memory work

Preservation

Reconstruction

Basic problematic

Malleability of past

Transcendence of past

theories assume that the concerns of the present determine how the past is read. The extreme version of this presentist argument is that the past is a completely ‘foreign country’ and that there is no continuity in it at all but few scholars take the argument this far.53 A second theoretical perspective – the continuity perspective – cautions against such a view by claiming that the transmission of the past from one generation to another is characterized more by constancy than change.54 Without a durable shared narrative of the past, social groups would find it very difficult to announce who they are to themselves and to others and to solidify a connection between the living and the dead.55 At the same time, some aspects of the past are more difficult to remember than others. Clearly, some societies find it difficult to process certain aspects of their past and ‘government atrocities’56 and human atrocities of other kinds fall into this category.57 On their own, neither of these perspectives is satisfactory.58 Against the continuity perspective, meaning-making in relation to Bloody Sunday bore surprisingly little relation to that in the 1970s and 1980s – the globalizing emphasis in the early 1970s all but disappeared by the mid-1970s and only re-emerged in the 1990s. And contrary to the constructionist perspective that tells us that present conditions drive interpretations of the past, memory choreographers drew on already existing commemorative forms and practices – what Guy Beiner refers to as ‘deep memory59 – to remember the tragic events of January 1972. Representations of the past, then, involve both traditional and new elements. As Joseph Roach reminds us one can never step into a river exactly the same way twice.60 Even embodied ritual repeated year after



Table 1.1 Continuity and constructionist perspectives on collective memory

year – like Orange parades in Northern Ireland, for example61 – cannot be done exactly the same way every year and can undergo small but important changes each successive time notwithstanding their explicit public commitment of fidelity and faithfulness to the past. Negotiating a middle ground between these two perspectives, Barry Schwartz’s statement that commemoration involves a ‘stable image upon which new elements are intermittently superimposed’62 – or in a more poetic formulation “old wine in a new bottle” – seems to provide a useful crystallization of Bloody Sunday’s meaning-making pathway. Prior research points to the important influence of institutionalization via museums and official records,63 articulation with elite interests,64 prior commemorations,65 the semiotic openness of symbolism,66 and societal conditions67 on the malleability of memories of the past. I mainly side with the emphasis on societal conditions at a local and global level and point to memory choreography and important factors influencing the effectiveness of symbolism68 as an explanation for its shifting “career” and “formula” for its commemorative success.

Data and methods As mentioned already, studying collective memory guided by the concept of memory work implies asking certain questions such as how the past is claimed in different ways by different groups, how global conditions influence commemorative activity, how commemoration takes on different forms, how people get others to come on board, and so forth. Empirically, answering these kinds of questions calls for the use of qualitative data gathering techniques. In keeping with this focus on the patterning and dynamics of memory over time, this book is based on data from interviews, archival research, and participant observation. A more detailed methodological account is provided in the appendix. Thirty-one people were interviewed for this book. Relatives of the dead, volunteer members of committees established to remember the event, politicians, journalists, or who people who were present on the original march or other commemorative events, made up the interview sample. Not all had direct, first-hand, personal and unmediated experience of Bloody Sunday, but most had. Younger interviewees experienced the event indirectly via their participation in the annual commemoration, the media and popular culture. In common with other studies of the past, data gathering for this book involved asking people about events and experiences that in most cases





happened many years ago and we know from previous research that the past is understood differently in different ‘presents’.69 To help address this possible presentist bias, where possible I cross-checked respondent accounts of the past against available textual accounts. For example, I interviewed some respondents about the Guildhall stained-glass window and questions asked about who was involved in promoting it, the stages it passed through in the decision-making process, whether it set off controversy or not, and so on. I then checked what respondents told me against local media coverage of the window. Archival research constituted a key data gathering technique as well. I examined a broad range of historical material from letters and speeches to brochures and posters. Accounts of earlier commemorative activity especially the Bloody Sunday march came from newspaper archives. This was supplemented by visual archival evidence of the marches in the 1980s and 1990s. In analysing the archival material, and political speeches especially, I paid particular attention to whether certain phrases, symbols, keywords and themes were present or not. As well as asking questions and examining documents, I also participated as an observer in Bloody Sunday commemorative events from 2004 to the present. Participant observation allowed me to get at the real-life practices through which the event was remembered as against how it was talked and written about via interviews and documents. This involved participating in the annual march, attending the various events that composed the commemorative programme each year, and speaking informally to people at them about their experiences. Because all of these events were public events, I did not have to negotiate access to them. Throughout the data collection stage, I viewed the interviews, archival research and participant observation as mutually influencing data gathering strategies. New things I learned while in the archive prompted me to ask new or different questions of interviewees and new things interviewees told me channelled my archival searches in certain, often unexpected, directions. Similarly, what people did or said while I observed and participated in different commemorative events urged me to think about my archival and interview data in a fresh light.

Organization of the book The book is divided into seven chapters and I follow a thematic rather than a strictly chronological approach by organizing the book into two



18

introductory chapters, four substantive chapters, and a conclusion. Each of the substantive empirical chapters are more or less self-contained but, as in the nature of a book, frequent cross-references are made between them. Throughout I approach the symbolic commemoration of Bloody Sunday from the vantage of one side of this divided society, that is to say, from the nationalist side. This is not because I wish to privilege a nationalist point of view or disavow Protestant perceptions of the event but, rather, reflects the basic reality of an unequal distribution in commemorative activity in relation to the event. Significantly, there is no Protestant organized Bloody Sunday commemoration – itself an index of the ‘our past’ frame of reference that shapes sectarian commemorative activity in Northern Ireland.70 Unionists and nationalists in Northern Ireland have different “time maps” and historically each community has worked hard to “outpast” the other,71 nationalists by invoking their Celtic past and experience of land confiscation during the Plantation period and unionists by ritually remembering the Battle of the Boyne. It is because nationalists feel more deeply about Bloody Sunday and claim it more in talk about their social identity and collective past than unionists do that they are the focus of this book. Chapter 1 introduces the study and carries the conceptual freight guiding the empirical enquiry. I introduce and explicate the concept of memory work, claim an important role for memory choreog raphers in the organization of memory, and stress the levels of memory work in which they are embedded and their political, social and cultural actions. I emphasize the critical role of actors via the concept of memory work, contextual influences on commemorative activity, and the need to historicize commemoration. Chapter 2, ‘Bloody Sunday in Historical Perspective’, seeks to orient the reader by placing the events of 30 January 1972 in a wider historical and structural context. In this chapter I first consider the pre-history of the event in early experiences of colonialism and conquest. After examining what happened in January 1972 I then move “upstream” by examining the changing contours of Northern Irish society from the 1970s on. This historical account helps us understand how Bloody Sunday was “heard” in different ways at different times. The following chapters then focus on different aspects of the commemoration and remembrance of the event – cases within the case study – which drew upon an already well-known repertoire of international mnemonic artifacts and practices,72 including wreath laying, memorials, visual representations, crosses, marches, murals and candlelit processions. Overlaying each chapter is a critique of different subsets





of the collective memory literature having to do with memorialization, embodied remembrance, commemoration in the context of globalization, and contested commemoration. The first empirical chapter that follows this – Chapter 3, ‘A Simple People Who Want a Simple Memorial’ – focuses on the spatial memorialization of the event and particular at the Rossville Street memorial dedicated to the victims. I look at how this memorial emerged, how it became the focus of important ritual events, how it articulated with other sites of memory,73 and the aesthetic changes it underwent over time. This analysis is employed to point out some deficiencies in existing theorizations of difficult pasts. Apart from the early commemorative activity in the early 1970s around the planning, fundraising, building and unveiling of the memorial, for most of the 1970s, the 1980s and early 1990s, nothing much was done to or took place at the site. The mid-1990s were different. I pay attention to an important debate about the spatial reconfiguration of the memorial that took place in the mid-1990s and brought the question of its ownership and the “legitimacy” of memories of the event to the surface. Irish republicans claimed that the memorial site was deserving of a place among other sites of memory evoking the city’s contested history while others were reluctant to concede this argument. At the annual commemoration, people gather around the memorial for an inter-denominational ecumenical service at which sacred performances of songs, prayers, wreath-laying, and a minute’s silence are enacted. In this “mixed economy” religious ritual event, the families of the dead are centre stage and occupy the front row and others gather around the memorial to listen to representatives of the Protestant and Catholic faiths and a short speech by a representative of the Bloody Sunday families. The history of the memorial underscored the complex political dynamics involved in memorialization that the memorial designers’ early claim about the families of the dead as a ‘simple people who want a simple memorial’ seemed to belie. Chapter 4, ‘On the March’, moves on to a detailed sociologicalhistorical analysis of the “career” of the key event in the Bloody Sunday commemoration – the annual Bloody Sunday march and rally which consists of retracing the steps of the original 1972 march from the Creggan to Free Derry Corner. This analysis – which involves a periodization of the march – traces how the march became a key site for the playing out of an early discursive struggle between a number of civil society organizations over the meaning of the event and their claims to legitimacy in remembering it. As Chapter 2 makes clear, these different periods were characterized by different socio-political conditions



20

and state activity with respect to “the Troubles” period. This chapter also focuses on the various symbolic strategies employed by organizers of the march and the political claim-making at the rally at the end of the march. Through this historical analysis I call attention to theoretical deficiencies in earlier research on the conservative qualities of embodied memory. Chapter 5, ‘The holocaust that was the Bogside of Sunday’, is a longrange empirical and historical study and in it I show how and why, over the course of a timespan of over thirty years, Bloody Sunday was reframed and reconstituted from a synonym for British colonial power to a symbol of the global struggle for injustice. In this chapter I draw on insights from the social movement literature, especially this literature’s attention to framing processes and frame extension.74 This positive rebranding of the event – using an abstract civic and moral discourse of “human rights” and “justice” – allowed for the coming together of previously antagonistic social groups around a shared quest for power to define truth about the event in the 1990s. Chapter 6, ‘The Politics of Visual Memory’, considers the various sites of spatial memory that visualize the past from a comparative perspective and gives special attention to the Museum of Free Derry, the Bogside street murals, and the Guildhall stained-glass window. Bloody Sunday may well be beyond representation but for all that there is no shortage of visual devices seeking to propagate it. Each of these sites of memory involves remembrance of the event outside the annual commemoration cycle though each reflects interesting variation in terms of such things as their funding, resonance, articulation with other sites of remembrance, contestation and so forth. The controversies about the Guildhall stainedglass window and the Rossville Street Bloody Sunday mural bring into focus the conditions under which the past tends to become contested and point to the fact that the intentions of commemorative symbolism are not always congruent with commemorative reception. The concluding chapter summarizes the book’s major argument, delineates the major empirical patterns identified earlier, and sets out some lessons for the general study of collective memory that can be learned from this particular case study. How similar or different was Bloody Sunday’s mnemonic life cycle from that of other historical events in other times and places? What does this study of the mnemonic life cycle of Bloody Sunday have to say about collective memory in general? And what does this sociological analysis suggest about the future of Bloody Sunday memory? What is clear from this study is that the valency of Bloody Sunday as an international political symbol has changed from





a negative to a positive one via relatively recent “justice” and “human rights” storylines. Earlier victimhood discourse was eliminated because it did not work anymore in promoting the event to audiences beyond Derry city and beyond Irish republicans in particular. Put another way, between the 1970s and the 1990s, the symbol-referent link changed – and new and less basic symbolism was needed to employ the event as a referent for talking about human rights and justice.75 The Bloody Sunday case furnishes a good example, then, of an historical event that underwent an intriguing reconstruction as a political symbol. Actors, contexts and temporality are the focal concepts that help explain this mnemonic “career” expressed via bodies, spaces, times, discourses and images. Memory choreographers were the key agents behind this shift in meaning-making. Their success depended on their ability to make Bloody Sunday a resonant symbol with different publics and creatively respond to shifting social, political and institutional contexts over a long period of time as well as the absence of competing memory choreographers putting forward different framings of the past.76 Symbolic of this long-range shift is the temporal extension of the commemoration of Bloody Sunday from an afternoon-length event to a week-long affair. The event has become a tourist destination that brings people to Derry to remember the tragic loss of life in 1972 while also feeling good about and enjoying themselves by attending workshops, film screenings, exhibitions and other events. Bloody Sunday’s institutionalization via a museum and its circulation in popular media culture suggest that memory choreographers have succeeded in securing the future of the event in nationalists’ collective identity and prolonging its meaning for subsequent ‘postmemory’ generations.77 By contrast, other tragic events in Northern Ireland’s relatively recent past that did not have memory choreographers to promote and prolong their memory and that were not resonant within particular institutional contexts, were not singled out for special commemoration year after year. Instead, these became subsumed within the ‘lives lost’78 during “the Troubles” and to the extent that this is true provide an interesting basis for pursuing a comparative sociology of collective memory. Finally, the methodological appendix details how memory work in relation to this historical event was empirically studied.



22

Bloody Sunday in Historical Perspective

Bloody Sunday tends to be viewed as a key spark of “the Troubles” and as a switchpoint of Northern Irish politics. On the face of it, this seems plausible enough, but if one were to indulge for a moment in the hypothetical question of “what if Bloody Sunday never happened?” a good case could be made that “the Troubles” would have unfolded anyhow – considering that by its own account the IRA began its violent challenge to British state power before Bloody Sunday.1 At the same time, Bloody Sunday was a godsend to the recruiting sergeants of militant Irish republicanism because what happened in Derry in 1972 articulated with longstanding historical grievances among nationalists towards the British state connected with a long experience of colonialization and imperialism. These grievances were sparked off by Britain’s colonial project and a chronicle of this antagonistic Anglo-Irish colonial relationship helps to provide a socio-historical context to the events of 1972 and to place them in the context of a long history of division and discord. To fully understand the political claim-making and counter-claimmaking – for example, between nationalists and Catholic Church sources, between nationalists and unionists, and between republicans and the British state – that took place at Bloody Sunday commemorations one is pushed back into Irish history. In some ways the political rhetoric articulated at Bloody Sunday commemorative occasions involved a playing out of or continuation of earlier interpretative struggles and public meaning-making. The second part of the chapter provides a capsule summary of Bloody Sunday via a consideration of events in Derry city as a lightning rod of the civil rights agenda. I employ anthropologist Victor Turner’s concept of social drama to understand the event. Based on his ethnographic study of ritual among the Zambian Ndembu tribe,2 Turner 23



2

24


Table 2.1

Trajectory of social drama

Stage 2: Crisis: Breaking of this rule prompts a collision between different social groups about what happened (legitimacy of British state called into question). Stage 3: Redressive Action: Something is done – sometimes through a formal legal pathway – to restore confidence in the binding nature of social norms and to pre-empt a further amping up of the crisis (establishment of Widgery Tribunal, 1972). Stage 4: Reintegration – Schism: Actions taken to bring about the resolution of a crisis and to achieve consensus among contesting groups. Failure to achieve this outcome can lead to long-standing antagonism (establishment of Saville Inquiry, 1998)

claims that an event such as a war, political scandal or atrocity can be understood as unfolding across four empirical stages: (1) breach, (2) crisis, (3) redressive action, and (4) reintegration–irreparable schism. In Turner’s analysis, some cultural rule is violated and this in turn triggers a potential breakdown in a society’s normative order. Something is done then to address this often in the form of a legal route. This either works to close the original breach or it fails to bring about a resolution. Clearly, Bloody Sunday unfolded in a way consistent with this pattern (see Table 2.1) though Turner did not have much to say about how one stage can act back on earlier ones. In the Bloody Sunday example, the redressive action of the Widgery Tribunal, as we shall see, represented a breach almost as great as the original event and which in turn prompted further redressive action – though much later – via the Saville Inquiry. Following this historical account of Bloody Sunday, I examine the major large-scale political, social and economic developments in Northern Ireland since the 1970s as a macro-structural context to symbolic claim-making that took place at Bloody Sunday commemorations and as a way of mapping the shifting contours of the remembering society.

History as storytelling Historian Roy Foster has usefully suggested that Irish history can be considered in terms of a number of narratives or stories Irish people tell themselves and to others. Foster highlights the constructed “made up”



Stage 1: Breach: A societal rule or norm is broken in a publicly visible way (anti-internment marchers killed by British soldiers).

nature of these narratives as exercises in public collective meaningmaking, the common use of the devices of hero and villain in storytelling, and the connections between biographical stories and national stories.3 Looking back over the course of Irish history, one can identify – though without obliterating variation and differences in experiences of them – narratives of colonization and conquest, victimhood and oppression, and more recently of prosperity and peace as the “master” narratives on or about the Irish past. Earlier narratives of oppression and victimhood, though, were not always articulated in a navel-gazing kind of way. Even within Irish nationalist victimhood discourses, the use of universalizing storylines can be traced as far back as debates over the “national question” – the extent to which the boundaries of the nation cohere with the boundaries of the state – and nationalists like Daniel O’Connell invoked inclusive global idioms to ground their struggle against oppression at home.4 For the purposes of this book, the point of departure of this chronicle of Irish historical narratives is the Plantation period. The plantation of the north-east part of the island in the sixteenth century represented an attempt by the British state to anglicize the Irish population. This was done chiefly by displacing the native Irish with Scottish settlers and confiscating their lands. Predictably, the native Irish responded to this by instigating a series of agitations against English rule, and this period marked the continuation of a long succession of rebellions, risings and battles challenging British authority and power in Ireland. Denial of the right to property was soon followed up by denial of the right to practise religion. This period, known as the Penal Law period, was one in which the British state sought to systematically purge the influence of Catholicism in Irish society by restricting religious practices and by driving out the organization of the Catholic Church.5 From their vantage as Protestants loyal to the crown, Irish subjects were seen as having altogether different loyalties, chiefly to a foreign Roman power. Culturally, the Irish were seen as unenterprising, lazy, feckless, too given to spirituality and, politically, as incapable of governing themselves.6 This draining of Irish cultural traditions and effort to weaken the position of the colonized had unintended consequences. Instead of subordinating the Irish in political, social and economic terms, their suppression galvanized and solidified Irish national identity, much of which was expressed in and through the Catholic Church. Indeed, religion became a conduit for the articulation of Irish opposition to British state activity. As well as strengthening religion as a repository of collective identity and shaping the values and beliefs of the Irish people,



Bloody Sunday in Historical Perspective 25


the English colonial project also influenced the material conditions of Irish society. The early planting of Ulster resulted in a strong division between labour and capital. While the native Irish could sell their “free” labour as tenants on the land of the “Big House” English aristocrats, landowners monopolized key sources of capital. Contemporary sayings about the geography of stratification in Derry city such as “the Catholics got the view, and the Protestants got the land”, in reference to the elevated and hilly Catholic Bogside and the more propitious land on the River Foyle side of the city, points to this history of unequal access to societal resources. In the nineteenth century, Britain stood as the “workshop of the world” and was the hub of the industrial revolution, but owing to its colonial past, Irish society, with the exception of a small industrialized area around Belfast, never went through a process of industrialization despite the best efforts of nineteenth-century civil reformers to correct the perceived deficiencies of the Irish character and move it onto a path of modernization and development. In the absence of an industrial complex, Irish society took on a strong rural-based character.7 Avenues for political agitation and a push for political independence were not completely driven out. however. by British imperialism and industrialization. Violent anti-colonial unrest has a long history in Irish society from the agrarian protests of the secret Whiteboys to the armalite of the IRA. They spawned their own counter-protest groups: Orange societies.8 Frequently, the resort to violence to achieve political ends invoked the ire of the Catholic hierarchy and the bishops were hostile to their priests becoming active in political independence efforts. But alongside this violent impulse has co-existed a drive to pursue political ends through non-violent means such as organizing mass meetings and persuading and negotiating with one’s political adversaries. One celebrated champion of this strategy was Daniel O’Connell. Famously known as “the Liberator”, O’Connell, worked hard to achieve Catholic emancipation and a political voice for Irish people. Influenced by the radical political ideas of the French Revolution, O’Connell was well schooled in the art of collection action and mobilized Irish people to secure land rights and to repeal the union and often using a global idiom.9 When the African-American abolitionist and political leader Frederick Douglass came to Ireland in 1845, for example, O’Connell articulated his own anti-slavery credentials and pointed to his global horizons involving sympathy with the oppressed the world over.10 Owing to high marriages rates and high fertility within marriage, and against expectations generated by economic circumstances, the Irish



26

demographic pattern was unusual.11 Throughout the eighteenth century the curve of Irish population showed a marked upward trajectory, which, together with family inheritance practices and heavy reliance on the potato crop, in the mid-nineteenth century created a context for famine.12 From the famine to the early decades of the twentieth century, political opposition to the British state was there but did not find a strong channel to express itself through. This owed in no small measure to the devastating economic and cultural consequences of the potato crop’s failure, now impressed on Irish collective memory. A nationalist organization to break the union with Britain took some time to emerge but did so in the early 1900s. Around this time, the Easter rising of 1916 took place. Appealing to the collective memory of earlier nationalist efforts, the leaders of the rising seized upon an opportunity to challenge the seat of British power in Ireland. Their might was met with the greater might of the British army and the rising was quickly put down.13 Five years later Ireland was granted independent status, resulting in the partitioning of the island into a twenty-six-county independent state to the south and a six-county statelet in the north-east and subsumed into the British state. This helped to solidify existing faultlines in Irish society between Catholics and Protestants and between constitutional nationalists and physical force republicans. As southern Irish society moved to establish its own state institutions it joined itself ideologically to the Catholic Church and promoted a strong Catholic rural fundamentalism up until the 1960s. From the 1960s the Irish state parted company with its earlier isolationist strategy and sought to prise open Ireland to outside economic and cultural influences, weakening its long-established ties with the Catholic Church and dependence on agriculture.14 Up north, sectarian divisions between Catholics and Protestants were manifest and sometimes found violent expression. Society “down there” to the south tended to be seen as Romanized and heavily influenced by the Catholic Church – in short, a “cold house” for Protestants and Unionists.15 Like Northern Ireland, the southern Irish economy remained weak and a development lag took place between the ‘outward re-orientation’ policies of the 1960s and the unexpected emergence of a prosperous and successful Celtic tiger economy in the mid-1990s,16 pushing the national economy up world leagues tables of globalization and surging ahead of nearest neighbour, the United Kingdom, in economic stakes.17 From the 1920s Northern Ireland and southern Irish society followed different pathways of social and economic modernization. The





relationships between the two parts of the island were part of a wider vector of relationships between the British and Irish states. At the same time, both parts of the island faced similar challenges – building state institutions, articulating a political vision for the kind of society they would promote, and raising adequate material resources. Southern Irish society was dominated by the politics of the civil war, pursued an isolationist industrial policy until the 1960s and thereafter a foreign-led one, and promoted a vision of Ireland as a mainly rural pastoral society until the 1960s, when a modernization project was embarked upon. In the North, the partition settlement meant that politically it became a Unionist-dominated state. The distribution of its socio-economic resources, in terms of housing and employment, was deeply entangled with the “national” question.18 Sectarian discrimination, or what poet Seamus Heaney refers to as a ‘sectarian seam’,19 remained an unhappy feature of social life in Northern Ireland throughout and the British state’s unwillingness to “hear” this discrimination story and the anger ordinary people felt about it created the context for its politicization through the emergence of a civil rights campaign in the 1960s.

Derry city as lightning rod of the civil rights agenda Globally, the 1960s was a conflictual and unsettled time,20 and had its own Northern Irish inflection. Today, recycled black-and-white grainy historical images of the civil rights struggle often depict stoneand petrol-bomb throwing youths in the Rossville Flats in the Catholic Bogside of Derry, the tabernacle of the struggle. Media images in the late 1960s relayed civil rights protest marches to a global audience, and one of the most famous – on Derry’s streets – showed the police reacting in a heavy-handed way to peaceful civilian agitation about discrimination and law and order measures. The British state’s reaction to the demands of civil rights agitators about “Houses, Jobs and Votes”, as the lyrics of the Derry song ‘Sunday Stones’ put it – in some cases involving violent police–protestor confrontations and later the introduction of British soldiers on the streets – further fuelled nationalist discontent.21 Indeed, law and order concerns displaced grievances about houses, jobs and votes as a consequence of how the British state reacted to the initial demands.22 Some of this discontent was later challenged into constitutional nationalism – via the foundation of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) – and some of it into a more radical and violent physical force nationalism – via the establishment of the Provisional IRA – and these two traditions



28

engaged in ongoing interpretative struggles over the origins of and strategies for resolving political conflict. How the British state responded to it more than the initial demands for civil rights prolonged the movement and at the same time had the effect of displacing it by strengthening the argument of those who sought a resort through violence. In a good example of ‘social movement spillover’,23 the Northern Irish civil rights movement drew heavily on the ‘repertoire of contention’24 – the strategies and tactics – of the American civil rights movement, namely riots, protest marches, sit-ins and other forms of disruptive but non-violent collective action.25 This influence of American activism together with the resonances between Northern Ireland and the southern American states challenged an “immaculate conception” view of the origins of civil rights agitation in Northern Ireland.26 The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was the main organization behind the civil rights agenda.27 It “began” in Belfast on 29 January 1967 at the impetus of the Dublin Wolfe Tone Society,28 and had a centralized executive based in Belfast and branches at local level, including one in Derry. Its major aims were modest – even mundane – and included voting rights, non-discriminatory housing allocations, fair employment, a bill of rights for Northern Ireland, and police reform. ‘A sober, moderate body’,29 NICRA was a broad church: it was composed of different “currents”, including republican organizations such as the Wolfe Tone Societies as well as more left-leaning movements such as People’s Democracy (PD),30 the Campaign for Social Justice, the Derry Citizen’s Action Committee, and the Derry Housing Action Committee. The Northern Ireland civil rights movement diverged from its American counterpart, however, in lacking a central charismatic leadership figure like Martin Luther King.31 Most of the leaders of the movement were middle-class Catholics,32 and they were able and committed to advancing the civil rights of Catholics and Protestants alike. Reaction to the British state turned, however, on the issue of internment. Many marches against it were organized across Northern Ireland, including one in Derry in January 1972.33 These were public events and quite often were associated with, or resulted in, some kind of violence. The weekend before Bloody Sunday, an anti-internment protest at Magilligan Strand was broken up by the Parachute Regiment, leaving many people injured. On the morning of 30 January 1972, the paratroopers travelled from Belfast to Derry. The “paras”, as they were known, had a ‘difficult reputation’34 as the British army’s “shock troops”. The decision to deploy them went against the advice of the then RUC Chief Superintendent,





Frank Lagan, who urged restraint rather than the use of maximum force and insisted that the march be allowed to proceed to its intended destination, the Guildhall. Lagan, who had been in regular contact with the organizers of the march and was well respected within the nationalist community, advised that the army take photographs of the rioters during the march and carry out the arrests later. But Lagan’s counsel was ignored by the commander of land forces on the day, General Ford. The civil rights leader, John Hume, also feared, given what he saw of the unsavoury actions of the paratroopers on Magilligan beach the previous week, that there would be trouble on the streets of Derry, and questioned the wisdom of the organizers in pushing ahead with the march. These forebodings – of Hume and others – were borne out on 30 January. Even before the anti-internment march in Derry took place there was a sense that ‘something could happen’35 on this day, and this feeling was added to by the build-up of soldiers in and around the Bogside and experiences at prior anti-internment marches. Crowds gathered at Bishop’s Field, near the shops and church in the Creggan area of the city, from about 2pm onwards to participate in the march. At approximately 3pm, the marchers left the assembly point in the Creggan and made their way down the steep slopes along Southway, Brandywell Road, Lecky Road, Stanleys Walk, Cable Street, Westland Street, Marlborough Terrace and Creggan Street. The crowd was in upbeat mood as it sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ and ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’ along the way and listened to music played from loud speakers. A Bedford coal lorry carrying the banner of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association led the march. When the march reached Aggro corner, at the intersection of William Street and Rossville Street, it split. A section of the crowd turned down William Street where they confronted a barricade erected by the British army outside McCool’s newsagents to prevent the march making its way to its intended and highly symbolic end point, the Guildhall, the heart of the then unionistcontrolled Londonderry corporation. Most of the marchers, however, turned right along Chamberlain Street and Rossville Street and continued on a short distance away to Free Derry Corner where a number of political speeches were about to get under way. At the William Street barricade, stones, bricks, bottles and canisters of CS gas were thrown at the British paratroop soldiers by a section of the marchers. The soldiers responded initially with purple-dyed water cannon and then with rubber bullets. At about 3.55pm, the British paratroopers fired their first shots, hitting John Johnson and Damien



30

Donaghey near waste ground on William Street. Suddenly, the mood of the march turned from expectancy and excitement to panic and terror. Nearly ten minutes later, at 4.07pm, the order to carry out an arrest operation was given and the army launched their incursion into the Bogside by advancing from William Street down Rossville Street and into the Bogside, some on foot and others in Saracen-armoured personnel carriers. Almost as soon as they alighted the sound of high-velocity live gunfire rang out. People desperately scattered in all directions for cover from the shooting. A brief lull in firing was ruptured by the sound of live rounds about twenty minutes later. By 4.30pm that afternoon of 30 January 1972, thirteen people lay dead on the ground in the Rossville Street flats and Glenfada Park area of the Bogside. Fourteen others sustained injuries. The dead were: Gerard Donaghy (17), James Wray (22), Gerard McKinney (35), William McKinney (26), John Young (17), William Nash (19), Michael McDaid (20), Michael Kelly (17), Kevin McElhinney (17), Patrick Doherty (31), Jack Duddy (17), Hugh Gilmore (17), Bernard McGuigan (41). The injured were John Johnson, Damien Donaghy, Michael Bridge, Michael Quinn, Patrick O’Donnell, Patrick McDaid, Alexander Nash, Peggy Deery,36 Michael Bradley, Patrick Campbell, Joseph Mahon, Joseph Friel, Daniel McGowan and Daniel Gillespie. John Johnson died from his wounds in June 1972, becoming the fourteenth victim of Bloody Sunday. That evening a list was drawn up of the known dead – the names were initially typed on a single piece of white paper, but as the list grew additional names were added using a pen.37 Crossed out Christian names on the list marked the confusion about exactly who was killed. What happened on the streets of Derry on the afternoon of 30 January had several unintended consequences.38 Immense collective shock and anger in the Republic of Ireland and the wider international community was the immediate emotional response.39 Writing in the Irish Times the day after, Nell McCafferty rhetorically asked ‘how do you spend the day after 13 people have been shot dead?’40 Media reportage was extensive and the shock and outrage was most deeply felt in Derry. The ‘grim seeking after detail’, as McCafferty put it, involved house-to-house visitations in the Bogside over cups of warm tea.41 Public statements by bishops, politicians and other civic leaders extended sympathy to the relatives, expressed anger at the deaths of innocent victims, and called for an independent inquiry. The priests ministering in St Eugene’s Cathedral parish who witnessed the events issued a collective statement stating that the British paratroopers





differed from terrorists only by the appearance of respectability that their uniforms gave them.42 Claiming the dead were all unarmed and that the only shots came from the side of the soldiers, they then accused the paratroopers of ‘wilful murder’.43 Meanwhile, a British Ministry of Defence account of the events released on 1 February 1972 employed the idiom of ‘gunmen and bombers’ to characterize the dead.44 The funerals of the victims, attended by representatives from Church and State, north and south, and globally televized, generated an extraordinary level of emotional intensity. Expectations for the attendance at the funeral Mass were so high that tickets were printed for family members of the dead. Across the Atlantic, the New York Times opened by reminding readers of the words of the Catholic Primate that what happened was an ‘awful slaughter’.45 ‘The skies wept, too, as Derry laid its dead to rest’, reported the front page of the Derry Journal on 1 February.46 The Irish Times front headline declared ‘nation to mourn Derry’s dead’.47 Nell McCafferty echoed the national significance of the event by writing, ‘Derry, a synonym now for national disaster, gave her dead to the nation’.48 In short, the Creggan and the Bogside were suffused with grief for ‘the boys’.49 2 February was declared a national day of mourning in the Republic of Ireland. The Irish ambassador in London, Donal O’Sullivan, was recalled.50 The then Taoiseach,51 Jack Lynch, announced the provision of funding to help non-violent protest by the beleaguered nationalist population in Northern Ireland. He called for an international inquiry into the events, and said a British inquiry would not go far enough. Shops and public houses in Derry closed for several days. 52 Teachers in Catholic schools in Derry went on strike for three days as an act of protest. But the events of 30 January 1972 played out differently before different audiences,53 and political orientations, religious beliefs and generational experiences all played a role in mediating how people reacted to it. Little protest or indignation came from Westminster. The voices of Protestant Church leaders and politicians were mainly muted. Protestant opinion was mostly consistent with the official memory of the event. The political fallout, at least in the short term, was felt as much in Dublin as in London and Northern Ireland. The British embassy in Dublin was burned and British businesses in the city were attacked. Anger and disgust at what happened – while registered at a political level – soon yielded to oblivion. To some extent this was understandable since many other violent events claimed public attention after Bloody Sunday.



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Taken together, reaction in Derry, Dublin and internationally exerted heavy political pressure on the British Conservative government under Prime Minister Edward Heath. In the face of this reputation disabling event,54 its moral standing in the world was clearly at stake. The British government responded by setting up the Widgery Tribunal chaired by Lord Widgery, the most senior English judge. His chief task was to adjudicate between different claims to truth articulated by the nationalist civilian population and the British army. This inquiry took place in Coleraine, about 30 minutes’ from Derry, over a period of less than one month. The public hearings took place from 21 February to 14 March 1972, and the report was swiftly published on 19 April, in stark contrast to the longevity of the second inquiry, the Saville Inquiry. A total of 114 eyewitnesses including residents, priests, media reporters, photographers, cameramen, soldiers, police officers and forensic experts appeared before Lord Widgery.55 The soldiers, the victims’ families and the tribunal each had their own counsel. Twelve volumes of evidence were accumulated during the hearings. The forty-five-page report, with the garrulous title Report of the Tribunal appointed to inquire into the events on Sunday, 30th January 1972, which led to the loss of life in connection with the procession in Londonderry on that day, flatly stated that ‘there was no general breakdown in discipline’.56 It was an exercise in the use of double negatives:57 ‘there is no reason to suppose that any soldiers would have opened fire if they had not been fired upon first’.58 The official narrative legally codified the British state’s narrative about what happened. Clearly, the Widgery report was an elite-level attempt to explain away what happened and to fix the meaning of the event for the British population and wider international publics. The ‘lies’ it contained were raised to the level of ‘truths’. In exonerating the soldiers of any wrongdoing, the report blamed NICRA – and by extension the victims who were killed – for the events of that day. Although it stated that there was no evidence to show the civilians were armed, it suspected that they were. Moreover, the British government in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday claimed that the soldiers acted in self-defence when they came under a heavy fire from armed terrorists. The confrontation between the forces of law and order and the civilian eyewitnesses thus occurred in two spatial contexts – initially on the streets of the Bogside and later in the media in competing definitions of the situation. What happened, then, on 30 January 1972, according to this official narration, was not a few British soldiers behaving badly, or bad British military policy, but paramilitaries who engaged the army with





bombs and firearms and lost their lives as a result. The grief and anger associated with Bloody Sunday derived as much from what happened afterwards – via Widgery – as from what happened. The report, which quickly became identified with its author in the abbreviated name of the “Widgery Report”, lent itself well to memorable alliteration. The impromptu slogan “Widgery Whitewash” and “Widgery washes whiter than white” – a play on the advertisement for Daz washing powder – emblazoned on gable-end walls in Derry’s Bogside, crystallized the deeply felt attitudes of many nationalists about the report. Indeed, for many nationalists Bloody Sunday simply became a synonym for the ill-effects of British involvement in Northern Ireland. Proverbs like “Widgery didgery dock the soldiers ran amok”59 encapsulated the vernacular nationalist memory and circulated it in everyday discourse. Father Edward Daly’s memorable and oft-cited phrase that the Widgery Report declared ‘the guilty innocent, and the innocent guilty’ achieved wide circulation in subsequent commemorative discourses. Nonetheless, the content between the covers of the Widgery Report, that is deeply at odds with the vernacular nationalist memory, stood as the authoritative official state memory of Bloody Sunday down to the present day. This memory, as Eviatar Zerubavel points out, ‘represents the political elite’s construction of the past, which serves its special interests and promotes its political agenda’.60 One of the most important consequences of Bloody Sunday was that the legitimacy of the Northern Ireland state in the eyes of its nationalist population was called into question. This legitimacy cost created the conditions for the rapid growth of the IRA and the demobilization of the Northern Ireland civil rights movement. The IRA could hardly believe its luck in the face of this unexpected “bounce” and saw itself become a revitalized paramilitary organization “defending” the Catholic nationalist population. Increasingly, socio-economic issues became displaced by nationalist demands. Bob Purdie’s61 and Nell McCafferty’s claim that Bloody Sunday signalled the inevitable demise of the civil rights struggle and normal politics overstates the case,62 but at the same time the event energized the Irish republican movement and helped solidify its belief in the impossibility of political reform as a response to it as this emotive call-to-arms in the flagship republican newspaper Republican News makes clear: as past events proved without doubt, Bloody Sunday failed to suppress republican resistance. Indeed, the courageous people of the nationalist ghettoes developed from a reformist people to a revolutionary



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The next section briefly chronicles the major political, economic and social changes in the remembering society from the early 1970s to the present. Clearly, and as others have pointed out,64 the political, the economic and the social can be distinguished at an analytical level, but empirically are subject to interaction effects.

Northern Ireland since the 1970s The early 1970s marked the intensification of a violent conflict between the British state and paramilitaries on the nationalist and unionist side.65 The cultural shorthand for this period is “the Troubles”, and its modern history goes back to partition. The basic and at the same time complex reality of this society is that it is one inhabited by two different social groups holding allegiances with and identifications to two different states, two different religious belief systems, and two different historical memories. Like most divided societies, an understanding of its causes and consequences is arguably best approached through a multivariate analysis involving religious, ethnic, class and political variables and their interactions. In the early 1970s, following a split in the late 1960s into a political official and militant provisional wing, the IRA committed itself to a long violent campaign against the British state and set off a counterparamilitary campaign on the unionist side. Reports of nationalist and unionist paramilitary attacks became routine parts of media coverage and of how Northern Ireland was imagined in other parts of the world. Numerous attempts by the British state to construct power-sharing arrangements in the 1970s were tried and typically failed on the charge that they conceded too much to Irish nationalism and not enough to the demands of politically more dominant unionists. While southern Irish political elites were not completely indifferent to events in the North and were sympathetic to the grievances of its Catholic minority, at the same time they did little to exert strong moral or political pressure on the British state to “do something” about the sectarian nature of Northern Irish politics and society. Against the background of failed political initiatives and a growing paramilitary threat, the British state tended to increasingly adopt a security strategy in response to the Northern Ireland “problem”. An



lantern at the forefront in the liberation of mankind. The Six County state cannot be reformed, and history has proven this.63


early indication of this was the termination of the “special category status” of Irish Republican Army prisoners in 1976. In protest against this, republican prisoners mobilized their own politicized bodies66 – first by adopting a “blanket protest” involving their non-wearing of prison-issued clothing and wrapping themselves in blankets instead; and, following this, the initiation of hunger strikes in 1980. Security responses also infiltrated how the British state reacted to cultural practices such as commemorative occasions. Under the Flags and Emblems (Display) Act 1954 the British state prohibited the public flying of flags and emblems that would lead to a breach of the peace. In practical terms this meant that the Irish tricolour – a charged symbol for Irish republicans – was banned in public places while the status of the Union Jack was protected and solidified, a policy that was reversed in the mid-1980s when both flags were granted equal status. In the south, the Irish state extended the closing down of cultural expression among republicans to the use of their voice in media relations – the national television station was prohibited from broadcasting oral interviews with members of Sinn Féin under section 31 of the Broadcasting Act.67 As a result of the hunger strikes, Irish republicans won over a significant amount of public opinion and it fuelled their political message about the ill-treatment of nationalists by the British state, which people were reminded of at Bloody Sunday commemorations. A number of republican prisoners joined the strike: the best known was Bobby Sands, who contested – and won a seat – in parliamentary elections from his prison cell. Sands pressed on with his hunger strike and despite efforts to dissuade him from it, he died in May 1981, further galvanizing Irish republicanism. Sands’ death was followed by several others. The strike finally came to an end in October 1981, and in a modest gesture the British government relaxed its prison clothing rule. Three years later the British and Irish governments engaged in intense negotiations that led to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, giving – against unionist opinion – the southern Irish state a consultative role – but crucially not a decision-making one – in respect of some aspects of Northern Irish affairs. The agreement solidified both governments’ commitment to the principle of majority consent and, while marking an important turn in Anglo-Irish relations, did not succeed in bringing the conflict to an end.68 Taken together, the 1980s was a difficult period and paramilitary attacks on the civilian population and British state continued to make the political terrain uncertain. However, Irish republicans came out of this period energized, and this worried southern political elites who



36

felt that the moderate constitutional nationalism of the SDLP would suffer.69 To help secure the electoral position of the SDLP, the southern Irish government established the New Ireland Forum to discuss ways of bringing about a political settlement and rapprochement. Constituted by southern politicians and northern constitutional nationalists, the forum met in 1983–4 and considered different political possibilities for ending the conflict and the conditions that would help create an environment for it. Outside of the political arena, further paramilitary attacks continued in Northern Ireland and the British mainland into the late 1980s. At the same time, the Irish republican leadership – by engaging in early negotiation with constitutional nationalists – showed the beginnings of a change of heart about the trajectory of its “armed struggle” and the possibility of achieving its long-standing goals through political channels. In the 1990s political efforts to seek a permanent solution to the conflict intensified again with a view towards securing paramilitary ceasefires and engaging paramilitary organizations in negotiations towards a settlement. Some “symbolic politics” took place to prepare the ground for this outbreak of the peace process, including the British government’s declaration of having no selfish ‘strategic or economic interest’70 in Northern Ireland. The 1993 signing of the Downing Street Declaration marked another important juncture in Anglo-Irish relations and created a propitious political context for the announcement of paramilitary ceasefires. Like earlier political documents, this endorsed the principle of consent and asserted the commitment of both governments to work towards a permanent settlement while respecting the important identity differences dividing unionists and nationalists. The IRA broke its 1994 ceasefire and reminded people of the terrible consequences of its 1970s and 1980s paramilitary campaign. More political talks continued into the 1990s and 1997 – the year of Tony Blair’s election as British Prime Minister – and signalled a renewed willingness by the British government to push the peace process forward. The beginning of multi-party talks – which led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement – sought to close the gap between the unionist and nationalist sides about how difficult outstanding issues like the Irish state’s constitutional claim on Northern Ireland, the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons, policing, justice and equality, and prisoners would be dealt with. This agreement, endorsed by referenda north and south, embedded the peace process and secured the place of “normal politics” in shaping Northern Ireland’s future. Although the issues it sought to grapple with were not completely settled, it marked a new





engagement between unionists and nationalists and between the British and Irish states.71 Patterns in political attachment by age – controlling for other important demographic variables – offer weaker grounds for optimism. Geoffrey Evans and Richard Sinnott report that the more moderate political parties on both sides increased the number of older voters but in more recent times the more extreme parties on both sides have captured the youth vote.72 Highly symbolic of the new political landscape was the establishment in 1998 of the Saville Inquiry via a public announcement in the House of Commons, Westminster, by British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In making the announcement, Blair defined it more as a truth-telling exercise than a court of prosecution about the tragic events of Bloody Sunday.73 At a political level, the period from the 1970s to the present involved extraordinary developments and changes. The changes were discontinuous, though: political progress at one point was displaced by a resort to violence at other points. Changes at a social level were no less significant and some consideration of these deserves comment. One important socio-cultural change that took place during this period was a demographic one (with an important political inflection)74 and involved a discontinuous rise in the size of Northern Ireland’s Catholic nationalist population. In 1971, 31.4 per cent of the population self-identified as Catholic. This fell to 28 per cent in 1981 and grew to 38.4 per cent in 1991 and 40.26 per cent in 2001.75 This rise in the Catholic population owed something to the strong pro-natalist position of the Catholic Church and its valorization of large family sizes. Although Catholics constituted a growing proportion of its population, they tended to have higher rates of unemployment (or if employed to be concentrated at the low end of the labour market) and this in turn contributed to their higher propensity to emigrate.76 A growth in the Catholic middle class, a Catholic “bourgeoisie”, was also a notable social change.77 In the 1970s, Catholics tended to be overrepresented among the unskilled working class even though they tended to receive good solid educations in their own denominational system. The low rate of return among Catholics on their educational attainment was something civil rights agitators pointed to as evidence of a “sectarian seam”. However, in more recent times the once “Catholic disadvantage” in terms of the likelihood of transitioning from secondary school to higher education has been eroded and Catholics and Protestants are about equally likely now to go on to higher education.78 Northern Ireland’s economic landscape was strongly influenced by its political dynamics. Unsurprisingly, in the 1970s Northern Ireland’s



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economy – because of the constant threat of bombings – struggled to attract foreign investment, relied heavily on British exchequer investment, and found much of its material resources absorbed by the political conflict.79 A “seepage” of 150,000 jobs alone is estimated as a result of the long period of political violence.80 Indeed, its economic fortunes tended to be joined more to those in Britain than in southern Irish society.81 Lacking strong inward investment in the 1970s and moving to a post-industrial environment, unemployment in Northern Ireland during this period was high. The second important point that can be made about Northern Irish unemployment is that it affected different religious and gender categories in different ways: unemployment tended to be a good deal higher among Catholics and males than among Protestants and females.82 In 1971, overall the unemployment rate was just under 6 per cent, dipped slightly in the mid-1970s, and then experienced a bounce up until the late 1980s. In 1981, unemployment was nearly 10 per cent and by the mid1980s reached 17 per cent.83 In the early 1990s, unemployment began to drop significantly again and come closer to its early 1970s level. Variation in unemployment by religion was one of the important factors contributing to Catholic discontent about Northern Irish society in the 1970s. During this time period Catholics were more than twice as likely to be unemployed – in 1971 the unemployment rate for Catholics was 17.3 and 6.6 for Protestants.84 This “Catholic disadvantage” in terms of labour market outcomes persisted into the 1980s and 1990s, but the adoption of stronger fair employment and equality principles in the 1980s helped over time to reduce barriers to employment among Catholics, especially in public sector zones. In 1994, at the time of the IRA ceasefire, the unemployment rate among Catholic males (22 per cent) was twice the Protestant rate, but the gap had narrowed from 1971. So while Catholics have done better economically since the early 1970s they are still more likely to be unemployed and in jobs at the low end of the labour market than Protestants.85 However, the 1990s – and articulating with economic changes in southern Irish society – saw an upturn in Northern Ireland’s economic fortunes indexed by more stable unemployment trends, greater inward investment and a new emphasis on marketing it as a postmodern economy that has parted company with its violent past. One example of this branding of Northern Ireland is the recent effort to promote Belfast city as an international hub city with an attractive cultural life and economic investment opportunities. Its rechristening as “Titanic Town” employs a “positive” historical past to enhance its marketability and connect the city to a potentially large global tourist audience.




The changes and developments briefly sketched here at a political, social and economic level point to how different Northern Ireland is now compared with the early 1970s. The historical asymmetry of power in this society has clearly been recalibrated. Writing in the mid-1990s, Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd claimed that since 1969 the authority of unionists has been weakened,86 and they seem equally confident in pointing to the growth in nationalist power.87 Patterns relating to socialization, denominational schooling, religious service attendance, intermarriage, residential segregation, political voting and ongoing struggles over historical symbolism and collective memory all point though to the continuing presence of a “sectarian seam” in this small society, but, as the political progress over the last fifteen years suggests, in a far less unsettled institutional environment compared with the 1970s. Having Considered the changing contours of the remembering society in this chapter, the next chapter moves on to examine the role of memorialization and space in remembering the events of January 1972.



40 Commemoration and Bloody Sunday

A ‘Simple People Who Want a Simple Memorial’

On 28 January 1973, the people of Derry will commemorate the Bloody Sunday massacre. They will be joined by people from all over Ireland, from Britain and from all over the world. The people of Derry will remember the thirteen as friends, neighbours or workmates. But they will also remember them as comrades in the struggle which has still to be completed, the struggle to end repression, introduce democracy and uproot sectarianism from our community. NICRA leaflet for 1973 commemoration, NICRA Boxes, Northern Ireland Political Collection, Linenhall Library, Belfast. This year’s programme hosts a series of events that scrutinize the context of ‘democracy’ here and explore how we can collectively deal with our past ... In addition there are exhibitions, films and panel discussion. ‘Their epitaph is the ongoing struggle for democracy’, so read the programme, come to events, join in the debate! 2008 Bloody Sunday commemoration programme. About halfway down Rossville Street in Derry’s Bogside stands a memorial to the thirteen civilians shot dead on Bloody Sunday. The site of the memorial, known locally as “Speaker’s Corner”, was an obvious, logical and highly symbolic one,1 given that the victims had died on the spot or close by, in Glenfada Park, and had used the already-existing concrete platform at the corner to take cover on the day of the tragic shootings. The event commemorated by this memorial was a highly contested event and stands as a good example of a “difficult past”2 that gave rise to 41



3


emotionally and politically charged and competing impulses to remember and to forget among both victims and perpetrators. At the time of its erection, it stood before the high Rossville flats and there was a curious congruence between the vertical memorial and the buildings behind it. Reviewing the sociology of memory literature in their study of postapartheid remembrance in South Africa, Chana Teeger and Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi (2007) argue that two possible kinds of commemoration can take place as responses to difficult pasts: a multivocal one, in which a shared object gives expression to different meanings of an event, and a fragmented one, involving different temporal and spatial commemorations speaking to divergent publics. In this and another influential work,3 Vinitzky-Seroussi proposes and elaborates a conceptual model that helps explain different commemorative outcomes focusing on three key factors: the influence of what she calls ‘agents of memory’, the salience of the past in the present, and the prevailing political climate. Based on an analysis of a museum in post-apartheid South Africa, Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi go on to put forward an alternative third response of ‘overarching consensus’, in which the focus is on carefully managing the form and content of commemorative objects to promote what they call a ‘controlled consensus’. Northern Ireland represents an unsettled political culture and thus offers an interesting point of comparison with other unsettled societies with controversial pasts such as Israel and South Africa.4 Focusing on the Bloody Sunday memorial, I argue in this chapter that, in the 1970s through to the early 1990s, the Bloody Sunday memorial was an instructive example of the fragmented model and that from this period on it evolved into a consensual commemoration as the remembering society underwent political and social change. During this more recent period, I argue that Bloody Sunday commemoration revealed a convergence in the meanings associated with the event, one aligned with the earlier, nonhegemonic interpretation of NICRA.5 I also specify the conditions under which this is likely to develop. Based on this, I propose a model of consensual commemoration closely resembling Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi’s ‘controlled consensus’ framework but departing from it by emphasizing the core idea of the importance of convergence between different ‘preferred meanings’ of the past articulated across two key mnemonic sites rather than the closing down or omission of potentially disruptive narratives within a single memory site suggested by their analysis. Because Vinitzky-Seroussi’s analysis lacks a long-range, historical vantage, the contingent and indeterminate nature of commemoration is not theorized very well, whereas the Bloody Sunday case allows for a more extended



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temporal distance from the original event to help us better understand changing public representations of difficult or controversial pasts. The data for this chapter comes from interviews carried out with members of the victims’ families and memory choreographers. In addition, from archival research at the Linenhall Northern Ireland Political Collection, Belfast, I examined the original architect’s designs for the memorial, posters announcing the unveiling of the memorial and other commemorative events, as well as newspaper opinion pieces written in the early 1970s when the planning for the memorial took place and subsequent commentary in the local press. Finally, I draw on mnemonic speeches made at the memorial during various commemorative events. Special attention is given to the 1972–4 period when plans for the memorial got under way. This is the most opportune time to study a memorial because it is during this time that we get a window onto what Iwona Irwin-Zarecka calls its ‘framing process’.6 To help contextualize this analysis, I begin by grounding the chapter within existing collective memory research specifically with respect to the social memory of memorials7. I also locate it within the literature on memory in the Northern Irish context. This is followed by a narrative history of the memorial focusing on the role of the Derry branch of NICRA in co-ordinating efforts to plan the memorial, secure the site, raise monies for its construction, and organize the unveiling. I hope to show how the memorial was a repository of a non-violent political discourse articulated by NICRA and that this collided with an alternative discourse put forward by Sinn Féin (SF) in which Bloody Sunday was pressed into service in the construction of an anti-British myth of nationalist victimhood reflected in historical asymmetries of political and discursive power. Then, drawing on the work of Jennifer Jordan (2006) and Vinitzky-Seroussi (2002), I examine the factors that help explain the changing form of the memorial including the role of memory choreographers, the salience of the past in the present, and the evolving political landscape. I look at the reception the memorial received and the extent to which it resonated with its intended audience. Finally I examine the recent coming together of NICRA’s earlier interpretation of the memorial with later meaning-making from the mid-1990s, which the opening two passages bring into sharp focus.

The politics of memorialization There is a large and growing literature on the sociology of memorialization and the contested nature of this process, particularly with respect





to what are termed “difficult pasts”.8 Narratives of the past, difficult or not, are mobilized in the construction of identity storylines at an individual and collective level and find concrete expression in various artefacts and practices of commemoration.9 Some scholars have found the construct of trauma to have some analytical value with respect to difficult historical occurrences that throw a depth charge into this narrative storyline of a group or collectivity, but the construction of a trauma narrative depends upon cultural mediation.10 A number of empirical studies of memorialization across quite different national contexts provide evidence for the point that memorials to difficult pasts are frequently fought over. Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz’s well-known work on memorialization in respect of the Vietnam War, for example, examines the rich complexity around remembrance of this event in the United States in answer to the seemingly simple question of “How is commemoration without consensus, or without pride, possible?”11 In this example we see an important symbolic struggle between official state actors and vernacular grassroots groups over the “proper” way to remember a contested event that lies somewhere between a triumphant and a traumatic one. This struggle played out in the competition to select an appropriate memorial design and subsequent additions to it.12 The end result was a memorial whose simple form and content expressed ambivalence yet, against expectations, brilliantly succeeded in creating what David Kertzer refers to as ‘solidarity without consensus’.13 In this case, in strong contrast with the Bloody Sunday example, the moral categories of “victims” and “perpetrators” are ambiguous and there is much more state activity and mobilization around Vietnam War memory and commemoration. In the Bloody Sunday case, competing definitions of the situation got in the way of the construction of a shared narrative about what happened. But a common feature of both of these stories was a concern about constructing a memorial that would do justice to the dead being remembered – simplicity being the order of the day – and the sacrifices they made while at the same time giving expression to each society’s highest values of democracy and peace. Vinitzky-Seroussi’s work also addresses struggles over the meaning of the past with respect to the Yitzhak Rabin memorial in Israel. In this interesting case, two memorials or “spaces to remember” exist, one at Rabin’s grave and another at the spot where he was assassinated.14 The inscription on the Rabin grave memorial, in contrast to the Bloody Sunday one, is non-committal about the perpetrators and omits any mention of what happened and the context in which it took place. The



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memorial at the place of his death, on the other hand, reflects a more elaborated than a restricted commemorative discourse. The present day Bloody Sunday memorial inscription is an example of an elaborated discourse though until the mid-1990s the only framing of the memorial was the simple inscription ‘Their epitaph is in the continuing struggle for democracy.’ Although the first commemoration at the site of Rabin’s death was divested of political content, subsequent ones were not and elaborated a more politicized discourse. We learn that the Rabin family’s expressed wishes about the form and content of the memorials were not fully met and the final design, like the Vietnam memorial, was the outcome of political compromises. Vinitzky-Seroussi claims that ‘the two sites clearly transmit diverse messages’, contrasting ‘the restrained and dignified gravesite’ with the ‘politicised’ assassination memorial that speaks to Rabin but, crucially, to a ‘great deal beyond that’,15 helping the memorial resonate with multiple audiences. In this example we see heavy state activity around the memory of Rabin, in contrast to the example of Bloody Sunday, and the case also points to the capacity of memorials, through their location and inscriptions, to fix or channel the meanings ascribed to a difficult past in particular ways and to reach particular audiences at particular times. Importantly, VinitzkySeroussi isolates the sociological factors – active memory choreography, for instance – involved in this interpretative meaning-making process. Contestation around memories of the past, articulated at memorial sites inscribed in geographical space, is also the focus of Scott Simon’s work on Taiwanese memory. As with the Vietnam War, Bloody Sunday and Yitzhak Rabin examples, memories of a difficult past, in this case the massacre of 28 February 1947, fuel political claim-making about Taiwanese identity under Japanese colonial rule and, more recently, under mainland Chinese power elites. At the annual commemoration ceremony at the 2:28 memorial, grievances about Japanese rule are expressed in politicized banners and public discourse. These difficult memories co-exist alongside more benign interpretations of colonization as the conduit for the modernization of Taiwanese society. The cracking of Japanese colonialism after World War II ushered in a new era of Chinese rule, but even this carried its own polysemic meanings. For some the commemoration of 2:28, in both official state ceremonies and everyday bodily practices such as visits to Japanese coffee shops, became an occasion for constructing an anti-China and pro-Japanese myth and the chosen theme for the 1997 commemoration, “Remember 2:28; don’t be Chinese”, articulated this very clearly. For others, it was an occasion for critical claim-making with respect to the Japanese legacy





in Taiwan and drawing attention to the less than savoury aspects of its power. These competing memories register a quarrel over ‘the right to control social memory’,16 and point to, as the Vietnam and Rabin examples also demonstrate, the mobilizable potential of the past as a resource in the narrative construction of national group identity.17 Within Northern Ireland in recent years, dealing with the legacies of this society’s traumatic past and revitalizing its moral tissue has become a topic of frequent public discourse.18 Indeed, the project of securing a long-term and sustainable peace in Northern Ireland may well turn on a capacity of its two divided communities and the British state to develop inclusive ways of remembering the past that do not privilege the historical suffering of one side over the other. Historically, this society’s ‘hierarchy of victimhood’ has meant that some people’s deaths have been remembered and commemorated while others have been ignored and forgotten.19 Each community, nationalist and unionist, has tended to remember its own dead but few occasions of remembrance have commemorated the dead of both communities together. Relatively recent efforts to develop “civic remembrance” – for example, the massive book Lost Lives20 – aim to do this but the important question of different levels of responsibility for violence inflicted on the Other – the fine, grey line between victims and perpetrators – remains a point of contestation. Social science scholars have made an important contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of contested remembrance in Northern Irish society. Patricia Lundy and Mark McGovern’s work, for example, focuses on the issue of dealing with the difficult memory of funerals of casualties of the sectarian conflict in urban working-class Catholic communities such as the Ardoyne, memories woven into the identity narratives of the victims’ families and the subject of healing efforts – through such things as community oral history projects – during the “peace process”.21 The British state has also taken upon itself the task of remembering Northern Ireland’s difficult past through a state-sponsored assessment of the “problem” of memory.22 Like civil society initiatives, this report makes a strong argument for the importance of dealing with the significant human cost of the political conflict in terms of lives lost and the suffering of the victims’ families as a result. 23 However, the problematics of bringing about healing and reconciliation at a social level, the application of psychological discourse and concepts to collective social experiences, the relationship between institutional and vernacular remembering, and the sociological factors influencing this process are not questioned as much as one might expect in these state and civil society projects.24



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As the organizer of the original march at which the thirteen civilians were killed, NICRA was the major memory choreographer and took upon itself, in consultation with the victims’ families, the task of memorializing the events of 30 January 30 1972. What was surprising about this project, in the light of the deeply divergent and polysemic meanings that Bloody Sunday evoked in later political contestation between NICRA and SF, was how uncontroversial and straightforward it was. NICRA and SF engaged in competing claim-making around the event, SF emphasizing it as an example of the injustices of British rule, and NICRA evoked the Bloody Sunday dead as a metaphor for the continuing struggle for peace and democracy in Northern Ireland. While there was some critical comment in the letters to the editor pages in the pre-history phase, once the memorial was built it evoked little debate, although it was a key site at which NICRA put forward its nonviolent construction of the meaning of the event. Consistent with Vera Zolberg’s findings, the passage of time has fashioned more consensus about the memorial.25 The Belfast-based NICRA had a branch structure, and the key figure within the Derry branch of NICRA behind the memorial was Bridget Bond.26 Little time was wasted in putting plans in place for erecting the memorial. The February edition of NICRA’s newsletter, just a month after Bloody Sunday, announced the establishment of a memorial fund to raise money for the design and construction costs, was non- committal about what shape it would take, and reported an early donation of five pounds from an anonymous donor at NICRA’s Belfast office.27 In 1972, an anonymous citizen’s letter to the Derry Journal entitled ‘A Garden of Remembrance’ was equally quick off the mark and proposed the form that this memorial should take and its location, while noting the fervent interest in commemoration in the south of Ireland: When one drives through the South of Ireland one can only be impressed by the wayside shrines commemorating Ireland’s glorious dead. Ours in the past have only had their names enshrined on memorials and tombstones where they lost their lives fighting for an empire that held our country in thralldom and subjection. Now 13 of our brother Derryman have redeemed our inglorious past by their supreme sacrifice and it is right and fitting that we should honour their memory by the erection of our memorial, a garden of remembrance.



The Bloody Sunday memorial: a history

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In July 1972, DCRA, the Derry branch of NICRA, announced its intention to hold an open competition for the design of the memorial in an article in a national newspaper,29 helping to assure the project’s “national” legitimacy and establish its shared ownership,30 though the absence of any explicit rules about the design was curious. Letters were sent out inviting contributions from the public for the Derry Memorial Fund and a letter addressed to the people of Ballyhaunis, Co. Mayo, asked for their continued financial support and added that a thousand pounds was needed to fund it.31 NICRA replied to Ballyhaunis Civil Rights Association in a letter dated 7 February 1973, thanking it for its contribution to the Derry Memorial Fund and pointing out the shortfall in funding.32 Other smaller donations came from Harrow NICRA in Middlesex, England. Harrow NICRA donated five pounds. In reply, NICRA thanked the organization for its contribution adding that it expected to be able to pay for it within five or six months.33 Others were less sympathetic to NICRA’s plans of erecting a non-inflammatory memorial. In the letter pages of the Irish Times, for instance, the Revd. John Morrow, Presbyterian Chaplain at Trinity College Dublin, registered his displeasure at NICRA’s selective remembering of the past.34 In a letter to the Irish News asking NICRA to rethink its plans for a Bloody Sunday memorial, the Revd. Morrow asked for an inclusive symbol remembering all Derry’s dead.35 The 3 January 1973 meeting of the regional executive of DCRA was dominated by the Bloody Sunday commemoration. Much of the discussion was taken up with the practical arrangements for the commemoration – purchasing wreaths, organizing a press conference, the re-dedication to the struggle for democracy and organizing the vigil. As part of this discussion it was agreed that the only fundraising collection that would take place at the commemoration would be for the memorial and it was agreed that only books and records relating to Bloody Sunday and the NICRA paper and programme would be sold.36 At its March 1973 meeting the committee discussed proposals for raising money for the memorial. A concert and raffle, contingent upon the consent of the relatives, was proposed and passed unanimously. Members also agreed to establish a finance committee. Bridget Bond met the relatives regarding cheques that were received for the memorial.37



We have the perfect spot in the open space facing Free Derry Corner, the proposed traffic island which is there. This would have the two-fold purpose of honouring our dead and perpetuating Free Derry Corner, where our great struggle started, a struggle which has been seen now by the whole world. 28

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In addition to deciding upon the memorial design and raising enough money to construct it, the question of the site upon which it would be built was also on the table. Securing this meant negotiating with the public bureaucracy of the local city. NICRA wrote to the Northern Ireland Housing Executive about this in May 1972 and asked its permission to erect the memorial at Speaker’s Corner.38 Crucially, the site makes a strong claim on vernacular nationalist memory because of its explicit linkage to the historical event.39 As one interviewee elaborated in detail: in those days where the monument was actually sitting there was a structure of a sort in relation to a sort of a type of structure in such a way that took away the blandness of the area so they put what was known as tree-penny bits in there and what they were I think there were three structures in the shape of an old three-penny bit I don’t know ever remember that – it is like a hexagonal shape, you know, and those structures actually saved people that day. People took cover behind those when the Paras were firing and actually within the three-penny structure where the monument sits at the present time, internally there are bullets embedded in that.40 In its reply, the NIHE pointed out that ownership of the site had been transferred to the Londonderry Development Commission (LDC) in July 1969. Michael Havord and Bridget Bond of the DCRA agreed to arrange a meeting about the memorial with the Director of Works at the LDC. In a letter to the Roads Section of the LDC on June 8 1972,41 NICRA’s secretary, Edwina Stewart, wrote of NICRA’s intention to erect a memorial in the form of a sculpture surrounded by grass and flowers at its preferred location close to the scene of the shootings and asked for a meeting to discuss their plans.42 In response, the Director of Works for LDC, J. C. Mackinder, wrote back on 9 June 1972, noting his availability to discuss the memorial’s location.43 Havord and Stewart reported back to the DCRA regional executive meeting on 3 December 1972 that the meeting with the Director of Works had taken place and that he had no objections to the memorial. Proposals for the memorial design were received from the public from as far away as Australia.44 Michael Armstrong, an Irish emigrant living in Australia, wrote to NICRA and suggested thirteen coffin-shaped green marble stones each bearing the name of the dead – cut through with red to signify Bloody Sunday – and a plaque at the centre to explain





what happened. He asked that ample room be left between the stones to allow people to show their respect for the dead.45 Sculptor Cecil King, designer of a number of other public sculptures in Dublin and Washington DC, wrote to the Belfast-based NICRA on 26 July 1972 with his proposal for the memorial. Closely resembling Michelangelo’s famous Pietà, it took the form of a bronze statue of three people – one lying dead on the ground, another holding the dead body of one of the victims. King sent two photographs of a small-scale model of his proposed memorial with a cover letter to NICRA and asked their consideration of it. How much consideration it got is difficult to determine.46 It is quite possible that other designs besides those of Cecil King and Michael Armstrong were also considered, but, to my knowledge, no visual records remain of others. It is appears that the option of having more than one memorial was not considered. Of the designs that we do know about, none was particularly radical or unconventional in nature. From these proposed designs, sculptor Cathal L. Newcombe & Sons from Ballycastle, County Antrim, was selected by NICRA to sculpt the memorial at a cost of £1,000,47 and his proposed memorial design (Figures 3.1, 3.2) clearly resonated with the victims’ families. A former Long Kesh internee, the winning designer was introduced at a NICRA press conference in Belfast in January 1974. The carving of the memorial was delayed for some time because the blue Wicklow limestone for it had to be transported from a supplier in Dublin to Ballycastle. NICRA’s press officer, Kevin McCorry, said that a commemorative garden would also be built and that this would be cared for by schoolchildren from the area. The memorial was designed in two sections, the basic vertical structure and a concrete base known as a thrupenny bit. He stated at the time that the relatives were ‘simple people who want a simple memorial’,48 and, as Sturken rightly observes, ‘some of the most effective memorials and tributes to loss have been small and contained’.49 It was planned that the memorial should be unveiled for the 1973 commemoration, but owing to time constraints, the 1973 unveiling did not take place. Instead of an unveiling, and to avert a potentially damaging false start, the symbolic beginning of the memorial was marked at the 1973 commemoration by the turning of the first sod on the site by Lord Fenner Brockway, who was on the platform at the original Bloody Sunday march and a prominent member of the English Left.50 The singing of Bloody Sunday songs, a short address by the NICRA chairman, a recitation of Thomas Kinsella’s poem,51 the laying of wreaths, and the non-denominational service all took place before the turning of the



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Figure 3.1 Sculptor’s designs for Bloody Sunday memorial, Rossville Street. (Courtesy of Adrian Kerr, Museum of Free Derry)

sod. Edwina Stewart, Lord Brockway, Ivan Cooper, Bernadette Devlin, Fr. Edward Daly, the Revd. Terence McCaughey, Rory McShane and Margo Collins made up the platform party. Speakers were asked by letter to adhere to the protocol limiting speeches to five minutes. Anyone who did not agree to this would not be asked to speak. Bridget Bond laid the wreath on behalf of DCRA at the first NICRA commemoration. The design of the wreath was agreed beforehand: it was round with the figures in the middle and the flowers were blue and white, the signature colours of the civil rights association.52 A year later the memorial was just about ready for its unveiling. The construction of the memorial began on the Friday afternoon of the weekend of the 1974 commemoration, continued through Friday and Saturday night, and was ready just in time for the unveiling on the Sunday. The Derry Journal carried a photograph of Charles Morrison,53 Cathal Newcombe and Michael Harkin at work on its construction on





Figure 3.2 An artist’s impression of the proposed Bloody Sunday memorial. (Courtesy of Adrian Kerr, Museum of Free Derry)

the Friday before the unveiling,54 and a NICRA poster announcing the unveiling (Figure 3.3) depicted the outline of the memorial against a background of many people and its simple black and white colours evoked the sombre character of the occasion as well as the simple,



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Figure 3.3 NICRA poster for unveiling of memorial. (Courtesy of Adrian Kerr, Museum of Free Derry)

non-inflammatory nature of the memorial. A leaflet publicizing the unveiling stated that the dead gave their lives neither for party politician nor private army but for an end to internment, torture and repression. Non-violent





mass struggle was their method. Unity of all people in peace and democracy was their aim. The same demands, the same methods and the same unity are still as necessary today as two years ago. Remember the martyrs of Bloody Sunday and the objectives for which they died by attending the march and commemoration starting from the Bishop’s Field, Creggan on Saturday, January 26th 1974 at 2.30p.m. The commemoration will include the unveiling of the Bloody Sunday monument.55 In preparation for the unveiling, a crane was hired to erect the memorial and a cover was placed over it. Crash barriers were erected around the memorial to protect it and vigilantes kept it under observation at night.56 The unveiling by Bridget Bond of the DCRA, announced nearly three weeks earlier in a NICRA notice in the Derry Journal,57 took place on 26 January 1974.58 At the unveiling were gathered relatives of the dead as well as members of DCRA. It was a highly scripted occasion. The unveiling consisted of a meeting at the memorial addressed by Jim Wray, Edwina Stewart (secretary of NICRA), P. J. McClean (former secretary of Long Kesh Camp Council), Brian Brennan (Belfast CRA). Following short five-minute speeches, the ‘Lament for Aughrim’ was played and a one-minute silence was observed. After this the memorial was unveiled. Wreaths were then laid followed by a re-dedication to the struggle for democracy and civil rights.59 The Irish Times carried a front-page photograph of the newly unveiled memorial the day after and an article about the SF and NICRA commemorations.60 The Derry Journal’s front page showed Bridget Bond standing alone beside the memorial.61 The Londonderry Sentinel also ran an article and photograph of the memorial, but did not give it front-page treatment.62 The memorial took the form of a Protestant-styled obelisk,63 and was characterized by ‘aesthetic conservatism’.64 On it were inscribed the names of the victims and their ages and the date of the unveiling by Bridget Bond of DCRA, 26 January 1974. The naming of the dead, which helped to personalize the memorial, was straightforward given the relatively few people killed.65 The memorial squarely faces the question of guilt and responsibility – thereby validating the vernacular nationalist memory – because it tells us that the dead were ‘murdered by British paratroopers on Bloody Sunday 30 January 1972’. The British army did not approve of the wording of the memorial’s inscription, which permanently reminded people of its alleged culpability and made this discontent publicly known.66 The inscription emblazoned above this,



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‘Their epitaph is in the continuing struggle for democracy’, evokes the indebtedness of the living to the dead,67 and calls forth a democratic means of achieving political and social change. A peace dove is inscribed beside this. Above this is the inscription N.I.C.R.A. and below it the year 1974. In this way, the vernacular memorial serves a dual purpose, as Guy Beiner reminds us, remembering not just the dead but the memory choreographers involved in remembering them.68 Impressively, the whole project, from initial fundraising to the unveiling, was completed in just two years. From this year on, the memorial became a stopping-off point at the annual commemoration and became known locally as “the Martyrs’ Memorial”. A report in An Phoblacht/Republican News on the 1984 commemoration, in stating that wreaths were laid at the ‘memorial cross erected by the people of Derry’,69 omitted to mention NICRA’s role in the project of memorialization and the political meanings it claimed for Bloody Sunday, claim-making that stood in stark relief to that of Sinn Féin. This interpretative struggle between NICRA and SF took place at the annual commemoration march, marking the original 1972 march and retracing its steps from the Creggan to Free Derry Corner, at which each sought to seize the discursive field and exert control over the meaning of Bloody Sunday in a way that, in the early 1970s, created a fragmented commemoration with each memory choreographer organizing its own remembrance events competing for the ideological allegiance of northern nationalists. In this symbolic struggle, the Bloody Sunday memorial became a carrier of peaceful meanings, epitomized by its inscription and the dove of peace emblazoned on it, that was contested by an alternative interpretation, coming from militant Irish republicans, emphasizing, via the annual march, violent political action. At the memorial these competing ideologies were articulated and each group used the annual memorial service to legitimize its involvement in remembering Bloody Sunday.

Transforming a difficult past For the first twenty years or so, the Bloody Sunday memorial received virtually no maintenance, was rarely reported upon in the local press, and stood on an isolated piece of ground dwarfed by the modernist high-rise Rossville Street flats. Until the late 1990s, there was no fence or railing to set the memorial apart from the everyday comings and goings of people or to protect it from possible damage by parked cars or passing traffic. Apart from the annual memorial service (Figure 3.4) and




Figure 3.4 Crowds assemble at the Bloody Sunday memorial prior to the start of the 2005 memorial service and wreath-laying ceremony. (Photograph by the author)

occasional visits by locals, the memorial was mostly forgotten, uneventful and evoked little comment, positive or negative. But from the mid-1990s on, three important factors identified by Vinitzky-Seroussi, and others such as Jennifer Jordan, help account for changes in the memorial: the political landscape, the power of memory choreographers, and the salience of the past in the present.70 After the 1994 Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire it became increasingly common for political luminaries who visited the city – US Senator Edward Kennedy and then-Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern – to lay a wreath at the memorial and through this to lend symbolic support and national visibility to the campaign of the victims’ families for a new inquiry. Lord Saville visited the memorial in April 1998 when the Bloody Sunday Inquiry opened in Derry’s Guildhall. The Derry Journal reported that ‘from William Street they made their way to the Bloody Sunday monument and stood for a quiet moment, perhaps contemplating the enormity of what had happened here all those years ago’.71 Visits by the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign (BSJC) to Dublin and




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London also helped to nationalize its message. One’s success, or not, in “bearing witness”, as Kurasawa reminds us, is crucially shaped by power relations and the ability to forge national and transnational alliances and allies.72 Owing to the history of previous Bloody Sunday commemorations not all political elites were prepared to lend their support. In 1992, the BSJC extended an invitation to the President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, to lay a wreath at the Bloody Sunday memorial when she visited Northern Ireland. President Robinson declined to do so on three occasions, although she did lay a wreath at the Enniskillen War memorial.73 In 1993, the BSJC reissued the invitation, pointing out the non-political nature of the BSJC. Speaking on national radio in May 1993, Mrs Robinson pointed out that many people had lost their lives in “the Troubles” and went on to take issue with the privileging of nationalist suffering at the expense of that of the other tradition – something she did not want to solidify by visiting the memorial. In this account, the President was troubled by the implicit moral ranking of Troubles-linked deaths and especially the view among some nationalists that ‘deaths there (among unionists) don’t seem to have the same value’74 as other deaths in Northern Ireland. As the political dynamics changed in the 1990s, Northern Ireland’s potential as a site of tourism improved and within Derry city, the memorial was visited by more tourists than before. In 1994, Councillor Mary Nelis (Sinn Féin), after representations made to her by Bogside residents, called on Derry City Council to erect signposts for Free Derry Wall and the Bloody Sunday memorial,75 and bemoaned the event’s omission from tourist guides of the city.76 Councillor Nelis’ intervention was important from the standpoint of collective memory because it brought into the public domain, for the first time, the question of ownership of the memorial and whether it was, or ought to be, part of the history of the city reported in tourist guidebooks, key mediators of tourists’ navigation of time and space.77 By raising the crucial question of to whom the memorial belonged, what was at stake here was how the city of Derry presented itself to itself and to outsiders. By omitting the Bloody Sunday memorial and Free Derry Corner from the official tourist mapping of the city, it could be argued that the city planners sought to construct an image of Derry as a bright, modern and new city, one that has jettisoned its difficult recent past, a past that tourists would be reminded of by being directed to these two sites of memory.78 Derry’s recent symbolic construction as “the Galway of the North” and tourist hub city – a vibrant, friendly, youth-oriented urban environment – reflects these material changes in its landscape. Also in the late 1990s, the meaning





of the memorial was shaped by the ongoing Saville Inquiry, signalled by the visit to the memorial of Lord Saville and a candlelit street procession to it by the families of the victims and their supporters on the occasion of the opening (and closing) of the inquiry’s legal proceedings. Physical changes to the Rossville Street area in the late 1980s and early 1990s, brought about by the local city government via its urban renewal project, significantly altered the immediate environment around the memorial and made it more appealing as a tourist destination. As part of this urban renewal process, the Rossville flats were demolished to make way for low-rise council housing. Tall lantern-like public lights were taken down and stone bollards along the street removed. Looking up towards the city walls above the memorial one observes recently constructed tourist hotels that cater for a growing visitor market in the city. The area in and around the memorial – Free Derry Corner – was transformed in the mid-1990s as a major site of “Troubles tourism” and the memorial now competes for visitor attention with several other historical sites including Free Derry Wall, the People’s Gallery (a series of street murals painted by the local Bogside artists), and the recently opened Museum of Free Derry. All these sites articulate “potted summaries of events” with implicit connections or inter-textual links with one another,79 and point to the politicized histories and geographies of the Catholic nationalist community. The memorial and Museum of Free Derry museum across the road, located within clear view of each other, now work together to shape the meaning of the Bloody Sunday story for new audiences including tourists, visitors and political luminaries. While the museum chronicles what happened on Bloody Sunday and preserves archival material related to it and other local events, it is not the focus of ritual commemoration. In this sense, then, and also owing to its longer history of association with the close-knit, working-class nationalist Bogside, the memorial is arguably freighted with greater symbolic meaning. Each, however, is increasingly visited by ‘tourists of history’80 eager to know something more about the tragic events of 30 January 1972 and to connect it to ongoing struggles for truth and justice in other times and places. When asked to comment about post-Saville Inquiry commemorative activity, one memory choreographer specifically singled out the Rossville Street memorial as the central site of Bloody Sunday memory connecting future generations to the event: if Saville comes out with a perfect report we will not be on the streets anymore but the issue. Bloody Sunday will still have happened ... the



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A third important change was reflected in the attempt of memory choreographers to fix the meaning of the memorial more than the original inscription had done and to promote a consensus about its interpretation consistent with the vernacular nationalist memory of the event. Around the time of the 25th anniversary and in preparation for the memorials’ re-dedication, a number of memory choreog raphers decided to make some aesthetic improvements to the memorial by redoing the inscription, adding a garden, brick wall and railings around the perimeter in the style of a memorial garden, and, importantly, a plaque at the entrance (Figure 3.5). This was done because it was felt at the time that the memorial had a tired look, that it had been allowed to become untidy and run-down, and that it simply did not do justice to the victims. As one memory choreographer put it: ‘we felt that it didn’t amount up to what the dead and injured deserved to be truthful. You know it was pretty bland. Very, it didn’t look right.’82 The iron railing, as W. Lyold Warner puts it with strong echoes of Durkheim, symbolically sets apart ‘the social boundaries of the sacred dead and the secular world of the profane living’.83 The emblem or logo of the BSJC is emblazoned on this railing. One of the dove’s wings is inscribed with an oak leaf. Bloody Sunday is inscribed at the top and 72 at the bottom of the logo. Taken together – the setting apart from everyday space, the ritual commemoration, and public ownership – help to establish the memorial as ‘shadowed ground’.84 In 2008, a variation of the inscription on the memorial – ‘Their epitaph is the ongoing struggle for democracy’ – was invoked in the narrative of that year’s commemorative brochure and this solidified its importance as a site of Bloody Sunday memory. The most significant aspect of the change was the plaque. For almost thirty years the memorial existed without any attempt to fix its meaning and was characterized by its ‘open-ended ambivalence’. 85 Lisa Yoneyama’s account of the intentions of memory choreographers who erected a plaque in memory of Korean victims of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima as reflecting an ‘anxiety about controlling the memorial’s significatory processes – their desire that visitors not arbitrarily interpret the memorial’,86 applies equally well to the Bloody Sunday memorial. The plaque’s narrative is set against the iconic photographic image of the lorry that led the original



issue can’t just ever disappear because it did happen. There is nothing Saville can say that will mean that fourteen were not murdered by paratrooper. It will always be there, it will be different, but it will always be there, the memorial will always be there.81


Figure 3.5 author)

The Bloody Sunday Memorial, August 2004. (Photograph by the

march bearing the CRA banner and is ‘dedicated to all those throughout the world who have struggled, suffered imprisonment and lost their lives in the pursuit of liberty, justice and civil rights’. Given its significance, the script is worth quoting at length: On January 30 1972, a massive British military operation in Derry’s Bogside ended in the murder of thirteen unarmed civil rights demonstrators and the wounding of fifteen others – one of whom died later of his injuries on 16 June. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery,87 was appointed by the British government to hold a Tribunal of Inquiry. When his report was published eleven weeks later, it exonerated the British army. The people of Derry felt betrayed. The Widgery report was branded a whitewash by human rights groups throughout the world. On 3 October 1972, Lieutenant Colonel Derek Wilford, Commanding Officer of 1 Para, the regiment most responsible for the massacre on Bloody Sunday, was awarded the OBE for services to Queen and country.



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Bloody Sunday was a watershed with catastrophic consequences for the peoples of Ireland and Britain: it removed any remaining confidence in the judiciary, the police and the government. The passage of time has not dimmed the memories or the trauma of those who marched on Bloody Sunday for civil rights and an end to internment. For those who lost loved one, the hurt is particularly ingrained. A debt of justice and truth is still owed to the victims, the bereaved and to the people of Derry. The British military, the British judiciary, the British government and the Stormont regime88 – all must accept responsibility for Bloody Sunday and its consequences. Only then can the wounds of that day finally be healed. Two things about the plaque are particularly noteworthy. First, the dedication to other casualties of state injustice across the world points to a convergence with NICRA’s earlier construction of the meaning of Bloody Sunday. And, second, the deployment of a language of “justice” and “truth” resonates with the civil society and state projects, mentioned earlier, aimed at dealing with difficult memories, but also, crucially, with commemorative discourse at Bloody Sunday marches in the 1990s but particularly at the 2002 commemoration. Around the time of the 30th anniversary there was a surge in interest in Bloody Sunday and 2002 represented the high water mark of an effort, developed from the mid-1990s onwards, involving the mobilization of public support for the non-violent quest for justice and truth for the victims and their families. As one memory choreographer put it: the families are the people who look after it. We’ve been involved over the last, since 1992 really, in dealing with the monument itself and looking after the monument. At one time it was just a plain piece, it was just the monument itself sitting on top of a three-penny bit itself, the structure itself, but if you look at it now it has the garden, it has the railings ... and we done that three years ago I think it was that we decided to upgrade the monument. We done it for the 30th anniversary. That’s when we done it. And we decided to upgrade the monument itself.89 The memorial redesign was initially taken up by a small cadre of memory choreographers who discussed the matter among themselves and then enlisted the support of others with valuable skills. One choreographer




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we went and talked to people, and raised funds for it, and put it together ... so it wasn’t a straightforward situation of you know. Right we will do this. What it was really at the end of the day, because we decided to do it, between the three of us ... as a matter of fact the first we did was they we got a local businessman in the city ... a builder, and he started off.90 The interviewee continues by elaborating the memorial’s resonance with new publics: but then, as I say, on the 30th anniversary we decided to put up the railings and we decided to put plants and all that sort of stuff so. In other words to upgrade because thousands upon thousands of people from all over the world visit that monument every year. And we thought it was only right and fitting that they should see a monument that was deserving of the people who died on Bloody Sunday. So it lay like that for twenty years in an ordinary state of affairs till we came along. The families came along, within the campaign. And we more or less took over.91 Importantly, the decision to upgrade the memorial was linked to the memorial becoming a site of tourism and its political salience “within the campaign” aimed at exerting pressure on the British government to establish a second inquiry into the events of 30 January 1972. Now, the area in and around the memorial – Free Derry Corner – hosts a wide range of memorials to different aspects of the Northern Irish conflict, transforming it into a highly charged mnemonic space.

Reception of the memorial NICRA was successful, as we saw earlier, in planning and eventually building the memorial on Rossville Street. But this is not the whole story. What of the memorial’s reception after its initial construction and unveiling? The success, or otherwise, of memory work turns on whether it resonates with an audience. Audience reactions, in turn, are shaped by their relationship to the memory choreographer. In the case of the Bloody Sunday memorial, different people responded to it and the memorial services that took place at it in different ways. For one



explains the process he and two other allies went through and reveals the social structure of memorialization:


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I think it is actually a very sad occasion and I think sometimes you nearly feel uncomfortable there not that anybody makes me feel uncomfortable. Sometimes you feel it is a very private and personal thing for the families but your there your showing support and you’re your you’ve got your own thoughts and feelings about it but there is something about it I can’t quite say I just think it is a very sad occasion a very emotional occasion for those people especially and everybody around them and the minute’s silence at the actual time that the shooting started on the 30th of January you know the march is on the nearest Sunday the minute’s silence on the anniversary itself that is very eerie it seems to me the whole Rossville Street the whole Bogside nearly comes to a standstill.92 For others, the memorial service at the monument evokes little emotion and carries a weaker meaning compared with the annual march but the act of laying wreaths at the memorial during the march does have significance, highlighting how one site of memory articulates with another. One respondent commented on what the service meant to him: I would say the march is only part of the commemoration but it is in one sense the most meaningful because it is the biggest and because it is a public statement and but personally I think it is the march and specifically the march where they lay the crosses on the monument. I find that quite moving significant moment. The march itself, the wreath-laying is obviously very significant to the families. The whole wreath-laying on the morning. That was the most significant. I would also see the commemorative events during the week as significant.93 For this respondent, Bloody Sunday is commemorated in multiple ‘spaces to remember’,94 including a week-long programme of events and activities including seminars, exhibitions, discos, table quizzes, lectures, video screenings in the week prior to the commemorative march and memorial service (Figures 3.6, 3.7, 3.8), but each one reinforces rather than undermines consensus around the event. The memorial’s meaning, then, is shaped by its relationship to other sites of memory, particularly the



interviewee, participation in the memorial service on the morning of the annual march prises open the relationship between private personal remembrance and public communal commemoration:


Figure 3.6 The families of the dead lay wreaths at the Sunday morning memorial service during the 2009 commemoration. (Photograph by the author)

annual commemorative march. Yet the memorial is the key site of Bloody Sunday memory – as Ground Zero is for the families of 9/1195 – because it is here that the families of the victims go, and not somewhere else, when they want to read a public statement about Bloody Sunday. More than any other memorial site, it functions as a ‘stand in for the dead’.96

Conclusion Vinitzky-Seroussi’s analytical framework that distinguishes between fragmented and multivocal commemoration has a good deal of theoretical purchase and has clearly improved our understanding of the different forms commemoration can take and the factors that account for this variation in meaning-making and interpretation of the past.97 At the end of her work on Yitzhak Rabin, Vinitzky-Seroussi invites further research examining commemoration in other national contexts with different societal conditions – particularly with respect to the past– present relationship, the salience of memory choreographers, and the prevailing political climate – to those of Israel.



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Figure 3.7 Speakers address the assembled crowd at the Sunday morning memorial service during the 2009 commemoration. (Photograph by the author)

The case study introduced and elaborated in this chapter, the memorialization of Bloody Sunday, offers an interesting “test” of VinitzkySeroussi’s model. Rossville Street was an “authentic” spot to locate the memorial though the obelisk,98 or indeed any commemorative form, was hardly adequate to the terror associated with the event and those who bore witness to it. A memorial is more likely to have “legs” when it is located in a publicly owned site, lacks competing claims on the space it occupies, resonates with a wide audience, and is promoted by memory choreographers.99 The Bloody Sunday memorial, as we have seen in this chapter, had all these things going for it. For all the apparent fixity of memorials though, its meaning did not stand still. This case suggests that the commemoration of a single event can encompass both fragmented and consensual commemorations. Like Vinitzky-Seroussi’s empirical example, the commemoration of Bloody Sunday involves different mnemonic times and spaces, the times including a week-long series of events as well as the symbolic high point of the commemorative march on the nearest Sunday to 30 January, and the multiple spaces encompassing the Rossville Street memorial, the Guildhall





Figure 3.8 The Bloody Sunday memorial shortly after the memorial service and wreath-laying ceremony during the 2009 commemoration. (Photograph by the author)

stained-glass window, the route of the original march from the Creggan to Free Derry Corner, and the recently opened Museum of Free Derry. Against Vinitzky-Seroussi’s line of argument, these multiple mnemonic spaces do not speak to different publics but rather represent different occasions for retelling the vernacular nationalist memory of the event. Vinitzky-Seroussi’s analysis would lead one to expect that the commemoration of Bloody Sunday, against a background of an unsettled society and culture, would take only a fragmented form. But her lack of temporal distance from the Rabin memorial means that she is poorly positioned to examine change over time in the memorialization of controversial pasts in response to changing social and political conditions, and only at the end of her article does she begin to speculate about this. This chapter, by taking a longer range temporal perspective than Vinitzky-Seroussi, suggests that two different forms are possible within a single event. In the early 1970s, Bloody Sunday remembrance was characterized by different social movement organizations articulating divergent and contradictory meanings of the event, clearly fitting the



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fragmented model. Towards the 1990s this gave way to a more consensual commemoration in which the Bloody Sunday memorial and march became a shared symbol around which different social groups, with different interpretations of 1972, mobilized in their quest for power to define the truth about what happened on Bloody Sunday, making it a “usable past” freighted with moral capital within a new political environment seeking to resolve Northern Ireland’s long-standing conflict. Admittedly, and in keeping with most collective memory research, this chapter has examined a memorial that actually got built. But as Jennifer Jordan points out in her work on memorialization in Berlin,100 attention to memorials that are unbuilt – where a memorial was not101 – may well be just as illuminating in terms of our understanding of the conditions influencing “successful” commemoration. In the Bloody Sunday example, a proposal in 1992 by the then Bogside and Brandywell Development Association (BBDA) to develop a ‘Bloody Sunday Memorial Garden’ in the Gasyard site on Lecky Road in the Bogside ran aground in the face of difficulties in securing state funding for a project with “Bloody Sunday” in its title.102 In pitching the proposal for the redevelopment project, Michael English of the BBDA noted the respect enjoyed by the nearby Rossville Street memorial and predicted a similar receptive local audience to the plans for the Gasyard site. Derry City Council declined the original proposal and a later revision of the BBDA’s plans for the site omitted specific reference to Bloody Sunday and employed the more neutral name of Gortananama, the Irish for “the field of souls”, though retained the idea of a memorial garden for the Bloody Sunday dead.103 This took the form of fourteen vertical limestone stones, but only five were ever erected. This brief negative case104 of unsuccessful Bloody Sunday remembrance teaches us that the existence of committed memory choreographers on its own does not result in “successful” commemoration. Getting others to come on board depends on characteristics of the memory site as well. Stand-alone, small-scale and selfcontained memorials like the Rossville Street memorial examined here that are not part of large-scale redevelopment projects, are less dependent on state funding for their construction and assert strong claims to authenticity,105 may well be less difficult – though not easy – for memory choreographers to pull off.




4

On a cold Sunday afternoon in January 2007, a few hundred people gathered outside the shops in the Creggan area of the city. Just a short distance away is the Catholic church where the funerals of the dead took place. Along the railings in front of the shops Irish republican banners bearing the symbols of republican cumann, or branches, stand upright, their bright colours of red, green and yellow throwing the dark grey clouds overhead into sharp relief. Further up, young and old, men and women, republicans and non-republicans gathered outside the Telstar bar – some with pint in hand – and listen to drum and flute bands practise their musical arrangement. A photograph of the original Bloody Sunday march hangs on the wall inside the pub and the grafittied walls outside declare “Provoland”. Across the road, street traders sell republican memorabilia at cheap prices, though most passersby look rather than buy. A white chip van jostles for room on the roadway lined with cars and 1980s buses. As the starting time approaches, the families of the dead begin to assemble at the front of the march and white crosses are distributed bearing the names of the dead. Someone unrolls a large white canvass with the inscription ‘Tell The Truth’, and this is moved to the front as the lead banner. When political luminaries begin to arrive they mingle and chat for a few minutes and then more and more people leave their vantage points and assemble behind the families. Photographers take quick shots of the families lined across the road to march once again for justice for their dead relatives. All of a sudden the size of the march seems much larger than the small clusters of people standing, talking and waiting outside the Creggan shops. Banners held aloft by Sinn Féin cumann from Crossmaglen and Louth, Troops Out Movement, the Irish Republican Socialist Party, and Irish Northern Aid, gives the crowd 68



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a face. The march, led by the tricolour, moves slowly off down the winding Creggan slopes to its Free Derry Corner destination. Everyone seems glad to be off (Figures 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5).1 The proceeding chapter examined the “career” of one important site of Bloody Sunday memory. This chapter continues this examination of its commemorative trajectory by focusing on the ritual remembrance of the event in the form of an annual march and rally. The commemoration of the event, as we have seen, involves a great variety of discursive, visual and embodied registers, and this chapter focuses on the latter. The march marks the high point and culmination of each year’s commemoration, attracting high media attention and promoting wide participation among ordinary people in the remembrance of the event. What, after all, could be a more appropriate way of remembering the event than re-enacting the original death march? In recent years, scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds such as anthropology, sociology, psychology and history have paid increasing attention to collective memory in the underwriting and construction of group identity.2 Within the discipline of sociology, most studies have focused

Figure 4.1 Crowds assemble at the Creggan shops, Derry, for the start of the 2008 Bloody Sunday commemorative march. (Photograph by the author)



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Figure 4.2 The front of the march being photographed by local photographers at the start of the 2008 Bloody Sunday commemorative march. (Photograph by the author)

on various sites of inscribed memory such as museums, memorials, films, websites, song, books, magazines and so forth. Less attention has been given to non-inscribed ways of bringing the past into the present, such as marches, processions and parades. Of those few studies that do examine embodied forms of remembrance and the mnemonic capacities of the body, Paul Connerton’s How Societies Remember has been particularly influential as a theoretical point of departure.3 This chapter employs, and extends, Connerton’s framework to help make sense of the annual re-enactment of the Bloody Sunday march, a movement through space that also entails a movement through time. After providing a brief theoretical reference point for the chapter, through the work of Connerton, I then go on to delineate a three-stage periodization of the march focusing on important shifts and discontinuities between each stage as well as accumulations across them. In the section that follows this I return to the theoretical claims introduced earlier and seek to call attention to under-analysed aspects of Connerton’s theorization of bodily memory pointed to by the empirical



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Figure 4.3 Republican banners lined up along railings at the Creggan shops prior to start of the 2005 Bloody Sunday commemorative march. (Photograph by the author) data, specifically the extent to which embodied remembrance undergoes change and modification over time and how performative ritual in the context of an unsettled society,4 such as that of Northern Ireland, is politically charged and responsive to wider socio-historical shifts and currents. I also examine the possibilities of the strong embodiment argument introduced in Chapter 1. The work of Paul Connerton is concerned with how societies represent the past and particularly through performing history in the form of commemorative ritual. He begins his work by drawing attention to and criticizing the strong textual tilt that seems to dominate social science scholarship and the consequent lack of attention to non-textual means, or what he calls embodied means, of remembering the past. He writes that ‘although bodily practices are in principle included as possible objects of hermeneutic inquiry, in practice hermeneutics has taken inscription as its privileged object’.5 By seeking, then, to offer ‘an account of how practices of a non-inscribed kind are transmitted, in and as a tradition’,6 he attempts to problematize the privileging of



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Figure 4.4 Crowds assembling behind a banner announcing state collusion at the start of the 2005 Bloody Sunday commemorative march. (Photograph by the author)

inscription in existing analyses of collective memory.7 For Connerton, bodily social memory is carried through two kinds of social practices: formal, scripted commemorative ceremonies and more informal bodily practices such as postures, gestures and bodily etiquette with respect to food and eating, that evoke the past, often in unthinking and taken-for-granted ways, but ‘without explicitly representing it in words or images.8 Commemorative ceremonies include parades, marches, wreath-laying ceremonies and the like, and it is this aspect of his work that I seek to draw on and contribute to in this chapter. Central to these commemorative ceremonies is the notion of performative re-enactment, of repeating the past as it really happened. When Christians re-enact Christ’s death at Easter, for example, they make an explicit link with an actual past event. We are doing this now as it was done thousands of years ago. These ritual performances are centrally implicated in the construction and underwriting of communal memory and consist, according to Connerton, of ‘more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and



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Figure 4.5 Families bearing white crosses and images of the dead assemble before start of rally at William Street during the 2009 commemoration. (Photograph by the author) utterances’,9 suggesting that ritual re-enactments of the past, and especially those of a religious kind, are capable of resisting change or what he terms variance. But, as I hope to show, bodily memory, or at least that of a vernacular, non-official kind, may well be much more indeterminate, especially ritual re-enactments organized against a shifting political landscape and in the context of a deeply divided and conflictual society like that of Northern Ireland. While Connerton has made an important intervention in building the conceptual scaffolding of collective memory scholarship, I try to make the case that his central claim about the ‘more or less invariant sequences of formal acts’10 that make up symbolic rituals may be less applicable to acts of bodily memory organized at grassroots civil society level and in resistance to official forms of memory. Most of Connerton’s empirical examples of rituals are either of religious rituals or of statesponsored rituals such as commemorations of Bastille Day in France, and one is led to wonder whether his theoretical claims can be extended to bodily rituals that explicitly contest official collective memory.



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To make this argument, then, I focus in particular on the way Bloody Sunday has been remembered through an annual march re-enacting the original 1972 march. Although Bloody Sunday is now commemorated through a series of events over a week, an annual commemorative march has always been the central event of the commemorative calendar, drawing the biggest crowds and attracting, at least in more recent times, significant media attention. I show, following Maurice Halbwachs,11 how and why this ritual re-enactment of the past reflected and responded to changing socio-political circumstances, interests and needs. Thus, I pay attention to the wider political context in which the march took place and explain its evolving structure with respect to shifts in relations of power between the two divided communities that make up Northern Irish society. My sociological-historical analysis of this march is based upon a number of archival sources, including newspaper accounts and film footage, interview data, and a participant observation study of the 2004–9 anniversary commemoration march and rally. I argue that three stages define the march: (1) Stage 1: Pre-Hegemonic: Sinn Féin (SF) versus Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association12 (NICRA), 1973–5; (2) Stage 2: Hegemonic: SF’s appropriation of the march, 1975–90; and, (3) Stage 3: The Quest for Power to Define the Truth, 1990–present. This periodization of the march is based on changes in memory choreography, changes in the historical symbols carried on the march, and changes in political discourse articulated at it. Stage 1 looks at the contest between SF and NICRA over control of the memory of Bloody Sunday and the minor role of other social movement organizations. In the early to mid-1970s, SF and NICRA both organized marches on the same weekend but, to avoid confrontation, on different days. The NICRA commemorations were small in scale in comparison with the SF commemorations, and they were more private events for the victims’ families than they were public. NICRA speakers spoke about the importance of remembering and made statements about its hopes that the values of democracy and non-violence that the Bloody Sunday dead stood for would not be forgotten. At the SF commemorations, the political claim-making was very different. SF commemorations were used as an opportunity to rally support for physical force republicanism, to express anti-British hostility and to amplify a victimization narrative while emphasizing that the Bloody Sunday victims should never be forgotten. In these speeches the suffering of victims of “the other” (and most often at the hands of republicans), that is, the Unionist – Protestant community



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were omitted, representing a kind of selective forgetting of victimhood. Republicans exhorted their followers to continue the armed struggle as a homage to the victims of Bloody Sunday. For them, Bloody Sunday represented all that was unjust about the British state and so it became an important symbol around which to mobilize support for its goals. Taken together, these two narratives defined the terms within which Bloody Sunday was debated and motivated different collective action strategies. This early pre-hegemonic phase of contestation between different voices (including Derry Women’s Action Committee, People’s Democracy and the Irish Front who organized marches in the 1972–7 period) was followed by Stage 2 in which SF settled down into its role as the dominant memory choreographer of Bloody Sunday. Put another way, from 1978, SF had the march to itself. Although NICRA’s commemorative role had been reduced to organizing a wreath-laying ceremony at the Rossville Street memorial to Bloody Sunday, SF nonetheless faced strong and frequent criticism from the SDLP who happily “ceded” the commemoration of Bloody Sunday to its political rival. SF, in turn, tended to use the Bloody Sunday commemoration as an opportunity to criticize constitutional nationalism both north and south of the border as well as the Irish Catholic hierarchy, a favourite target of republican critique. This is followed by Stage 3, where I look at the march as a cultural tool for mobilizing support for the quest for a new inquiry. This stage was marked by more intense memory work and choreography than the two earlier stages. During this phase, Irish nationalists began to gain more cultural and political power in Northern Ireland and this was expressed in very high levels of attendance at the commemoration marches towards the end of this period. A rhetorical emphasis on critiquing other nationalists was diminished in this phase as republican and nationalist interests in challenging the official memory met and a new rapprochement between Northern Ireland’s two divided communities began to take shape. But before examining each stage in greater detail it is useful to begin by briefly looking at the origins of parading in the Northern Ireland context and the general properties of the Bloody Sunday march. Origins and Meaning of Marches in the Northern Irish Context. The tradition of parading can be traced to the guild processions of the European Middle Ages. This form of social walking, and others such as processions, pilgrimages, promenades and pageants, have long been used both to legitimize and to contest state power.13



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Figure 4.6 Speakers address the assembled crowd at the rally during the 2009 commemoration. (Photograph by the author)

Northern Ireland has a rich history of parades and marches.14 Once the preserve of the unionist tradition, this cultural form has also been recently taken up by nationalists as a means of remembering significant past events. Marches have become then one powerful way in which social groups in Northern Ireland create and sustain difference and symbolically express the power dynamics that shape their everyday lives.15 While loyalist parades pay homage to memories of victory and triumph, nationalist marches tend to be victim parades honouring memories of loss, tragedy and defeat.16 General Properties of the Bloody Sunday March. On the Sunday closest to 30 January every year, republicans and nationalists reflect on and remember what happened on this day in 1972. By ritually re-enacting the original march over the same route at the same time, an attempt is made to obliterate the past–present distinction.17 It is literally a walk down memory lane. The route starts on the steep slopes of the Creggan shops near Bishop’s Field and is mostly downhill all the way to Free Derry Corner, where



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Figure 4.7 Families bearing white crosses and images of the dead en route to Free Derry Corner during the 2009 commemoration. (Photograph by the author)

wreaths (and more recently crosses) carried on the march are laid at the Bloody Sunday memorial followed by a political rally (Figures 4.6, 4.7) 100 yards away at the site of the “You Are Now Entering Free Derry” mural in Free Derry Corner, the symbolic heart of the predominately Catholic and nationalist Bogside. The route is about two miles long and it takes about two hours to complete. In contrast to the Orange tradition, there is no return march and no prescribed clothing is worn. In this movement through geographical space a movement through historical time takes place as well. Roads in the Bogside are temporarily closed during the march, thus suspending the normal flow through time and space as if the march takes place in a moment out of time. The march stops at several points along the route such as at the Bloody Sunday victims’ mural and at the scene of the action, so to speak, at Rossville Street, where one minute’s silence is observed. Banners hung on wooden poles are held by some of the marchers, bearing slogans that reflect political grievances and the demands of the day (Figure 4.8). Local flute and drum bands also participate. The band members march in military-style formation and play nationalistic



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Figure 4.8 Sea of Solidarity-Sea of Flags initiative during the 2009 commemoration. (Photograph by the author)

music, heightening the aural experience of the march. At the end of the march a political rally takes place. The back of a lorry serves as the platform upon which a podium and microphone are erected and a ladder is leaned against the side of the lorry to allow the speakers to mount the platform. A man holding a tricolour stands on the platform. The convenor, normally a local republican, welcomes the crowd. Before the speeches get under way, the Irish national anthem is played by a flautist, imbuing the occasion with a national as well as a political significance. The names of the wounded are then read out, followed by the names of the Bloody Sunday dead. A one-minute’s silence is then observed. Not everyone who attends the march stays to listen to the political speeches at the rally – by the time the two-hour march reaches Free Derry Corner some people are tired and leave.18 This act of walking through the streets of Derry, a classic Durkheimian ritual of coming together around a common set of symbols that affirm group identity and solidarity,19 can never be done in exactly the same way twice.20 It is a repeated act that is at the same time open to imagination and transformation. Embodied remembrance then is



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The March Stage 1: Pre-Hegemonic: SF versus NICRA, 1973–8 The first few years of commemorating Bloody Sunday were characterized by mnemonic battles between various social movement organizations who competed with one another over claims to the memory of the Bloody Sunday dead; but two of these, NICRA and SF, emerged as the dominant memory choreographers. Each went about remembering Bloody Sunday in very different ways, articulating competing discourses of peace on the one hand and violence on the other, as well as communicating different norms about the content of the march. Memory work in the early 1970s was intense, given the closeness to the original event. Over time, SF took over from NICRA as the organizer of the march as Northern Irish society moved into a long and protracted period of conflict. The early parades were small-scale, local events drawing crowds of between 2,000 and 5,000. The public notices for the march of NICRA and SF crystallized how each organization seized upon the memory of Bloody Sunday in very different ways. SF’s 1978 public notice for the march, for example, reminded people that participating in the march provided them with an opportunity to ‘show England you remember Bloody Sunday’ and offered a platform for articulating an anti-colonial rhetoric.21 NICRA’s commemorative discourse reflected a different understanding of the proper meaning of Bloody Sunday. NICRA’s press officer, Kevin McCorry, in a press release for the 1973 commemoration, stated that the commemoration was about remembering the dead as well as helping people realize their present political situation: ‘The people of Derry will remember the thirteen as friends, neighbors, and workmates. But they will also remember them as comrades in the struggle which has still to be completed, the struggle to end repression, introduce democracy and uproot sectarianism from Northern Ireland.’22 Public sentiment, though, was not always behind the SF organized marches, and the letters page of the local press was a terrain upon which a diversity of opinion about the marches was expressed. In



simultaneously traditional and adaptive, but Paul Connerton’s analysis would lead one to expect little or no adaptation in the face of socio-political change. An examination of the stages through which the march passed through provides empirical support for the claim that Connerton overstates the traditional element in embodied memorialization, to which I now turn.


1978, Republican News reported that ‘though we commemorate the 14, one or two of the families didn’t attend. They do not appreciate that the violent oppression of civil rights plus State massacre equals the necessity for civil resistance and armed struggle ... this year saw some families march for the first time with Sinn Féin’.23 One year on, An Phoblacht reported that at the 1979 commemoration ‘reportedly representatives from all the victims’ families, except those who had left the area, were present at the head of the march’.24 But people stayed away for other reasons as well, as the following informant makes clear: I went to very few marches, keeping in mind that it was SF who ran the marches. I felt that, I didn’t agree with them taking it over. I think they should have allowed NICRA, keeping in mind that the people who died, what happened on Bloody Sunday happened under a NICRA banner. I think they should have allowed NICRA to commemorate it. I would have attended some marches, a few. But that was my reason for staying away from them. 25 Some citizens’ letters constructed the march as degrading republican propaganda exercises and in bad taste: no doubt, as we again approach the anniversary of that terrible day in our beloved city’s history, Bloody Sunday, the coat-trailers of the Provisionals, which they call their political wing, are busy making plans to turn the day of sorrow into a carnival of bands, banners and speeches of hate. In view of the slaughter of innocent people in Birmingham, Aldershot, London, Woolwich, and Guildford, carried out in the name of Ireland, may I suggest that the relatives of Derry’s 14, the Church and people of Derry, do all in their power to deny the Provos the excuse to display their mock hypocrisy on the streets of Derry on Bloody Sunday. The letter goes on to suggest a preferred way of commemorating the dead: Let us honour our dead by going to Mass, praying for the souls of the dead and for forgiveness for their killers. Do not let us soil the memory of those who died for justice’s sake by falling for Provo propaganda, especially since the Provos have shown that they are incapable



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Beyond these competing discourses, NICRA and SF prescribed different rules about the organization of their marches. NICRA’s statement before the 1973 commemoration called on all organizations ‘which would hope to commemorate this day to zealously protect it from anyone or any group which would attempt to sully the names of the dead by seeking to make cheap political capital out of their massacre last year’.27 Echoing this, the Bogside Community Association also called for a dignified and peaceful march saying ‘no opportunity should be afforded on this occasion to any person or group, be they members of the Army or of this community, or anyone else, to introduce discord into commemorative proceedings’.28 In practical terms, this meant draining the march of any political content. The NICRA march was a silent march. NICRA asked people not to carry banners and exhorted them, in a statement released on 27 January 1973, to be ‘an example of dignity and respect to the world or else we reject the principles of those who died and we discredit their memory’. 29 A leaflet for distribution to marchers reminded them of the norms governing the march: that it would be silent, that wreaths would be carried at the front, that no flags or banners would be carried, and that no confrontation would be sought. NICRA, above all, impressed upon marchers the dignified and non-political nature of its commemoration and left nothing to chance on the day. NICRA’s preparations for the commemoration consisted of issuing a press statement outlining its provisional programme and publishing a poster (Figure 4.9) for the commemoration the month before. Matters such as stewarding, catering and fundraising, as well as the order of the commemoration ceremony, were all discussed beforehand. Arrangements for other items such as a wreath from the executive of NICRA, loud speakers, a statement from the relatives supporting the NICRA commemoration, and the platform, were all made in advance.30 The SF organized marches were much more political in content and included marching republican bands and the carrying of banners and flags announcing the grievances of Irish republicans. Little fidelity to the historical symbolism of 1972 was evident in the content of these marches. This high level of militarism associated with the republican parades alienated those who saw the memorialization of Bloody Sunday



of understanding the meaning of justice themselves through their cowardly murders and knee-cappings.26


Figure 4.9 NICRA commemorative poster, 1973. (Courtesy of Adrian Kerr, Museum of Free Derry)

as an occasion to reinforce values associated with peace and democracy rather than violent action. NICRA, in particular, criticized SF in very strong terms for the way it used the occasion to subvert the meaning of the original march. A letter from NICRA to Alfie Byrne in New Zealand is an instructive example of this: the Bloody Sunday Commemoration was held by us on Saturday in Derry. There were several hundred people at the event and it was a quiet, dignified ceremony which passed off without incident. Which is more than can be said for yesterday’s demo by Provisional Sinn Féin to commemorate Bloody Sunday. The speeches which were made from the platform were a disgrace and more so since they were uttered on an occasion like a Bloody Sunday commemoration. Maire



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Drumm said that if Frank Stagg died, they [the Provos] would send the SAS back to England in coffins – Kevin Agnew, to my shame a one time Chairman of NICRA – said that if Stagg dies, bombings like what happened in Birmingham where 21 people died would be like a picnic to what was to come in the future ... it was utterly sickening to hear them say this at such a solemn occasion – anyone would think that it was on a march organized by the Provos that the 14 innocents were murdered.31 But NICRA’s capacity to win the hearts and minds of people was quickly diminishing as republicans began to undermine its ambitions of affecting change through democratic avenues. The smallness of the crowds that it attracted to its commemorative events was sufficient evidence of that. SF, even though its marches never attracted great crowds either, was emerging as the dominant memory choreographer and its definition of the meaning of the memory of Bloody Sunday gained ascendancy over NICRA’s non-violent message and promotion of Bloody Sunday as a symbol of the importance of peaceful means of achieving political goals. SF’s emergence as hegemonic gatekeeper of the memory of Bloody Sunday owed as much, it could be argued, to the lack of interest among other political actors such as the nationalist SDLP who were better placed to challenge its hegemony than a comparatively weak organization like that of NICRA. Stage 2: Hegemonic: SF takes over, 1975–90 The NICRA commemorative march was discontinued in 1975. From this point on, SF took over the organization of the march. SF marches did not reach the attendance levels of the 1990s partly, it must be said, because so many sectarian killings were taking place in Northern Ireland. By 1985, SF had colonized the Bloody Sunday commemoration, as it had with other commemorations, such as Easter and St Patrick’s Day. Street politics had always been a strong strategy of the republican movement and it became an important conduit for the expression of nationalist discontent.32 NICRA was no longer a rival, even a weak one. Not surprisingly then, criticism of SF from other rival political parties, most notably the SDLP, became more frequent. Symbolic struggles between constitutional and physical force nationalism carried over from stage 1 into this second stage. In 1983, Gerry Adams, leader of SF, attacked the constitutional nationalist SDLP for its poor leadership (the SDLP was holding its annual conference on the same day as the commemoration) claiming that ‘what is happening



On the March


here on the streets of Derry is more important in political terms than any SDLP conference’,33 and went on to say that the SDLP was a declining political party. Not surprisingly, the SDLP was known in these years as the “Stoop Down Low Party”.34 For the first time, SDLP leader John Hume publicly rebuked Gerry Adams in a letter to the Derry Journal, for using the commemoration for what he called ‘party political purposes’. Hume wrote that, ‘their deaths have been burned into the consciences of the people of Derry. They did not march in support of any party political organization. They marched behind the non-violent banner of the Civil Rights Movement to oppose the injustices perpetrated against the people.’ The letter continues: ‘It is not only distasteful but offensive that anyone should attempt to use their memory for party political purposes.’35 In the letters to the editor section of the local press one gets a sense of public sentiment towards the march during this stage. One letter, by James Wray, father of Jim Wray who was killed on Bloody Sunday, argued that SF had been organizing the annual commemoration over the past eleven years while other actors such as the Catholic Church and the Irish government had stood aside. He asked this rhetorical question: ‘Is it possible that what really upset Mr Hume was Gerry Adam’s comment that politicians and representatives of Church and State ended their commemoration of the Bloody Sunday martyrs the day of their burial?’ Mr Wray went on to say that, ‘I can speak not only for my family and myself when I thank all the people, Sinn Féin, and, in particular, Gerry Adams for participating in the 11th commemoration parade for the Bloody Sunday victims.’36 Another letter, by the prolific writer Sean Carr, argued that John Hume’s letter was ‘a touch of severe sour grapes’. He stated that the reason John Hume had spoken only now was because of SF’s recent electoral performance.37 Hugh Gallagher, a resident of the predominately nationalist Creggan estate, argued that John Hume’s ‘own conscience should have been troubling him as he sat with his middle-class friends in their Forum Hotel in Belfast, while the people of his own city remembered their relatives and friends so cruelly butchered by the British.’38 The absence of letters in favour of Hume’s position suggests that SF enjoyed considerable support in the 1980s for the way it remembered the Bloody Sunday dead, although, as we will see, many people, like Hume, did not participate in the march precisely because it was an SF organized event. But it was perhaps the 1990 commemoration that mostly clearly registered the discursive struggle between physical force nationalists on the one hand and constitutional nationalists on the other. That year’s



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It was to have been a dignified, commemoration march with a message of justice for people who had been wrongly imprisoned, but for myself and others it turned into a nightmare. I haven’t been able to sleep thinking of the way he died, even though I’ve seen death in many ways before. The march organizers must feel as sick as I do. I don’t know if I’ll be able to face the commemoration march next year. I certainly will be afraid to let my children go again.41 Criticism of the commemoration cut across the city’s communityspecific newspapers. In the Protestant Sentinel newspaper, for example, one citizen registered strong anger at the IRA’s appropriation of Bloody Sunday in a letter under the title ‘IRA must be exorcised by Nationalists’: Sunday’s bomb attack along the route of the Bloody Sunday commemoration march and rally, yet again demonstrates the IRA’s total lack of respect for human life ... the IRA and Sinn Féin have hi-jacked and tarnished the name of nationalism, but the time has surely come for all members of the nationalist community to exorcise these thugs from their society once and for all.42 The nationalist Derry Journal newspaper was no less sympathetic, describing the IRA’s actions as ‘beyond the pale’ and as a ‘cynical utilisation’ of the commemoration.43 SDLP councillor Pat Devine’s criticisms of the organizers of the commemoration concurred with this by reminding people that the events at the commemoration showed the true colours of the organizers. He urged that the best help that Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA can offer them (the Birmingham Six) is to stay well away from the genuine campaign being waged by people of integrity who are trying to secure their freedom. There can be no place in this genuine campaign for



commemoration was explicitly linked to the Birmingham Six case.39 An estimated 5,000 people attended, one of the biggest turnouts for a Bloody Sunday march.40 During the march, the IRA detonated a bomb. Charles Love, a 16-year-old from Strabane, County Tyrone, who was attending the march, died as a result. One letter to the editor expressed revulsion at the actions of the IRA:

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Another vocal critic of republicans, the Catholic Bishop of Derry, Dr Edward Daly, issued a public statement drawing attention to the history of earlier commemorations and claimed that their theme was one of militancy and pro-violence and the inversion of the true meaning of Bloody Sunday. The Bloody Sunday Commemorative Committee asked the bishop to clarify his remarks; in response Bishop Daly called on it to publicly announce its opposition to violence and intimidation of all kinds.45 While the Bloody Sunday Committee, through its spokesperson Tony Doherty, criticized the IRA’s actions as a ‘gross error of judgment’, it strongly defended itself against criticisms by British government ministers, the SDLP, and members of the Catholic hierarchy. In its statement it said: ‘British Ministers have absolutely no right to condemn or lecture Irish people about violence or the deaths of civilians. John Cope and Brian Mawhinney are members of a government which routinely destroys the lives of Irish people and who repeatedly justify the heartbreak which they cause.’46 The 1990 commemoration, then, provided a context and frame of reference within which the 1991 commemoration was understood. As Jeffrey Olick reminds us, ‘the context for any new commemoration is the residue of earlier commemorations.’47 At this commemoration, and in explicit response to the previous year’s killing, a plaque was unveiled at Glenfada Park in memory of Charles Love by his father, Charles Love, during the march. The organizers of the commemorative march – the Bloody Sunday Initiative (BSI) – sponsored the memorial plaque. Stage 3: Quest for power to define the truth, 1990– During this stage, beginning in 1990 and reaching its apogee in 1997, the quest for power to define the truth about Bloody Sunday took centre stage. Although the claims and counter-claims of the second stage did not completely disappear, a slow process of remarketing Bloody Sunday and moving away from a politics of blame took place. Broader political changes shaped memory work and a critical factor that helped neutralize earlier criticism of republicanism from constitutional nationalists was the IRA’s historic cessation of violence in August 1994. This brought about a transformation in the political and security environment of Northern Ireland and opened up an



individuals or organizations who cannot outrightly condemn the outrage on Sunday that was an abuse of an anniversary and the wanton taking of a young life.44

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opportunity for Irish nationalists and republicans alike to bring pressure to bear on the British government to establish a new inquiry into Bloody Sunday. Prior to the IRA ceasefire in 1994, rhetorical attacks by the SDLP on the organizers of the commemoration differed little from before. In 1992, for instance, the invitation by the BSI to Gerry Adams to speak at the rally gave rise to strong criticism from William O’Connell of the SDLP. Councillor O’Connell claimed the BSI was a ‘front for Sinn Féin’,48 and responding to Councillor O’Connell’s comments, the BSI described them as ‘a slur, an insult, and a pathetic attempt at party politics’,49 revealing the intensity of local debate about the proper meaning of Bloody Sunday. Not everyone accepted the SDLP position. A marcher from Massachusetts, USA, congratulated the BSI for a job well done, ‘as someone who was interned at the time of the Bloody Sunday murders, I would like to congratulate “The Bloody Sunday Initiative” on the magnificent way they organized this year’s commemoration and other associated events. It was a fitting tribute to the dead’.50 But these important symbolic changes were not enough to convince all that SF’s influence had been drained from the march. That the deep structure of the march remained untouched and only its surface appearance had changed is suggested by this citizen’s letter to the Derry Journal: Mr P O’Connor must have been at a different Bloody Sunday March to the ‘one’ that I saw. Black taxis leading, banners commemorating IRA men, bands in paramilitary uniforms, bus loads of S.F. ‘branches’ and supporters from parts of Ireland and Scotland with S.F. banners, and of course, Mr. McGuinness, Adams and Co. I don’t have a problem with the Republican Movement organizing the Bloody Sunday March to commemorate the 14 innocent people murdered by the British army (15 including Mr Love killed by IRA).The problem is why does Mr. P. O’Connor and Mr. C. Feely (Irish Times) keep denying it? Take away the banners, the bands, the black taxis. Have a dignified march gentlemen and it wouldn’t be 40,000 next year – but 140,000!.51 Attacks by SF on the SDLP were standard fare at rallies in the 1980s. However, as a result of the peace process, and the movement of SF into mainstream electoral politics, the politics of blame was abandoned in favour of attempts to create a pan-nationalist front. At the 2001 commemorative rally, members of political parties other than SF spoke, an unthinkable scenario prior to the IRA’s cessation of violence. A transformed political



On the March


environment found expression in changed political discourse. From 1994 on, the ideological project of Irish republicans shifted as rhetoric about British injustices, British withdrawal, the ill-treatment of Irish republican prisoners, and the need to continue the armed struggle was eclipsed by a stronger emphasis on political persuasion, dialogue and negotiation, a new language for a new political reality. Gerry Adams, speaking at the 1995 commemoration, stated, well aware of his audience, that ‘a just and lasting peace is the only memorial which can ease the pain and justify the suffering of the victims of Bloody Sunday and all those who have suffered’,52 political rhetoric that would have been unthinkable at a SF rally in the 1970s and 1980s. The SDLP spokesman on policing, Alex Attwood, used the occasion to call for progress on police reform and decommissioning in keeping with the Belfast Agreement. The SDLP leader, Mark Durkan, spoke at the 2003 commemoration.53 This period was marked by three symbolic high water marks in the history of the march – the 20th anniversary (1992), the 25th anniversary (1997), and the 30th anniversary (2002), important anniversaries in garnering media attention and public participation in the march. But it was the 1997 and 2002 anniversary commemorations, as we shall see, that were arguably the most significant. An estimated 40,000 people attended the 30th anniversary commemoration,54 the best-attended parade in recent Northern Irish history, 55 and visibly manifested the strength of local support for the quest for power to define the truth. Important changes in historical symbolism were evident in this stage. In the early 1990s, white crosses bearing the names of the dead replaced the traditional floral wreaths. In 1992 and 2000, 56 the march did not go to Free Derry Corner but proceeded instead to the Guildhall Square, the intended destination of the original march.57 Fourteen white crosses were laid at the footsteps of the Guildhall and the rally was held in front of it in the Guildhall Square.58 This change in the route of the march in 2000 was made because Free Derry Corner was being landscaped at the time, while in 1992 the reason was to mark the 20th anniversary. But once this symbolic break with the past was first made in 1992, it paved the way for other marches to the Guildhall, as happened in 2000. As one key figure put it, marching to the Guidhall was a way of ‘taking the issue right into the open, right into the wider world and symbolize that by going into the city center ... because I don’t think the implications of Bloody Sunday were confined to the Bogside and Creggan’. 59 This spatial strategy then was intended to heighten the symbolic meaning of the march.



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I suppose the one that really remember those banners were up there on Southway almost as if they were looking over you. The dead were kind of there looking over you. Turning that corner and coming down that hill and looking up and seeing them. it was a bit like. That same year, once the march came on down to Free Derry Corner you had them down below the walls – they took them to London a few years ago while the inquiry was sitting in London.62 Another example of changing historical symbolism was the use of spectacle street theatre during the march. For example, in 1997, large-sized versions of the front page of the Widgery Tribunal report were carried during the march at the same time as relatives of the Bloody Sunday dead, bearing white wooden crosses, literally walked through the report to the applause of onlookers.63 This street theatre is a playful, carnivalesque and symbolic inversion of the canonical official memory, a sort of mock parody of Widgery.64 In Paul Stoller’s terms, this mimicry is a form of ‘embodied opposition’.65 Greater efforts to make the march more inclusive of other victims and more broadly of the other tradition, that is, unionism, defined this stage. Speeches at the rally from 1998 on regularly made references to the progress of the Saville Inquiry.66 Other examples of state violence as a result of collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries received attention as well as the New Lodge Six killings, the Ballymurphy Eleven and the case of Pat Finucane.67 The “Open Up The Files” campaign was launched at the 2003 commemoration, a campaign aimed at bringing pressure to bear on the British government to release files relating to state collusion in loyalist paramilitary killings. 68 A Protestant dimension to the commemoration was added through seminars addressing the meaning of Bloody Sunday to this tradition,69 and extending invitations to members of the Protestant community to attend commemorative events, concretizing the new discourse of acknowledging the suffering and perspectives of others. Intensive memory choreography to preserve the memory of Bloody Sunday and appeal to a new younger generation lacking in first-hand knowledge of the event was a key feature of stage 3. A number of



In 1997 and 1998, large-size banner portraits of the victims were erected along Southway,60 as the marchers made their way down to Free Derry Corner.61 One interviewee remarked how emotionally charged these banners were because they brought the dead back to life and symbolically placed them at the heart of the Nationalist community:


organizations emerged at this time, but because of a good deal of overlap in personnel, goals and material resources between these different organizations that emerged, it is difficult to discern when one organization left off and another began. For the most part, they seemed to work to the same agenda of keeping Bloody Sunday and other human rights issues on the political and media radar. These organizations included the BSI (1990),70 the BSJC (1992),71 the BSWC (1992), the Pat Finucane Centre (BFC) (1993),72 and the BST(1997).73 These organizational name changes reflected the coupling of the commemoration of Bloody Sunday to political campaigning to overturn the official legal memory of the event. In the third stage, and unlike the previous stages, this project of attempting to dislodge the official memory with a vernacular memory, or, put another way, to translate the vernacular memory into official memory, came to the fore. Overall, Bloody Sunday was commemorated in a more celebratory and inclusive way as the memory choreographers employed well-established mnemonic devices such as archives, film, exhibitions and seminars to remember the event, appeal to new publics beyond the nationalist and republican support base, and support local community economic development. As one interviewee put it, Well there has been some talk and I don’t know because now the commemoration is quite an event for the city. I think the march should end on a high march. The last march is a huge big march. It passes off peacefully and is well attended. And all of that. It (the commemoration) may be taking on a persona of its own. I mean it is big tourist business for the city. A lot of people who come to the city they want to go to the Bogside and they want to see the murals. And Bloody Sunday is a big part of that. There is a huge interest after the films.’74 A new emphasis on linking Bloody Sunday to other examples of injustice and oppression in other times and places was also apparent in the rhetoric of memory choreographers, a topic taken up in more detail in the next chapter. The inclusion of cultural organizations such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians in the annual march and the choice of themes for the commemoration, such as “One World, Many Struggles” in 2002, was another example of this. Above all, these examples help to show how an act of embodied memorialization, that seems, on the face of it, to be a fixed, unchanging event from one year to another, consists of a range of symbolic changes linked to broader transformations in the sociopolitical context, and in particular, to shifts in the relationships between



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Northern Irish Catholics/nationalists and Protestants/unionists and the incorporation of nationalists within the Northern Ireland statelet. This chapter has examined the stages through which the commemorative march passed through. The periodization suggested that there were discontinuities between one period and another and some crossover between them as well. Little was said, though, about how these symbolic changes were received by “ordinary” Derry people. As part of the fieldwork for this book I asked people of different ages who attended the commemorative march what it meant to them. One interviewee in his fifties related how going on the march triggered off or activated memories of the original 1972 march even to the point of re-enacting the putting together of a petrol bomb: it was exactly 25 years later, and I young friend of mine came over from England. He was living and working in London and he wanted to go on the march and I said OK I’ll go on it and I did exactly the same. I already told him, I said ‘Look I’m going to I’m going to try and remember everything and I did everything that I thought that I did on that particular day even down as far as to where I went to William Street and turning back and sort of going through the whole thing of about getting the handkerchiefs and the vinegar you know.75 This is a good example of how memories of the past can inhere in people’s physical bodies – that is, trigger embodied actions – apart from deeply felt emotions. For this same respondent the march’s meaning is also created through the profusion of imagery and symbolism. He continues: I go on the march and I get into company with people and we just do the route and of course we watch the sort of ‘em they made up certain hoardings you know ... photographs, large photographs of the 13 people who were murdered on that particular day. So they would be all around the Creggan estate. You would watch them and there would be a lot of graffiti around, a lot of flags and things like that.76 Other younger interviewees spoke in similar terms about the march’s capacity to engage one’s emotions: I think there is a real it feels strange for me saying because I wasn’t on the march. I wasn’t even born but I do think there is a real sense of history coming over you when your on the march there is a sense that your following the footsteps of all the people that went out to



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stand up against internment, to stand up against injustices in the in the Northern state at the time. And there is nearly a sense of your following their footsteps in carrying on the civil rights struggle but there is. You know it’s emotional when you see the families and when the families speak. But it is also kind of uplifting in a way when you see that these people who have struggled for you know 32 years and more for the truth and justice and their still doing it and they are not going to give up. And they are dogged and then when you have thousands of people behind them you know there is a march in London as well. There is a march and there is a real sense of strength and togetherness around that whole weekend, that whole week, there is a real sense of people in Derry standing up for themselves again you know and saying we don’t accept your version of what happened and we don’t accept your version of justice ...77 Significantly, this young adult interviewee related to the justice and truth storylines of memory choreographers during the 1990s and of the political import of the march as a challenge to the dominant official memory. When asked what Bloody Sunday meant to young people in general he continued by evoking Bloody Sunday as a symbol of injustice with resonances for other events: I think in varying degree you know the same as me. I think a lot of people now, young people are fed up with the whole thing. Not only Bloody Sunday I mean but thirty years of crap. 30 years of killing, trouble. They want to move on and have their own lives and make money and have a family and whatever but the same with Bloody Sunday and other injustices impacts very strongly over them. And that’s what I said about the sense of justice. I think people in Derry were brought up. Whatever generation were brought up with a very strong sense of what injustices are and what they mean and how they can affect people. And a very strong sense of what justice is and a very strong sense of the importance of standing up for justice and striving for justice. I use that word a lot but I think it is a word that it is an emotive word but it is a word that people really feel strongly. A sense of injustice.78

Conclusion Paul Connerton’s influential work alerts us to the importance of embodied remembrance in our studies of collective memory and warns



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against the over-emphasis on inscribed memory in existing sociological and anthropological research. Clearly, he has advanced the study of collective memory. However, as I have argued in this chapter, Connerton carries his argument about the fixity of embodied remembrance too far. Memory work in the context of a deeply divided society such as Northern Ireland is highly contested, and Connerton’s claim about the resistant qualities of bodily memory is in need of modification to take account of societies in which the past is intensely fought over and constantly mobilized in contemporary constructions and reconstructions of group identity. Using the Bloody Sunday case, I have shown that bodily memory organized against official modes of commemoration responds to and reflects changes in the socio-political context. Changes in the symbols and banners carried on the march, changes in the route of the march, and changes in the types of social movement organizations participating in the march and in civic leaders speaking at the rally, all pointed to the malleability of non-official embodied remembrance. These changes, in turn, can be attributed to changes in the political landscape of Northern Irish society. Of course, the remembrance of Bloody Sunday involves far more than the annual re-enactment of the original 1972 march examined here, encompassing a wide range of inscriptions including books, websites, films, murals, poetry, song, and museum exhibits, memorialization, represented by the Rossville Street memorial to Bloody Sunday in the Bogside area of Derry city, as well as spectacle such as street theatre and finally, performance of the past which I have focused on in this chapter. Importantly, this performative dimension shapes and is shaped by the memorialization and inscriptions. As mentioned earlier, the annual march stops at the Rossville Street memorial and the Bloody Sunday mural where a minute’s silence is observed, suggesting that people’s experience of the march is scripted by these two sites of inscribed memory. This performative dimension, as this chapter has attempted to show, operated as a crucial focal point around which competing political discourses were articulated. In the 1970s, Sinn Féin seized upon the memory of Bloody Sunday to articulate a violent republican message while NICRA saw it as a metaphor for the futility of violent means to bring about political change. This republican interpretation was carried into the 1980s but as the peace process gained momentum in Northern Ireland in the 1990s it was eschewed in favour of a narrative emphasizing the capacity of the march to function as an important platform for dislodging the official memory with a vernacular nationalist memory, important symbolic shifts linked to changes in the relationships between the British and Irish states and Northern Ireland’s two divided communities.



On the March


Moreover, this analysis has shown, following Halbwachs, that the way the past is remembered has a lot to do with contemporary needs and issues. Presentism operates as a powerful mediator of the past. Political discourses at the commemoration rally reflected republican grievances of the day. In the 1970s, for example, grievances about the political status of republican prisoners loomed large as a concern of Irish republicans. In more recent times, concerns about such things as collusion between paramilitaries and state security forces have been articulated. There is greater emphasis than ever before in Bloody Sunday commemorations of inserting the event into a global frame of reference, thus helping to give the Bloody Sunday story resonance with new publics – a topic taken up in greater detail in Chapter 5. References in commemorative speeches to philosophical concepts such as truth, justice, reconciliation, and healing also tended to become more frequent in the 1990s. With the passage of time, the tone of commemorations has become much more celebratory, with concerts, discos, film screenings, table quizzes, and the like now a staple part of the annual commemoration programme. The selling of Bloody Sunday CD-ROMs, posters, mug coasters, and t-shirts, all point to the coupling of commemoration and consumer culture but also to efforts to extend the memory of Bloody Sunday in time and space. This chapter has looked at the shifting “career” of the commemorative march and builds on the earlier chapter on memorialization. The next chapter pays special attention to commemorative discourses and the global turn in them from the 1990s onwards. Behind the words “Bloody Sunday” there has been a reshuffling of meaning from an early globalized discourse to an extended, mainly localized, one and then to the comeback of a globalizing motif in the 1990s.



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On the 30th January, 1972, Jack Duddy, Kevin McElhinney, Patsy Doherty, Bernard McGuigan, Hugh Gilmore, William Nash, Michael McDaid, John Young, Michael Kelly, Jim Wray, Gerard Donaghy, Gerald McKinney and William McKinney were shot dead on the streets of Derry. They were killed while taking part in a Civil Rights March to open the gates of the Concentration Camps, smash the torture chambers, end repression and military terror in Northern Ireland. They were met with a new and terrible escalation of administrative violence. To the list of intimidation, internment, torture and individual murders was added the holocaust in Derry. Derry has taken its place with My Lai and Sharpeville as a milestone in the struggle of humanity against oppression. NICRA leaflet for 1973 commemoration, NICRA box, Northern Ireland Political Collection, Linenhall Library, Belfast As we commemorate the 30th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, we reflect on the parallels with others around the world who strive for truth, justice and healing in their communities. We salute the spirit of all those who have survived conflict and campaign to end it. We remember those who have died and celebrate their memory. We pledge our continued support, vigilance and assistance to the dispossessed, marginalised, displaced and tortured of our country and the world. 2002 Bloody Sunday commemoration programme 95



5


The newspaper account that opened this book related that almost immediately after it happened Bloody Sunday was symbolically linked to other historical events, most notably the Holocaust but also, as the 1973 NICRA leaflet reveals, with Sharpeville and My Lai. This initial deployment of a global idiom did not last long, however, and was soon displaced by a nationalist victimhood discourse as Irish republicans claimed ownership of the meaning of the event. In this chapter I focus on how and why this global idiom made a comeback in the 1990s and, in so doing, to contribute to debates about the global–local nexus with respect to collective memory. The Bloody Sunday case represents a particularly interesting case study of this because of the local and global dynamics of collective memory involved in it over the course of more than three decades.1 To provide a framework for this analysis I begin by looking at how the collective memory and globalization literatures seem, on the face of it, to offer opposing understandings of societal and group identity formation. After this I briefly consider how the event was commemorated in other cities in other national contexts and then move on to examine the interaction of local conditions and global environments in shaping international commemorative discourses and strategies in Derry.

Two literatures: collective memory and globalization The literature on collective memory is based on very strong geographical understandings of the basic co-ordinates of time and space. Paul Connerton writes in his influential text How Societies Remember that Maurice Halbwachs did a very good job of demonstrating ‘how no collective memory can exist without reference to a socially specific spatial framework’.2 Halbwachs himself reminds us that ‘it is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize and localize their memories.’3 Discussing religion as a social framework of memory, he makes the point that ‘it is not in the present but in the past that we must look for its grounding’,4 and goes on to claim that religion exerts its influence in ‘defined places and periods’.5 Anthony Smith’s work fits squarely within this tradition and is representative of a significant body of literature that quarantines national collective identity formation within the boundaries of the nation. Arguing that group identity is ‘always historically specific because it is based on shared memories and a sense of continuity between generations’,6 Smith claims that ‘global culture is essentially memoryless’.7 Through



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the influence of this nation-centred work such as this then, we have come to understand memory and identity, as having strong geographical or spatial bases,8 and the scholarship on globalization, seems, on the face of it, to problematize this ‘territorial trap’ because it speaks so much about the transformation in our individual and collective experiences of time and space.9 Rather than seeing people as being tied to specific times and spaces, this literature points to the porousness of these co-ordinates of human experience and to time–space compression. In this view we left with a borderless world system, in which people, ideas, information and goods flow easily and readily across the globe leading to the ‘disembedding’ or liquidation of the local.10 A particularly interesting line of globalization research, bearing upon the present chapter, is world society theory put forward by neoinstitutional scholars such as John Meyer and colleagues.11 The basic line of argument here is that there is a clear pattern of convergence between different national societies across a whole range of cultural and political fields including national development plans, political constitutions, educational curricula, human rights and equality policies, and so forth. According to this view, the nation is a ‘babbitt’12 that appropriates global cultural scripts furnished by transnational institutions and organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations, as well as non-governmental organizations. It is argued that nation states establish their legitimacy and credentials as ‘nice’, ‘likeable’ first-world countries in the eyes of these global political actors by following these scripts through their membership in international organizations and participation in international conferences.13 Failure to do this can bring global shame or legal sanction upon a nation state.14 Some countries, though, make symbolic concessions to these international norms by enacting new laws or policies – what Meyer and Rowan refer to as ‘ceremonial conformity’ – but without making long-term, deep-rooted commitments to them via policy implementation.15 Variation among nation states in response to these global scripts is shaped by their vulnerability to global demands and trends.16 One criticism of world society theory, or sometimes called world polity theory, is that it operates at a somewhat broad or general level lacking in a good understanding of how global norms get grounded in specific empirical cases and does not have much to say about national and local-level human actors and whether or how they domesticate these global scripts for their immediate local context. Put another way, world society theory represents a kind of global-to-local analysis as compared




with a local-to-global model or one that interrogates collisions between the local and the global.17 Notwithstanding this shortcoming, world society theory has considerable analytical purchase, as I hope to show, in terms of helping one to understand and explain the mnemonic life cycle or trajectory of Bloody Sunday memory. Admittedly, the Giddens analysis about dis-embeddedness and deterritorialization and the world polity perspective focusing on the territorial nation state as a modular node embedded in a world society orbit, represent different ways of thinking – “stories” – about the dynamics of globalization, but they both converge in a strong and convincing challenge to the state-centric analyzes mentioned earlier. Despite the obvious affinity in concerns about time and space, very few scholars have explicitly sought to bring the insights of globalization research to bear on collective memory research even though one sometimes sees passing references to globalization in the academic literature on collective memory and vice versa.18 But, for the most part, collective memory studies have not explicitly engaged with globalization research and a regrettable consequence of this is that the two literatures seem to have been talking past one another for quite a long time, or at any rate, have rarely come into contact. As Ulrich Beck neatly puts it, ‘there has been a great deal of thought about the globalization of space and location, but much less about the globalization of time and of memory’.19 Jennifer Jordan’s recent work on factors influencing forgetting and remembrance in urban Berlin exhorts scholars to correct for this curious omission.20 One major notable exception to this inattention to memory in globalization research is the recent work of David Levy and Natan Sznaider under the title The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, which explicitly examines memory in the global context.21 This ‘cosmopolitan memory’ involves a kind of double movement of de-territorialization and re-territorialization, on the one hand leading to a heightening of the importance of globalizing memories and on the other their adaptation for local tastes and traditions. For Levy and Sznaider, the mass electronic media of film and the Internet is crucially implicated in this process because of its capacity to diffuse images around the world, collapsing time and space, while at the same time these are interpreted and processed locally. In contrast to critics of the mass culture industry, they offer a strong defence of the electronic media’s representations of the past as standing up to tests about authenticity. They are careful not to liquidate the nation altogether by insisting that their work ‘no way implies the end of nationally based structures of remembrance’,22 only




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‘the rise of the global as a context and means for national cultures’.23 Because the local and the global interact in interesting ways, Levy and Sznaider find Roland Robertson’s concept of glocalization a useful frame of reference in their thinking about cosmopolitan memory. This memory is as much future-oriented as it is past-directed. Taking the example of Anne Frank’s book, they claim it is ‘coming to represent much less a past characterized by evil than a message for the future that transcends the past’.24 I agree with Levy and Sznaider’s claim that there are important linkages between the global and the local but the crucial role of local-level actors (memory choreographers) as interpreters and filters of global memory narratives, symbols and themes is given insufficient attention in their work. While Levy and Sznaider’s work does pay attention to a new globalizing of memory, we still get the impression from their research that the global language about memory exists without a context for framing it. Put another way, we’re left wondering about how the new global idiom around memory gets constructed at local level through texts like websites, museums, exhibitions and the like, as well as through embodied forms of remembrance such as marches and processions, all of which are the product of decades of creative and intensive memory choreography. To help rectify this somewhat decontextualized, delocalized view of memory, and following recent sociological efforts aimed at ‘grounding globalization’,25 I examine the choices memory choreographers make about how the past should be remembered. I try to make the argument that active local-level memory choreography is crucial to the constituting of memory narratives in terms of a global frame of reference and that this local-level identification is heightened in the context of Northern Irish society, in which two opposing group identity categories claim political allegiance to two different states.26 But the global institutional environment also matters here and specifically I argue that the “clever” reframing of Bloody Sunday in the modular and transposable abstract idiom of human rights27 can be explained in terms of world polity theory, and its emphasis on the institutionalization, diffusion and legitimation of a universal human rights discourse.28 The institutionalization of these discourses in international organizations helps civil society actors to mobilize them in its efforts to gain general public support.29 It can also be explained by propitious Irish, British, European, American and global influences as well as political, economic and demographic changes that came together in the mid-1990s. Finally, I attempt to draw attention to the limits and possibilities of this global storytelling in relation to remembrance and commemoration.




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From the mid-1970s the Bloody Sunday commemorative march diffused to other cities in the world including London, Birmingham, Cardiff and Glasgow, in the 1980s to cities like Leeds, Toronto, San Francisco, New York, and Boston, and in the 1990s to Milan. Ethnic identity helped to give Bloody Sunday a wider audience. These parades were similar in scale to the Derry one and, like the parent parade, were organized by Irish republicans and social movement organizations such as the Troops Out Movement, Irish Prisoners of War Committee and Socialist Workers; the parades in Britain – in cities with large concentrations of Irish emigrants – drew support from prominent members of the English Left. 30 Sometimes these marches were contested by members of the National Front. The parade – as a commemorative device – is flexible and can as easily be organized in one national context as another. Because they are public events that tend to draw large crowds of people – either as participants or onlookers – they are also good candidates for media coverage. 31 Public notices about the parades in newspapers exhorted people to ‘remember Derry’. 32 Coverage of parades in other cities was given in the pages of the republican newspaper An Phoblacht, usually alongside accounts of the Derry commemoration, and one brief article on the 1979 Glasgow commemorative parade reminded readers of the salience of the march in highlighting ‘British atrocities committed against the Irish people’.33 At these multi-city events, global parallels tended to be drawn between the political circumstances in Derry and the struggles of other peoples in other parts of the world. At the 1982 Toronto commemoration for example, which consisted of a public meeting and concert rather than a march, solidarity with Irish people was expressed by the American Indian movement and the Palestine National Council. 34 At the same time, they were often occasions for particularistic political claim making. London’s 17th anniversary march included a call for British troop withdrawal from Northern Ireland and Milan’s 25th anniversary commemoration urged a new inquiry into Bloody Sunday. Unlike the Derry march, which until the early 1990s was organized almost solely by Irish republicans, from the early 1980s the organization of the multiple-site marches reflected a diversity of social movement interests – republican, socialist, labour and feminist – and these cross-cutting interests became manifest in Derry only somewhat later. The fact, though, that the commemoration of 30 January 1972 spread



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relatively quickly to other cities in mainland Britain and the United States helped to embed the event as an international political symbol and enhance its commemorability. In the 1990s it reflected a more visible Irish diasporic community and one that was receiving increased official standing via a new politics of symbolic recognition articulated by President Mary Robinson. 35 What is clear as well from these multi-city commemorations is that for the most part Bloody Sunday as symbol took on similar meanings in different contexts: it stood for British malevolence and the struggle of Irish republicans against this; it stood for human struggles against injustice; it stood for victimhood. It’s interesting to note, though, that the meanings associated with this symbol varied temporally – the emphasis on cross-cutting activism and global parallel-drawing appeared earlier outside Northern Ireland than in Derry itself. The stronger nationalist agenda of Derry-based organizers in the earlier 1970s and 1980s time periods may well help to explain this salient difference. In the other societal contexts where Bloody Sunday was commemorated no big ‘national question’ was being contested though organizers did not ignore Bloody Sunday’s connection to this story. As other cities worked to remember the event, southern Irish society seemed to find it difficult to “hear” the Bloody Sunday story. A commemoration in Dublin in 1973 – consisting of a march and meeting – led to a street confrontation with the police and some arrests.36 Other cities and towns – Cork, Carrickmacross, Roscommon, and Sligo – had their commemorations in the early 1970s too, but it was not long before the memory of the event yielded to forgetting.37 In the North – and unlike the south which did not have such a movement – it was connected to the story about the civil rights movement and it occurred when this movement was gaining increasing attention. In the south, Irish republicanism was much weaker organizationally and did not have a strong capacity to keep the memory of the event alive south of the border and consequently suffered from ‘low mnemonic capacity’.38 Neither did the event have as much resonance in the south because this part of the island was politically independent – and therefore lacked the physical presence of the British state and a recent collective memory of its painful past – and the chosen device for remembering the event, a march, was much less embedded in this society compared to the longer tradition of marching and parading in Northern Ireland. Put another way, the conditions for Bloody Sunday commemoration “to take hold” were a good deal more favourable in the north than the south and, in political and cultural terms, they were two different places.




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Derry commemorative discourses and strategies with respect to Bloody Sunday can be understood in terms of three phases (see Table 5.1): 1970s, Phase 1 (Oppression and British Injustice); 1980s-early 1990s, Phase 2 (British Injustice but also Equalization of Victimhood) and; mid-1990s, Phase 3 (Truth-Telling, Human Rights and Justice Storylines). The

Table 5.1

Commemorative discourses across three historical phases

Phase

1

2

3

Time period

1970s

1980s–early 1990s

Mid–1990s

Spatial orientation

Internal (exclusive)

Internal (inclusive)

Internal–External (inclusive)

Explanatory Framework

Northern Ireland conflict as unfixable

Northern Ireland conflict as unfixable but some rapprochement possible

Coming together of favourable political/economic/ demographic conditions and Irish/British/ European/US/ global influences

Cultural idioms

“Murderous British tactics”

Unfinished “war”

“Human Rights” “Justice” “Truth”

Political projects

Struggle for independence from British rule

Continuing struggle for unity of Ireland but also emphasizing suffering of “the Other”

Quest for truth about events of January 1972 Rapprochement with Ulster Protestantism Engagement with political elites in British/Irish state/US

Discursive frames

Particularizing

Particularizing dominant; generalizing evident but weak

Strong generalizing

Emotional states

Sombre

Sombre

Celebratory



Temporal trajectory of commemorative discourses

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trajectory of political rhetoric articulated at the Bloody Sunday march in Chapter 4 followed this pattern as well and the surprising comeback of the early global commemorative idiom deserves special attention in terms of how memory choreographers constructed it and then in terms of the more difficult “why” question which I link to a set of Irish, British, European, American and global influences (some identified by memory choreographers and some not when I asked them about their work) and shifts at different levels – political, economic, demographic – that came together in the mid-1990s (and not in the 1970s and 1980s). Memory choreographers stressed that changing local conditions accounted for new global cultural discourses though the influence of the passage of time could also be considered important and the consequent reduction in the number of living informants with direct experience of the event,39 that is, people with cultural as against communicative memory.40 In terms of ‘discursive horizons’,41 Phase 1 was characterized by an internal exclusive focus, Phase 2 by an internal inclusive focus and Phase 3 by an internal and external inclusive focus. This historical periodization is based on changes in such things as spatial orientations, political projects, and cultural idioms as set forth in Table 5.1. This table also briefly summarizes the explanatory framework employed in the chapter. The next section of the chapter examines the third phase in greater detail.

Truth-telling, human rights and justice story lines The 1990s was characterized by a new emphasis on recalibrating republican’s definition of victimhood to encompass people’s in distant places as well – a good example of the ‘project of global justice’.42 The valency of Protestant victimhood as a result of “the Troubles” was also rhetorically acknowledged.43 Speakers at the commemoration were inclined to mention that the Protestant community also suffered during the long period of “the Troubles” and that no one tradition had a monopoly on suffering. Commemorative discourse then spoke to the political circumstances of the early 1990s and Bloody Sunday remembrance represented an important opportunity for the republican community to give rhetorical support for constitutional politics – chiefly by purging commemorative discourse of anti-British and pro-violence sentiments – and demonstrate the credentials of leaders within it as peaceful democrats. At the same time, the quest for the unity of the island of Ireland remained a key focus, but through a new means of peaceful dialogue and debate.





In the 1970s and 1980s, unionist opinion tended to be hostile to the Bloody Sunday commemorations. Politicians in southern Irish society paid little attention to it and were regularly criticized on the platform by speakers from a militant republican tradition. In the 1990s memory choreographers went to some lengths to seek the support of southern political elites behind the campaign for a new inquiry into the events of 30 January 1972. During a visit to Northern Ireland in 1998 Taoiseach Bertie Ahern laid a wreath at the Bloody Sunday memorial. Protestant political leaders, ignored in the 1970s and 1980s, were invited to participate in Bloody Sunday seminars as part of a more inclusive commemorative programme. The 1990s was marked by particularly intensive memory choreography or high ‘commemorative density’ around Bloody Sunday.44 It seemed that as people’s temporal distance from the original event increased, memory makers worked harder at preserving the memory of the event. An editorial in the Derry Journal newspaper pointed out that ‘from the British point of view, however, Bloody Sunday has become much more than a far-off disaster that is remembered once a year. It is now an issue that almost daily conjures up ghosts to haunt the British establishment. Slowly more and more of the truth emerges.’45 In the mid-1990s, and in the lead-up to the 25th anniversary commemoration, an effort was made to put together a “people’s archive” as a counterpoint to the official history and as a way of providing an empirical basis for nationalist truth claims that contested the dominant story. This effort to preserve individual and collective memories of Bloody Sunday and prevent their pluralization got under way through a public call in the local press inviting contributions to a permanent archive with a declaration that ‘unless people here now start to create their own archive of January 30, 1972, the official history will be the only substantial version left for future historians to judge. A People’s Archive will set the record straight’.46 Don Mullan’s groundbreaking book Eyewitness Bloody Sunday published around the time of the 30th anniversary,47 put together early oral histories of the event and helped to generate a surge of interest in the commemoration and to keep alive the continuing quest for truth. Organizationally, a plethora of groups emerged during this period – the Bloody Sunday Initiative, the Bloody Sunday Trust, and the Bloody Sunday Weekend Committee – with a focus on Bloody Sunday – some on its commemoration and others on the campaign for a new inquiry – but by the mid-1990s these twin foci became inextricably linked with one another in a way that had not occurred in the 1970s and 1980s.



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it is almost a habit that you do the Bloody Sunday commemoration. What it means to me sort of is that I am still campaigning. I see it as a campaigning thing. It can be seen as a commemoration rather than a march like the Poppy Day ceremonies and so on. People go on Poppy Day ceremonies you know in order to achieve any objective. We go because we go. But also and far more importantly from my point of view to see this issue through and to see the truth acknowledged by the British authorities about what happened in Derry. So when I go on it is sort of basically I’m campaigning. It is part of a political campaign.48 A wide range of cultural artefacts were deployed to infuse everyday social life with references to Bloody Sunday and to make it difficult to forget the event ranging from street murals to mug coasters – though some of these, such as the mural painting, evoked local controversy. The most noteworthy feature of this historical phase though was the re-imagining of Bloody Sunday as an example of injustice with parallels in different parts of the world such as Israel–Palestine, South Africa, Iraq and Mexico. The globalizing theme of the 1990s was manifest in a number of ways but one of the most interesting expressions of it was the commemorative poster for the 2002 commemoration,49 (Figure 5.1) which carried a picture of a flower juxtaposed against a background of a large assembly of people. On the face of it, the orange flower seemed unremarkable; but on careful inspection the ovary of the flower revealed a small globe. This use of photomontage was a clever and creative piece of iconography by that year’s Bloody Sunday commemoration organizers and was part of an effort to explicitly link the event to different examples of human injustice in different parts of the globe. Other aspects of the 2002 commemoration reinforced the international idiom – mentions of other world troublespots in public discourse, film screenings about war-torn locations, references to other conflict zones such as Israel–Palestine, and the flying of flags representing colonized peoples. This continued throughout the 2000s and the 2009 commemoration, for example, explicitly linked Bloody Sunday to the plight of Palestinians – who were under continuing Israeli military attack in Gaza. This symbolic connection was mainly achieved through the carrying of 1,000 Palestinian flags on the march,



This coupling of commemoration to campaigning was highlighted by one participant in the march:


Figure 5.1 Bloody Sunday commemorative poster, 2002. (Courtesy of Adrian Kerr, Museum of Free Derry)

mentions of Palestine in commemorative speeches at the rally, and the use of banners such as “Gaza-Derry Intimate Distance” at the Bloody Sunday lecture.50 When I asked interviewees about the feel-good and upbeat globalizing discourse of the 1990s the significance of media and public relations skills and resources among memory choreographers – mnemonic capacity51 – and crucially, changed local political conditions, were emphasized. One memory choreographer explained about the routinization of the work: I think we are just getting better at what we are doing. That’s part of it. We, people involved in the committee, there is an awful lot of skill in the committee. People who have been involved in events like this,



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not only the Bloody Sunday Weekend Committee, but other campaigns and other community issues. So people are just becoming, from one point of view, the committee is getting better and better at organizing things. We’ve been doing it for years so you learn from your mistakes. You don’t make them again, you get a bit more ambitious. There is also the issue itself has become so much more internationalized over the past ten years or more, I suppose with the peace process and stuff like that it is easier to get the issue out. While the war was going on it was always easy to keep the issue alive within our own community but while the war was going on it was another part of the war so getting it international wasn’t quite so easy you know. There was always international support on the issue but it is easy to use it I suppose when there isn’t a war going on in the background. Just we have tried to make it better and more ambitious every year and I suppose to a degree we are succeeding in doing that.52 Memory choreographers spoke of the importance of the Northern Irish peace process in creating a new political environment for a global idiom about Bloody Sunday. One spoke about how ‘the war’, that is, the violent paramilitary campaign against the British occupation of Northern Ireland, acted as a constraint on the ability of memory choreographers to construct a discourse about global human rights and justice. The same ‘war’ helped to ensure the resonance of Bloody Sunday ‘within our own community’ but not beyond it, particularizing it within a bounded field at a particular point in time. He was keen to emphasize the importance of the experiential as well by relating that ‘we’ve been doing it for years so you learn from your mistakes. You don’t make them again, you get a bit more ambitious.’53 Another important factor influencing the “easy listening” universalizing discourse had to do with pragmatic reasons. In the 1970s and 1980s, Sinn Féin (SF) was the dominant organizer of the Bloody Sunday commemorations but was not capable of securing the support of all the families of the victims of Bloody Sunday because of its avowal of violence as a mechanism for bringing about political change and its marginalization from the political mainstream as a result. As one memory choreographer articulated, ‘there was an effort by some in the republican movement to pull the families together. And you wouldn’t have got all the families buying into it. So we had to get rid of the party politics.’54 Draining the commemorations of its explicit republican colouration then became an important strategy of memory choreographers keen on building an alliance of political actors in their quest for





truth about what happened on 30 January 1972, that went beyond the street politics of marching and holding rallies that SF was a key force in: ‘we needed the likes of John Hume to be seen on television to be photographed with the Bloody Sunday families for people to see and understand this is not a republican event this is about the actual events of Bloody Sunday. There was a lot of work and effort put into that.’55 In this account, the adoption of a language of human rights and social justice is linked to the republican strategy of seeking the symbolic support of northern (and southern) political elites behind the campaign for a new inquiry and gaining a hearing with them. Crucially, this reframing of Bloody Sunday was done through the deployment of a human rights and justice interpretative framework and in a way that helped to neutralize earlier criticisms that the event was overly identified with and almost exclusively claimed by Irish republicans: ‘Bloody Sunday always had to be viewed as a human rights issue. Of course ... the politics of nationalists and Britain existed ... but Bloody Sunday had to be seen as a human rights issue. If we had tried to move forward without the support of the SDLP ... Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams at that time could not have done us favors in London.’56 This ‘taming of memory’ then,57 helped to win political allies in the quest to unveil the truth about what happened on 30 January 1972. As part of this strategy Bloody Sunday was coupled with not just global events but other local struggles against injustice such as the plight of the Ballymurphy Eleven. Political pragmatism then motivated the desire to eliminate the republican reputation that the Bloody Sunday commemorations developed and that alienated a number of significant potential political allies. For this to happen, Bloody Sunday had to be reconfigured and rebranded as not just an event that happened in Derry and that only mattered to Derry people – a Derry-centric interpretation – but one that would resonate with people well beyond the city of Derry. As one organizer of the annual commemoration put it: ‘I think it was important that it was seen to be organized by a broader group ... that was made necessary ... t hat was necessary in order to advance the campaign for a new inquiry in the early 1990s.’58 Another memory choreographer also pointed to the crucial platform the commemoration of the event created for increasing the visibility of the campaign for a new inquiry, elaborating that: it reflected pragmatism at the time. The Bloody Sunday Initiative was the first organization set up and it took on a few objective. Some were about Bloody Sunday and some were about developing a radical



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political agenda on human rights. You had two strands of thinking from the very very start and due to success I suppose the nature and basis of the organization had to change because the Bloody Sunday Initiative was very very successful in relation to creating a focus around the issue of Bloody Sunday. After a while once that focus was successfully created after 1992 it was felt that the mix the issue of Bloody Sunday with a whole range of issues within the one organization didn’t really do it justice. And it needed to be, it needed to sort of create a single focus.59 In this account, memory choreographers make little or no reference to the constraints imposed by earlier meanings attached to Bloody Sunday. Rather, we see an emphasis on pragmatic politics shaping the choices memory workers make in relation to remembrance and little concern about the difficulties created by earlier, and very different, meaning-making around the event. For all SF’s efforts to fix the meaning of the event as a constant reminder of the evils of British imperialism, by the 1990s Bloody Sunday was open in semiotic terms,60 and the open-ended nature of its meaning may help to ensure its salience among future generations with no direct, lived experience of it,61 and who come into contact with it only through the kind of mediated cultural memory – books, websites, songs, poetry, films – that intensified in the 1990s. Beyond pragmatic considerations identified by memory choreog raphers – such as Bloody Sunday’s potential as a usable past in the politics of the present – what others factors help account for the global turn in Bloody Sunday memory in the mid-1990s? Why did the discourse of “justice” and “human rights” emerge in the mid-1990s and not earlier? In the 1970s and 1980s, the Northern Ireland conflict tended to be viewed as a conflict that was unfixable.62 The depth of ethno-national division built up over a long history of hostility resulted in two silo communities, each with different group identities. These opposing identity categories were concretized in the material conditions of the society and in relationships with the British state. Historically, Catholics were materially less advantaged and developed an antagonistic relationship to the state. But owing to the coming together or conjunction of global factors, European influences, and shifting local conditions in the 1990s, this prevailing view became unstuck and the ending of politically motivated violence began to seem attainable as a long-term goal. Macro-structural changes such as changing demographics in Northern Ireland meant that Catholics




represented a higher, and increasingly confident, proportion of the population in the 1990s than they did in the 1970s and 1980s.63 In 1970, Catholics represented 37 per cent of the population compared with 44.5 per cent in 2001.64 Economically, Northern Ireland in the 1970s fared poorly and was heavily subsidized by the British government. Its economy picked up – especially its manufacturing sector – in the 1990s with the securing of the peace process.65 Linked to this economic development was a shifting local political economy focused on developing the tourist appeal of Northern Ireland generally and Derry specifically. City planning documents from the early 2000s placed heavy emphasis on marketing Derry as a bright ‘vibrant international’ city and isolated ‘memories of violence’ as an impediment to this process,66 implicitly urging the disavowal of the city’s violent past within this urban imaginary. Significantly, tourist guide maps of the city in the mid-2000s included references to the Bloody Sunday memorial because the commemoration of this event – and the city’s ‘Bloody Sunday Weekend’ – acts as an important draw for large crowds of people outside the tourist season. This inclusion also raised it to the level of a significant historical event in the city’s narrative about itself. Within the commemoration, the memorial is the site of an important wreath-laying remembrance ritual and elaborates a human rights/justice narrative through a plaque erected at it. Including the memorial in tourist guide maps demonstrated the ability of local city planners to reconcile the injunction to jettison ‘memories of violence’ with mobilizing the city’s troubled history as a resource for tourism. This was made possible by a ‘taming’67 of Bloody Sunday memory – via a human rights/justice storyline – and represented a symbolic rejection of earlier rhetorical emphases on blood, bombs and bullets (Figures 5.2, 5.3, 5.4). Yet at the same time, commemoration organizers did not completely sanitize Bloody Sunday as it was repeatedly referred to, at different memorial events, as ‘murder’ and employed as an occasion to put forward a sharp political critique of the British government’s actions on 30 January, 1972, and subsequently as well, despite the long temporal distance from the event. Changes within the nationalist community itself, shaped by broader political changes in Britain and Ireland, led to a slow rethinking of the political costs and benefits of continuing the “armed struggle”. Crucially, republicans began to develop political networks, via reciprocal visits, with leaders of and actors in other struggles against oppression in places such as South Africa, Palestine and Mexico,68 and these networks provided an important framework for the discursive construction of the




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Northern Irish conflict. The adoption of a universalizing idiom was made easier by the fact that international themes were already well articulated in other forms of Irish nationalist commemorative iconography. For example, the use of international symbols and images in republican mural painting began to emerge in the 1980s and sought to draw parallels between the Northern Irish situation and oppressed peoples such as Blacks in America and South Africa.69 The presence of this commemorative tradition and the rich “available past” that it called up provided an important resource for republicans to draw on in their memory work around Bloody Sunday.70 Not surprisingly then, Bloody Sunday murals were painted on gable-end walls in the 1980s and 1990s. The political context in Britain changed in the 1990s too with the election of New Labour, whose majority in Westminster gave it more





leverage with respect to accommodating the concerns of Irish nationalism than earlier Conservative governments.71 In the 1970s and 1980s British political opinion converged on the point that a way out of the Northern Ireland conflict could be found only through a military and security strategy. At street level, this manifested itself in poor relations between the security forces and the local nationalist population and fuelled nationalist grievances vis-à-vis the British state that were articulated at Bloody Sunday marches. In this climate, finding a negotiated political solution had little currency. Neither did the British government give more attention to recognizing the role of the Irish government in securing a settlement.72 In the 1990s political changes south of the border involved an increasing willingness to deal with and compromise on the old chestnut of the




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territorial claim to the northern six-counties, an increasing awareness of this as a blockage to a negotiated settlement, and an acceptance of the principle of consent with respect to changes in the status of Northern Ireland. The overcoming of the “territorial trap”73 by increasing exposure to global forces and influences gave a new impetus to attempts by peace choreographers around this time to refine the Northern Ireland conflict as one having to do less with territory than with people and how they might live amicably and harmoniously together. This was linked, in line with world polity theory, to an increasing emphasis on Ireland’s image and standing on the world stage and the extent to which the Northern Ireland conflict undercut this “nice”, modern, progressive societal image that cultural and political elites sought to promote in order to secure material and symbolic advantages.74




In the 1980s and 1990s, successive Irish governments engaged with the British government in seeking to bring about an end to the conflict. Convincing the British side of the counter-productive nature of its earlier security solution and of the value of Irish input in the affairs of Northern Ireland, represented key goals of this engagement process and helped to tilt public support away from militant republicans towards the moderate nationalism of the SDLP.75 The Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 codified this and gave the impetus for an internal debate within the Irish republican movement about moving towards a political route to securing its long-standing goal of a united Ireland.76 Across the Atlantic, a favourable political environment, most notably a US President, Bill Clinton, sympathetic to and interested in the Irish Question and a wider Irish-American constituency willing in support,77 created a propitious context for seeking a resolution of the conflict and pointed to the growing internationalization of it. This American mobilization of “soft” power – with political and economic interests lying behind it – helped to nudge Irish republicans in the direction of pursuing their goals through political processes.78 An index of this was the regular participation of Irish diasporic ethnic-cultural groups such as Ancient Order of Hibernian branches from America in the Bloody Sunday marches in the 1990s. At a European level, Ireland’s membership of the European Union meant that it was a net beneficiary of transfers from the EU and this helped it to catch up, in terms of infrastructure and public finances, with other more prosperous countries possible, helping, in turn, to equalize the Anglo-Irish relationship.79 Within this equalized relationship, Bloody Sunday became an increasingly usable past. Globally, examples of successful resolution of old and long-standing political conflicts such as the ending of the Cold War, the demise of communism in Poland, the reunification of Germany, and the end of apartheid in South Africa, provided an important frame of reference for political leaders in Northern Ireland and sent out a clear message that apparently unsolvable political quarrels could be brought to an end. A shifting global institutional environment, specifically one with increasing emphasis on a universal conception of human rights that became a peculiar and noteworthy feature of western political culture from the 1970s on,80 also helped to motivate and underpin this move from ‘licking one’s own wounds’ towards a translocal idiom of ‘cross-national solidarity’.81 Consider, for example, that in the 1990s, following the 1993 World Human Rights Conference, ratifications of international human rights treaties surged.82 All these influences – Irish, British, European, American, global – and shifts at different levels – political,





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Conclusion This chapter has sought to map and explain the memory discourses and commemorative strategies around Bloody Sunday across three historical phases scrutinizing in particular the period from the mid-1990s on. An analysis of these phases suggests that there was a slow but discernible shift in meaning-making from an early exclusivist interpretation of the meaning of Bloody Sunday to a more inclusive, pluralist one in which memory choreographers sought to appeal to multiple audiences for whom Bloody Sunday could or did have resonance and a positive valence. In the 1970s and 1980s Irish republicans colonized the memory of Bloody Sunday and in so doing went to great lengths to construct the British state as an “Other”, which clearly fitted well with its colonial interpretation of the Irish Question. Within this discursive framework the Bloody Sunday victims were repeatedly invoked as martyrs who died in the struggle for liberation from British imperialism and mobilized them to symbolically contest the British presence in Northern Ireland, a key republican goal. At the same time, Bloody Sunday commemorations, as with other republican commemorations, were occasions for bringing republicans together and creating a sense of community and connection among them. The 1990s – during the “Truth-Telling, Human Rights and Justice Storylines” phase – was marked by a rebranding of the Bloody Sunday story and the crucial interpretative tool for achieving this, as we saw earlier, was the clever deployment of a normative human rights/justice framework that helped to lift the event out of an earlier Irish republican interpretative model and eliminate its unsavoury connections with the use of violence and physical force as a political weapon. In this phase, Bloody Sunday did not mean the same thing that it did in the 1970s and 1980s. From the mid-1990s on, a discourse about state oppression did not carry the same force as a collective mobilization frame as before, and in the 1970s and 1980s it was not globally “chic” to draw attention to cross-cultural parallels with the Bloody Sunday experience.83 The programme for the 2005 commemoration articulated this connection with global audiences while at the same time grounding the event locally by evoking support for the Bloody Sunday families: ‘more



economic, demographic – that came together in the mid-1990s (and not in the 1970s and 1980s) reconfigured the political context of Northern Ireland and created a new environment within which global symbolism and idioms could find a resonance.

generally these events create a space to come and reflect with others on the importance of democracy here and throughout the world and to stand shoulder to shoulder, in solidarity with the families of the victims of Bloody Sunday and victims of injustice everywhere’. 84 Under this banner, global civil society groups that did not previously connect their causes to Bloody Sunday – such as anti-war groups – were mobilized in the 2000s to participate in the annual march and rally. In 2005 symbolic linkages were drawn between the Bogside and Basra. But the Bogside is not Basra and Basra is not the Bogside. This globalizing discourse tends to gloss over international asymmetries of power and domination and salient differences between different situations and contexts, Irish people’s own history of involvement in colonialization, and the past “sinner” status of Irish nationalists and republicans. This chapter has suggested that earlier commemorations do not have as constraining an influence as one might expect. Indeed, what is striking about this empirical case is how very different later commemorative strategies were to earlier ones signalled by the radical disconnect between early 1970s and mid-1990s framings. The anti-colonial meaning of the commemoration was stabilized throughout the 1970s and 1980s but became unstuck in the 1990s as the organizers of the commemoration sought to disavow the republican inflection of remembrance and to move the Bloody Sunday issue into the political mainstream and away from the arena of street politics. Political pragmatism, fuelled by a shifting local political setting, rather than the constraints imposed by earlier prior commemorations, together with a propitious global institutional environment, propelled this important symbolic shift in Bloody Sunday memory work characterized by a ‘cosmopolitan stretching of the moral imagination’.85 The extent to which this transnational, cross-cultural identification with casualties of injustice and ‘distant strangers’86 in other parts of the world with whom one has no face-to-face contact can be sustained over the long term or more importantly whether it motivates solidaristic human action or ‘remote strangers’ keepers’ in Kurasawa’s terms87 – sending money or humanitarian aid to assist victims of injustice or lobbying political actors on their behalf, for example – is an open question. It may well be that it is limited to a civil-political version of cosmopolitanism – via encouraging commitment to universal human rights discourses embedded in transnational institutions – rather than a socio-economic one involving the transnational transfer of material resources and a recalibration of structural power relations between “us” and “them”.88




117

The world polity approach has some “legs” in terms of explaining the global storyline that was a feature of Bloody Sunday discourse from the mid-1990s on. In particular, the trajectory of Bloody Sunday memory mapped out in this chapter, in terms of (a) a shift from particularism and localism to abstract ideas about human rights, and (b) the diminishing importance of local conditions over time and the parallel heightened importance of the global environment, is wholly consistent with the predictions of this theory. But it may well be that this scaling up – or ‘upward scale shift’, in Tarrow’s terms89 – in Bloody Sunday memory – from the local to the global – will lead to an elimination or hollowing out of its local meaning – a ‘de-vernacularizing’ of Bloody Sunday – and that it will become an empty shell onto which a range of meanings, with little direct connection to the original events, can be attached. However, the global side of this explanation is not the whole story. I have tried to argue that it is a combination of and interaction between shifting local conditions and a global political environment that helps explain the global turn in commemorative strategies. In this global storytelling, local memory choreographers, embedded in both a local context and a global environment, exercise control over the framing of Bloody Sunday in translocal terms while at the same time being subject to the proliferation of private memories that broke out into the public domain during the recent Saville Inquiry and the semiotic openness of the event. Taken together, these two factors have the potential to lead to a kind of fragmentation, instability and pluralization of Bloody Sunday memory in the future and a consequent loss of control over the meaning of the past. By drawing attention to key influences – Irish, British, European, American, global – and changes at different levels – political, economic, and demographic – that came together in the mid-1990s (and not in the 1970s and 1980s), influences that had the effect of reconfiguring the political milieu of Northern Ireland and creating an important environment within which global symbolism and idioms began to develop a currency and political traction among memory choreographers and a wider public, this chapter provides an explanatory framework, linking macro-structural, political and economic shifts to micro-interpretations and meaning-making, for understanding the trajectory of memory work with respect to the case of Bloody Sunday. The next chapter continues the focus on the Bloody Sunday memory life cycle by looking at the mobilization of visual resources in remembering the event from the mid-1980s onwards.




6

As part of the research for this book, one interviewee, after an extended interview, guided me into the front sitting-room to show me photographs of one of the Bloody Sunday dead. Recalling that in the early 1970s the loss associated with his death was too great for participating in the annual commemorative march, in the 1990s this interviewee went on the march and become more involved in and an active member of the then emerging Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign (BSJC). For this respondent, as, seemingly, for others, private memory was quarantined from public communal remembrance because the working through and processing of private remembrance associated with loss and bereavement took place at a slower pace than public commemoration. From the 1990s, the tempo of public commemoration of the event intensified and relied heavily on the mobilization of visual resources – like photographs – to relate the event to new publics. In the 1970s and 1980s Bloody Sunday was publicly remembered, to be sure, but only on the Sunday closest to 30 January every year. Beyond this there was very little public commemoration of the event. The 1990s, as mentioned earlier, were different. This period was characterized by intensive commemorative activity and in a way that sought to embed the event more fully in people’s everyday lives. Exhibitions, docudramas, websites and street murals (and a rich plethora of other non-tragic mnemonic genres) remembering the event all appeared during this time and, importantly, an organized political campaign to challenge the official memory of the event. All these visual resources helped to secure Bloody Sunday’s “institutional retention” as a cultural object.1 The puzzle this chapter attempts to engage with is why this intensive visual public commemoration of Bloody Sunday occurred in the 1990s and not earlier. Stated differently, what factors help explain 118



The Politics of Visual Memory

the intensity of and surge in public commemoration chiefly through popular visual culture – “memory mania”2 perhaps – and its timing? My aim here in this chapter, then, is to further extend the analysis of the commemorative “career” of Bloody Sunday by paying particular attention to the mobilization of visual culture – museum spaces, street political art, and stained-glass windows – in remembering and “seeing” the event in popular and institutional spheres. These examples do not exhaust the full range of ways in which the event has been visualized and collectivized – notable other examples being two different docudramas, Bloody Sunday and Sunday, which have already attracted a good deal of scholarly attention,3 newspaper commemorative supplements,4 and Internet websites – but they constitute important, though admittedly less well-known, empirical examples of the way in which the event has come to be represented and revitalized in visual terms. When Irish Times journalist Kevin Myers criticized the Bloody Sunday commemoration in 1997 – by then known as the “Bloody Sunday Weekend” – as a ‘festival’ and the ‘cult of victimhood’ it seemingly generated,5 his remarks may well have been impolitely framed and were clearly objectionable to and dismissive of the families of the victims; but they registered the increasing emphasis on visually marketing the event and the proliferation of visual symbolism associated with it. It is clear that local-level memory choreographers associated with organizing commemorative events are themselves increasingly aware of the capacity – despite the passage of time and generational differences in relating to the event – of such cultural resources to act as a firewall against oblivion among people with different generational and political experiences. One interviewee related that despite the distance of a generation the event has continuing currency among many – but not all – Derry people and the interviewee links this to heavy media coverage of the Saville Inquiry: when you live in Derry it had such an impact on it doesn’t go away in the space of a generation or two. And as families get bigger and bigger you know even the families directly affected by Bloody Sunday, take those killed or wounded, bigger and bigger families now have got children, grandchildren, everybody. So many people know somebody that was affected in some way that an uncle, or a grandfather or someone like that was killed or wounded on the day. The amount that has been in the local press, especially over the last couple of years with the Saville Inquiry. You know even kids can’t help being affected by it but there is also I have seen evidence of another point



The Politics of Visual Memory 119


Most interviewees for this study did not consider popular cultural representations of Bloody Sunday, which emerged in the 1990s, in such things as film as inauthentic. One young adult interviewee, contrasting the docudramas Sunday and Bloody Sunday (both released in 2002), pointed to the realism of film representations and the authenticity of the production achieved through filming on location in Derry city: I don’t know whether it could have went down the other way. In England or whatever but in Derry it just seemed far more real ’cause it was Derry people, real Derry accents you know and it was you recognized every wee corner, every wee part of it, because most of it, not all of it, some of it was filmed in Manchester I think. But I know a lot of it, most of it was filmed in Derry, a good proportion of it. Whereas the other film, a lot of it was filmed in Ballymun I think in Dublin.7 Another, older, interviewee who had direct experience of Bloody Sunday was critical of the use of Hollywood convention in Bloody Sunday: it adopted the standard Hollywood device of seeing the events of Bloody Sunday through the eyes of a central character. Once they selected the central character to be Ivan Cooper, once you make that decision then you have to place that character in order to tell the story you have to place that character at the center of every development and every incident that you are going to depict and that required that a role be ascribed to Ivan and therefore to other things that Ivan Cooper represented. Which vastly exaggerated the role which he personally had in the politics.8 The next section examines three sites that “picture” the event: the Museum of Free Derry, the Bogside street mural, and the Guildhall stained-glass window. Clearly, there are differences between these sites of memory in terms of their circulation, but what is common to them all is the use of visual culture in recalling the event and the fact that they represent sites of memory outside of the annual commemorative events at the end of January and which up to now I have not examined in much detail. They also differ in terms of how they work: the museum has more of an educational purpose and makes a stronger claim to represent the event than the Guildhall stained-glass window, for example – with



of view where ‘what’s it got to do with us’ you know it is thirty two years ago. What has it got to do with us?6

respect to who was behind their production – the stained glass window being a product of the work of local political elites and the exhibition of civil society groups9 – in terms of their resonance with people who want to learn about Bloody Sunday – for example, very few people visit the Guildhall stained-glass window as compared to the Museum of Free Derry, and in terms of their temporal structures10 – the Museum of Free Derry and Guildhall stained-glass window are open to visitors at certain times and not others while the Bogside street mural is not subject to any temporal constraints and is viewable year-round. Clearly, then, the three examples considered here are not “all of a piece” – the mural and museum connect with each other much more than the stained-glass window does – and are much more widely known – and thus represent different levels of “successful” remembrance. For each of these ‘visual monuments’,11 I comment in general terms about it, provide a brief narrative history about its origins, and then comment on whether or not it set off controversy. An investigation of these various ways of “picturing the past” is also instructive for what it tells us about the conditions under which a site of memory will set off controversy. Previous research points to the passage of time, the nature of the event or figure being remembered, how public the memorial is, whether it is permanent, and whether it is publicly funded as important influences on this.12 While all these conditions do not have to be present for controversy to be set off, at least one of them tends to be. In addition to these factors, I identify the attribution of blame or responsibility and the attribution of agency – a factor not identified by Vera Zolberg – and brought into focus in the fraught debate around the Guildhall stained-glass window and the Bogside street mural, as important conditions influencing the contested nature of remembrance and commemoration. Table 6.1 summarizes the major dimensions along which the three sites of Bloody Sunday memory vary.

Institutionalizing the past One way in which the memory of a past event can be kept alive in people’s consciousness is through institutionalizing it via such things as museums, but, like other kinds of memory work, this involves people coming together and making decisions to raise material resources and secure institutional support for it. Located in the Bloody Sunday Centre (formerly on Shipquay Street, later Foyle Street, and now the Museum of Free Derry in Glenfada Park) in Derry,13 the first large-scale public




122 Commemoration and Bloody Sunday Comparing three sites of Bloody Sunday memory Museum of Free Derry

Bogside Street Mural

Guildhall stainedglass window

Temporal distance from 1972

Long (mid-2000s)

Long (mid-1990s) Moderate (1984–9)

Resonance

High

High

Low

Claim to authenticity

High

High

Low

Purpose

Preservation and Instruction

Preservation

Preservation and instruction

Guardianship

High

Low

Low

Memory Choreographer

Civil Society Organization

Civil Society Organization

British State/political elites

Publicness

High

High

Low

Funding

British state/Irish state

Civil Society

British state

Permanence

High

Moderate

High

Tourist appeal

High

High

Low

Temporal structure

Five- day schedule of opening

Year-round

Five- day schedule of opening

High

Low

Articulation High with other commemorative sites Contestation

Low

High

High

Nature of contestation

None

Attribution of Agency

Attribution of Blame

exhibition dedicated to Bloody Sunday opened in August 1999.14 In the mid-2000s it was raised to the level of a museum and accordingly renamed as the Museum of Free Derry (Figure 6.1). This museum draws its funding from diverse public sources including Derry City Council, the Northern Ireland Tourist Board, the Department for Social Development and the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs. It hosts the National Civil Rights Archive and clearly seeks to position Bloody Sunday within a national historical narrative. In 2008, over ten thousand visitors passed through its doors. Highly visual in nature, the exhibition articulates with the visual nature of contemporary culture and the fact that ‘sight



Table 6.1

Figure 6.1 Exterior of Museum of Free Derry, Glenfada Park. (Photograph by the author)

is the dominant sense in modern Western culture’.15 It literally opens one’s eyes – and one’s ears – to Derry’s difficult past. Efforts to establish the museum – and to help institutionalize memories of the event – went back to the late 1980s with a public call in the local press for people to donate surviving artefacts of any kind, signalling an urge to safeguard memories of the event. The organization behind the museum, the Bloody Sunday Trust (BST), was established in 1992 with the founding goal ‘to commemorate the events of Bloody Sunday and to preserve the memory of those who died on that day’.16 Visitors pay a small fee to view the museum and revenue from this helps to support the non-profit trust. A visitor’s book at the entrance shows that many come as part of school tours or from other parts of the world to learn about the event and comments left in the book to the effect that the exhibition is emotionally charged and helps to connect visitors to their own difficult pasts suggest that visitors absorb the intended message of the museum.17 Located in Glenfada Park along Rossville Street, where some of the dead died, it is well integrated spatially into the Bogside nationalist community, is just across the road from the Bloody Sunday




memorial, and provides an important source of revenue for the local small economy as well as an opportunity to ‘experience’ the past and ‘get in touch with history’.18 Its close proximity to the Bloody Sunday memorial is noteworthy: at the end of the Sunday morning Rossville Street memorial service at the 2008 and 2009 commemoration the attendance was reminded of the opening hours of the Museum of Free Derry, highlighting and reinforcing the important connection between the memorial and the museum in instructing people about the event.19 Interestingly, the museum’s Bloody Sunday story is subsumed under a broader “civil rights” construct. Most of the staff who work at the museum have some personal connection to the event through being a family member of a victim or through having been on the original 1972 march. The museum plays an important role in retelling a vernacular nationalist narrative about Bloody Sunday but also in helping to mediate how visitors interpret other sites of memory such as the memorial and murals across the road from the museum. Its brochure gives one some sense of the message the BST hopes people will take away from their visit – it emphasizes the importance of telling history as seen from the vantage point of ordinary people and communicating the lessons of Free Derry so that they might be learned by other peoples in other times. 20 I attended the official launch of the museum in the Bloody Sunday Centre on 25 January, 2005, as part of the 2005 commemorative programme. The main speaker, Eamonn McCann, spoke about the importance of the museum to remembering Bloody Sunday and providing a ‘democratic history’ of it.21 Unlike most other museums, which present the official history of the past as defined by official cultural elites such as academics and historians and national political elites, he said this museum would be set apart by its representation of the subjective vernacular past of the ordinary, working- class Bogside residents, the ‘living history’ of its people. Reminding the attendance of the highly visual nature of the museum, he said that just by looking at the photographs around the room, one got a sense not of the well-taken, well-focused, static picture of reality as it happened – as represented in a still photograph – but of the dynamic nature of events unfolding, or the ‘creative chaos’ of Free Derry, as he put it, at the time. A notable feature of the museum, he said, was the fact that it would be located on the spot where the events it chronicles took place, specifically, in the ‘killing fields’ of Glenfada Park, a clear reference to Cambodia’s Pol Pot regime and an explicit global connection to the event. 22 He continued by noting that the museum’s location at the symbolic centre of the event helped to underwrite its truth-power and that it was




not just about chronicling the past but acting as a form of resistance to it. Through the museum, he said, ordinary people would be enabled to tell their own story to themselves and to others even if Lord Saville’s report turned out to be a ‘crashing disappointment’. In this way he positioned the museum as a counter-narrative to the official dominant narrative of the British government and to its reconstruction of the meaning of the event though clearly the latter carries more authority.23 When I viewed the exhibition, I spoke to the exhibition staff and their narrative tended to reinforce the critique of the official memory articulated by the artefacts, videos and panels. The exhibit, which is mainly a walk-though one, consists of a five-part structure in the sequence of (1) Civil Rights, (2) Battle of the Bogside, (3) Internment, (4) Free Derry, and (5) Bloody Sunday, so that as one moves through the physical space of the museum one moves through time as well. It displays a wide range of artefacts in glass- enclosed cases including the Derry Civil Rights Association (DCRA) banner, now bloodstained, used in the original march, the original white handkerchief carried by Father Edward Daly, civilian eyewitness accounts collected by NICRA, the speech delivered by NICRA honorary secretary Edwina Stewart at the first commemoration, and clothing, personal letters, and other belongings of the dead. The DCRA banner was unveiled as part of 2009 commemoration programme and at its unveiling Eamonn McCann spoke of the importance of preserving the banner for future generations. He reminded people of the symbolic links between Bloody Sunday and other global events and of the continuing campaign of the families of the dead for justice via the Saville Inquiry.24 This banner, arguably the central artefact of the exhibit, is an emotionally charged and sacred object to the victims’ relatives because the bloodstains of one of the dead are still clearly visible on it. Its inclusion in the exhibit helps to underline the martyred status of the dead and the tragic sacrifices they made. Photographic displays along the walls of the museum, consisting of still facial images of the dead in the fullness of life, relate to the victims, and by presenting images of them in prosaic family, work and leisure situations, they personalize the exhibit and in a way that disrupts the more abstract construction of the event via a human rights/justice discourse – while at the same time occasionally making reference in the narrative accompanying the museum images to other places that experienced similar events. By individualizing the dead in this way the museum follows the convention of historical preservation in other national contexts.25 This use of facial images of the dead in the museum represents a strong challenge to Bernadette Wegenstein’s ‘post-facial era’ argument





that faces have become obsolete.26 Wiggenstein claims, mainly with reference to beauty advertising, that the face is ‘overcoded’ and has now ‘ceased to be the most representative signifier of human appearance’,27 now other body parts allow us to ‘see’ the individual ; but this argument does not seem to extend to political commemoration. Challenging the DCRA banner for status as the most charged artefact of the museum is the white handkerchief used by Father Edward Daly on Bloody Sunday. In January 2009 the handkerchief was donated to the museum by Kay Duddy, sister of Jackie Duddy, and reflected concern that it might be lost for ever if not preserved.28 Artefacts such as used plastic bullets, gasmasks, and stewards notebooks, and posters advertising protest civil rights marches in the earlier parts of the museum remind us that the victims were also part of a then ongoing political project of challenging discriminatory government policies relating to housing, voting rights and employment. Glass display cases containing these artefacts constitute the bulk of the museum, but visitors can also view video footage of army and civilian confrontations in the Bogside and listen to audio clips,29 now well- established museum techniques to appeal to all the senses of the visitor and establish their authenticity credentials.30 When I asked one staff member of the then Bloody Sunday Centre about the surge of commemorative activity in the 1990s, including the Museum of Free Derry, he explained that making the event resonate with more publics and increasing the political clout of the victims’ families was a key goal: I think it is commemorated so as to incorporate other individuals and peoples, or persuasions or other political type people, to come in and have an input to it. You know because if you look the families put together the Bloody Sunday lecture. We were the first to instigate that we tried to expand as well not just from the morning service but with the Bloody Sunday lecture. We set that up. We usually had it in the Guildhall. The reason why we done that is to put the people into the center of the Unionist seat more or less. In other words, the Guildhall was controlled by Unionists for all those years. We felt it right that they should go into the Guildhall but it hasn’t been in the Guildhall these last five years because of the Inquiry. So therefore we have it up in the Calgach Centre. We had it in different venues. So therefore we found it would be important to expand as well – what we were trying to achieve was to make people aware of the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign, and also to make people aware of Bloody Sunday and to educate and bring more support in for what we were



126

trying to achieve. So we found that would be important too. The Bloody Sunday Weekend Committee decided to have all these events to bring in political opinion into it – in other words we had panels where you had the DUP, SF, SDLP – you had all the political persuasions at times within the one room. Because remember also we were in the middle of the peace process. People were trying to organize in some way in such a way that would incorporate those type of people so they could sit down and talk and people listen to their opinions. So you had that and you also had different things going on as well – you could have a thing in a pub, a quiz. It was a matter of expanding on what you had – a march. You only had a march, nothing else. 31 In this account, the commemorative density of the 1990s is linked to political mobilization – to ‘bring more support in for what we were trying to achieve’ in the words of this key informant – in support of the quest of the families of the victims for truth and justice. From the 1990s, people who visited Derry for the annual commemoration, then, could view the exhibit but could also attend a Friday night lecture, listen to Saturday morning panel discussions, participate in Bogside walking tours, help answer questions in table quizzes, purchase Bloody Sunday souvenirs such as black ribbons, posters, and mug coasters, and listen to music at a Saturday night concert and disco, all organized by people concerned with ‘making people aware’ of Bloody Sunday. Interestingly, these Bloody Sunday souvenirs are sometimes sold by street traders who set up their stalls in Derry’s Guildhall Square and operate outside the aegis of the local Bloody Sunday Trust.32 Marita Sturken’s insightful analysis of American commemorative activity around September 11 and Oklahoma City characterizes ‘tourists of history’ as largely non- engaged and non- committed and with a potted knowledge of the past,33 but interviewees for this study related that being part of the Bloody Sunday commemoration represented an important outlet for claiming their group identity, especially members of the Irish-American diasporic community. One Irish-American interviewee, for instance, when asked why he participated in the commemoration related that showing one’s symbolic support for Bloody Sunday and giving expression to his religious beliefs was a primary motivation for his coming to Derry: We take it as we should come here and show our brothers here that we’re behind them ... its part of our its part of our motto ... you know in our community in the Christian Church this is part of the unity





part you know even though we’re separated by water if you need us we’re there for you.34

I’ve heard about it from about back to my first studies thinking about Irish and thinking about what the Irish went through. First of all my family didn’t come to America during An Gorta Mór, the big one, they came over in the first one and the first one you know people don’t say much about it but the first famine was in ’34. The second famine was in ’44 and they came over in ’34 and from that point it was a kind of a study forward and learning about the history of what the Irish are going through and then learning about Bloody Sunday and having then having the opportunity to come over and experience it further. To me was very important.35 In this account, the importance of “experiencing” the past is also highlighted, and one assumes that, for this informant, as indicated by his regular attendance at recent Bloody Sunday commemorations, this goal is achieved. He continued by invoking Bloody Sunday as an example of a long history of white oppression and an opportunity to claim one’s white identity: it gives me some depth and education in what they went through ... the Irish here in Northern Ireland went through for equality you know ... we had we hadn’t it easy but we always fight for equality and civil rights and we want to see that ... that everyone has an equal opportunity the same has to be true here.36 Irish-Americans who participate in the yearly commemoration tend to be sympathetic to the vernacular nationalist interpretation of the event. This is made clear in the following citizen’s letter, ‘An Irish-American View’, which relates the reader’s knowledge of the event to popular cultural knowledge and visual representations: I have just finished reading the Derry Journal’s 25th Anniversary coverage of Bloody Sunday. As an Irish-American I never realized before that this massacre still haunted Derry so much. After seeing the photographs of the 14 dead I can understand why. Only when



Another American participant linked Bloody Sunday to the Irish experience of famine when I asked him about how he came to know about the event:


Interestingly, the writer’s articulation of the “truth” and “justice” storylines promoted by memory choreographers in the 1990s suggests that their meaning-making around the event is taking hold even among people who are spatially removed from Derry. Lapel badges worn by Ancient Order of Hibernians members with the slogan “I Was There: Derry, Ireland” also point to the importance of participation in the commemoration to their diasporic group identity.38 Many also wear the familiar Bloody Sunday black ribbons (analogous to the pick ribbons used in cancer fundraising) on their lapels though their wearing in social spaces beyond the commemoration – in workplaces, for example – has been a source of local sectarian tension along familiar unionist and nationalist faultlines.39 When people wear black ribbons on their lapels, as many do, they are not just purchasing a Bloody Sunday souvenir to help fund the families’ quest for truth but are expressing their identification with the event and implicitly challenging the official British state memory. Another site where this opposition finds expression is on the streets of Derry’s Bogside.

Mapping history on to geography Street mural painting for political purposes has a long history in Northern Irish society and involves the painting of large-scale visual images on gable- end walls in mostly working- class housing estates.40 The use of mural painting among republicans was taken up in the 1980s, and Bloody Sunday memory choreographers mobilized this already existing mnemonic device to underwrite their challenge to the official memory of the event in the 1990s. Curiously, murals occupy a kind of middle zone between monuments and graffiti: they are not quite permanent but neither are they completely transitory. A photograph of a white handkerchief-waving priest Father Edward Daly shepherding Jacky Duddy to safety is the canonical image of Bloody Sunday, analogous to the shot of US President John F. Kennedy being assassinated as his motorcade made its way through the streets of Dallas, and has been recycled over and over again in newspaper accounts and other visual records of the event. Bogside street traders sell framed reproductions of the mural from temporary stalls in Rossville Street and the Bogside artists sell posters and t-shirts depicting their Bogside murals, contributing



the truth and justice prevails over the lies of the English government can there be some closure to Derry City’s open wound. God save Ireland. God save us all.37

further to its global circulation. As Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz remind us, ‘the most successful cultural objects reproduce themselves’.41 One interesting place where this image is reproduced is in a street mural on Rossville Street in the Bogside (Figure 6.2). One interviewee told me about how this helped to socialize young people into the memory of the event: sort of glad that it is there. Particularly now. Now most young people now weren’t even born then. It is emotive when you look at it. You would be over there. You can’t avoid the Father Daly one now. When you go over to the Bogside you can’t avoid the Father Daly one’.42 In this account, the key informant emphasizes the mural’s placement on Rossville Street as an important aspect of its resonance and attributes to it an important role in bridging the gap between, as Kurasawa puts it, ‘then and there’ and ‘now and here’.43 The mural is more complicated than it seems at first sight and is in fact a montage of four different images: a photograph taken by Italian

Figure 6.2

Bloody Sunday mural, Rossville Street. (Photograph by the author)




photographer Fulvio Grimaldi of Jackie Duddy being carried to safety in the Rossville Flats car park by a group of men; a British soldier; the bloodstained civil rights banner; and the march making its way down Creggan Street to Free Derry Corner. Painted by the Bogside artists in the summer and early autumn of 1995 and funded by voluntary contributions, it is simply entitled ‘Bloody Sunday’ and is part of ‘The People’s Gallery’44 of murals along Rossville Street, mapping the history of the city on to its geography. The mural is black and white and the foreground British soldier standing on the bloodstained civil rights banner carried on the original march signifies the fact that the victims were shot dead by the British army. Another mural dedicated to Bloody Sunday is located on Westland Street, about 100 yards away, and unlike the montage mural is linked to the annual commemoration march because the march stops at it on its way to Free Derry Corner for the observation of a minute’s silence as a mark of respect for the dead – in this way the inscribed memory of the event connects with its embodied memory (Figure 6.3). Compared with the montage mural it is less politicized – it simply depicts the nameless faces of the dead enclosed by a circle of

Figure 6.3

Bloody Sunday mural, Westland Street. (Photograph by the author)




oak leaves – and personalizes the abstract commemorative discourse about human rights and justice by bringing the victims – as fathers, sons, brothers, colleagues and neighbours – into people’s awareness. In the early 1990s, the mural consisted of a few ad hoc wooden panels attached to the wall. At the 1992 commemoration, a mock judge whitewashed the bottom of the wall on which these wooden boards were erected to signify the “Widgery Whitewash”, and the slogan “Bloody Sunday: The Day Innocence Died”45 was emblazoned on the whitewashed wall.46 The mural was subsequently refurbished as a full-scale gable- end mural for the 1999 commemoration. It was not the subject of local debate and controversy. By contrast, the Rossville Street mural generated local controversy and bore out Jennifer Jordan’s reminder that the motivations of commemorative activity are not always congruent with their results;47 though, given the passage of time from the event remembered, one would have expected the mural to have been less controversial than it was.48 In 1995, journalist Nell McCafferty wrote an article, from a critical feminist perspective, in the magazine Hot Press entitled ‘You are Now Entering Woman-Free Derry’49 that touched off a local debate about the mural between McCafferty and the artists who painted it. In the article McCafferty told readers that while out for a walk one evening she noticed the mural and its omission of women and the bigger point of its gendered construction of civil rights history. For McCafferty, the mural was a good example of an androcentric world with a Derry inflection. In two separate letters to the editor of the Derry Journal on 1 September 1995, Nell McCafferty and Fionnbarra Ó Dóchartaigh claimed that women were literally painted out of the history of Derry and strongly criticized the artists’ sin of omission and the worldview that their mural embodied.50 McCafferty explicitly contrasted the mural with the Bloody Sunday memorial across the road, reminding people of Bridget Bond’s role in planning it and the inscription of her name on it. She mentioned that Peggy Derry was among the injured of Bloody Sunday. Ample examples of women’s association in one way or another with Bloody Sunday threw their omission from the mural into stark relief. This gender omission got the artists into trouble with the journalist, and they responded by asserting the importance of the event to Derry city51 and reminding her of their reliance on historical images of the event in their painting work. After some back-and-forth criticism and a public meeting between the relatives, the artists and McCafferty, the controversy was resolved. A megaphone was incorporated into the




painting of Bridget Bond in the foreground of the mural and the role of women in the Northern Ireland civil rights movement was accordingly acknowledged. The BSJC, through its spokesman, Tony Doherty, stated that it regretted the controversy.52 This local controversy was a small-scale one but it is noteworthy because it illuminated a bigger issue to do with the disjuncture between “history” and “memory” evident in other controversies about problematic pasts such as the Enola Gay exhibition:53 on the one hand the artists claimed legitimacy to represent this historical event for future generations of Derry people and, on the other hand, McCafferty called for a mural that was faithful to her personal memories of women’s involvement in civic activism. A similar controversy about who should be remembered played out in the fraught debate over another site of Bloody Sunday memory, the little-known Guildhall stained-glass window, and particularly over the issue of who could claim to be a “victim” of past political violence.

Localized official memory Almost all of the Bloody Sunday commemorative sites considered in this book have been the result of the memory work of civil society organizations. One exception to this is the Guildhall stained-glass window which was the first official site commemorating the event, more than a decade after Bloody Sunday, because it was the result of an initiative by Derry City Council. Curiously, it represents a good example of a localized central state memory of the event. The chosen memorial (Figure 6.4), a stained-glass window in the entrance porch of the city’s Guildhall, is part of a set of stained-glass windows in the Guildhall that chronicles the city’s history, including the famous Siege of Derry.54 Even someone well acquainted with the history of the event would find it difficult to recognize it as a memorial to Bloody Sunday – suggesting that its intended audience may well be more local than international – because there is no mention of the event in the window, only the names of the dead on white crosses. Its spatial positioning in an obscure window frame makes it hard to find and it is easily overlooked by even a discerning eye as one walks through the entrance of the Guildhall. Significantly, unlike the Rossville Street memorial, the window is not the site of a major annual ritual commemoration, and for this reason is rarely brought into public awareness. Indeed, several people whom I spoke to about Bloody Sunday either were not able to recall the window’s existence or knew little about its origins.




Figure 6.4 Guildhall stained-glass commemorative window. (Photograph by the author)

The content of the window is noteworthy. It has different signifiers – red poppies, white crosses, skeletons, and soldiers’ helmets – and is divided into four sections separated from each other by stonework. The Gothic motif is apparent in the depiction of skeletons and white crosses in the window, and, as Philip Smith reminds us, ‘phantoms, madmen, corpses and mad scientists’ are common to Gothic imagery.55 The centrepiece of the window consists of white crosses – carried for the first time in the annual commemorative march in 1992 – with the names of the Bloody Sunday dead inscribed on them. Inscribed on the bottom of the window are the words: ‘to commemorate the innocent people killed during the Troubles in the Derry area’. In the bottom right-hand corner is the signature of the artist.56 The window is clearly




ecumenical in its symbolism: consider, for example, that poppies are associated with 9 November Remembrance Day and are juxtaposed alongside white crosses signifying the Bloody Sunday dead. The function of this window is to preserve – it remembers the violent history of the city – and to instruct – it attempts to categorize some victims of the Troubles as “innocent”, and by implication, others as “guilty”. The political composition of Derry City Council was an important factor influencing support for the window. Sinn Féin (SF) first secured seats at local council level in 1983 after a long debate within the republican movement about the relative importance of electoral politics and armed struggle.57 1985 saw the first SF councillor, Hugh Brady, elected to Derry City Council, the same year that the Guildhall Bloody Sunday commemorative proposal was first put forward. In the local elections of May 1985, SF took seats on seventeen out of a total of twenty-six Northern Ireland local councils.58 The original impetus for a Guildhall memorial to Bloody Sunday, though not specifically in the form of a stained-glass window, to the Bloody Sunday dead in the Guildhall came not from a politician but from a local man with republican sympathies, Sean Carr, 59 a prolific writer of letters to the Derry Journal. In June 1984, Carr sent a letter to the Mayor of Derry, Len Green, a letter he also submitted to the editor of the Derry Journal. Entitled ‘Memorial To The Dead Of Bloody Sunday’, the letter stated that: After the time lapse of twelve years, is it not about time that civic recognition and honour was paid to the memory of the fourteen fallen victims of oppression? May I suggest that Derry City Council takes steps to erect a fitting memorial to these men, inside the Guildhall itself, and I choose that location for two reason. – 1. It, was to that site, that the dead men had intended to march in their protest against internment. 2., The Guildhall is the seat of civic power in the city and already contains memorials to less worthy causes.60 Six months later, the Irish Independence Party (IIP) took up where Carr left off. A Guildhall memorial to the Bloody Sunday dead was the subject of discussion on several occasions by Derry City Council in the period 1985–9, and was deliberated upon by a number of its committees.61 The debates in the council centred around whether the memorial would be specific to the Bloody Sunday dead or be inclusive of other victims during “the Troubles”, what form it would take, the wording of the inscription, and the moral boundaries between “victims” and “perpetrators”.




On 25 January 1985, the original motion to erect a Bloody Sunday commemorative plaque in the Guildhall of Derry City Council was first proposed by Councillor Bradley of the IIP. This proposal was the beginning of a debate about finding an appropriate aesthetic form for commemorating Bloody Sunday. In response to criticisms from political elites of a memorial making no reference to other victims other than the Bloody Sunday dead, the leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) in the council, Councilllor Pat Devine, proposed a second motion that the Finance and General Purposes Committee be asked to deliberate about the placement and form of plaque with mention of all the innocent dead of ‘the Troubles’. Councillor George Peoples (SDLP) felt that the temporal distance from the event was too short to commemorate Bloody Sunday in this way.62 In the letter pages of the local press discontent was also expressed. Creggan estate resident Hugh Gallagher, writing in Derry Journal, criticized Councillor Devine’s eviscerated or ‘watered down’ version.63 Strong criticism also came from unionist political opinion. Jim Guy of the Official Unionist Party criticized Councillor Bradley’s proposal as a form of ‘symbolic violence’64 to the unionist community by claiming it was ‘detrimental to what we are trying to achieve here – that the two communities can live in harmony’.65 Although the council agreed to the modified Bradley proposal and to the establishment of a sub- committee to oversee it, the plaque was never erected. A year later, a motion almost identical to the original Bradley proposal was proposed by SF but this time the proposed memorial took the form of a stained-glass window rather than a plaque.66 Councillors agreed to hold an open competition for the design of the window, and in May 1987 the Town Clerk reported that a short-list of three artists had been selected and that each artist was invited to visit the Guildhall with their design and their costings for it. In December 1987 the Amenities and Leisure Committee was told by Declan McGonagle of the Orchard Gallery that the three artists had submitted their proposals. This committee commissioned Peter Rooney to take on the aesthetic challenge of designing the stained-glass memorial in place of the existing blank window. Asked by the council to elaborate on his design, the artist told the council that the design would be abstract (in stark contrast to the simplicity of the Bloody Sunday memorial) and that he had made some changes to the original design such as omitting the name of William Best, a British soldier killed by the IRA in 1972.67 A fraught debate occurred in the council chamber over what constituted “innocence”, a debate that reflected sectarian political




divisions. Unionist politicians led the charge against the proposal. Gregory Campbell claimed that paramilitary groups were not included in this category. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) took issue with the window’s definition of ‘innocent victims’ and its sharp delineation between ‘this side’s victims and that side’s victims’.68 In 1988, Campbell stated that ‘if innocent victims from the Londonderry area are to be remembered in such a way as this, then the wording ought to say that they are from Londonderry’.69 He saw the window as exclusivist because by memorializing Bloody Sunday, all of whose victims were working- class nationalists, it disavowed the suffering of the Protestant/unionist community and made no mention of many other victims of the conflict, particularly members of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the British army. He drew a sharp distinction between paramilitary violence and state violence.70 The Widows’ Mite organization,71 representing families victimized by the IRA, also criticized the window as particularistic and drew attention to the lack of sincerity of those behind it. On 7 December 1989, four years after the idea of erecting a memorial to Bloody Sunday in the Guildhall was first mooted, and despite the apparent haste of the council in seeing the project through to completion and the strong opposition that it evoked in and outside the council chambers, the stained-glass window was finally installed in the entrance hall porch of the Guildhall. The installation revived the debate surrounding the original proposal about the politics of recognition and who ought to have been commemorated in the first place. Predictably, opinions about the new window divided, as before, along sectarian political lines. Councillor Dodie McGuinness of SF accused the SDLP of not wanting a memorial dedicated specifically to the Bloody Sunday dead while Councillor Pat Devine of the SDLP accused SF of using the memory of Bloody Sunday for its own political ends.72 Outside the council chambers, the newly installed window attracted media attention and gave rise to criticism for its lack of fidelity to the original IIP proposal. A letter to the Derry Journal editor from an anonymous ‘Derry Nationalist’, under the title ‘Indecent Wrangle’ criticized the political quarrel between SF and the SDLP over the window and posed this question:73 Would the S.D.L.P. or Sinn Féin have had a memorial window installed in the Guildhall today if Sean Carr had not mooted the idea in the Derry Journal some years ago and the Irish Independence Party had not taken up the suggestion in Council?





In the end the installation of the window was the outcome of local political efforts to memorialize the events of 30 January 1972 even if they left the centralized official collective memory intact. Subsequently, the window evoked little comment or controversy, attracted little if any attention, did not become a tourist attraction, was not associated with any other Bloody Sunday commemorative activity, and suggested that an act of official memorialization itself can fuel forgetting of difficult pasts.74 Surprisingly, the act of commemoration that attempted to go furthest in recognizing the deaths of different parties to the Northern Irish conflict was the least resonant of the three collective memory projects. More than the Bogside street mural and the Museum of Free Derry, the evolution of the window’s design and inscription and the pattern of the political debate it generated reflected the faultlines of Northern Irish society.

Explaining the visual turn In this chapter I have sought to extend the analysis of variation in commemorative activity and the diffusion of its forms with respect to Bloody Sunday through a comparative examination of three key sites of Bloody Sunday memory that “picture” this event in various and interesting ways: the Museum of Free Derry, the Bogside street mural and the Guildhall stained-glass window. Two of the three empirical examples introduced and elaborated upon in this chapter signal how private visual images can become transposed into the public spaces of museum exhibits and street murals though the latter can just as easily travel the other way as well.74 The painters of the Bloody Sunday mural used photographs of the day as a template for their painting. The permanent exhibition invites people to look at photographs of the dead taken from family albums so as to help them develop an association with the event,75 and recycles canonical images of the event in ways that reinforce the photographic convention of earlier traumatic events like the Holocaust.76 All these sites of Bloody Sunday memory raise questions about selective forgetting. The Museum of Free Derry as an instructor of what happened beforehand and what happened on Bloody Sunday teaches very well. Because the museum makes no mention of IRA attacks carried out and justified with reference to events like Bloody Sunday and other state atrocities, it has arguably less to teach visitors about what happened afterwards in terms of the politics of Bloody Sunday memory and how the event was mobilized – as we saw in Chapter 4 – in political claim-making to call attention to Irish republicanisms’



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“sinned against” status and to veil its “sinner” status. By contrast, the Guildhall stained-glass window makes a stronger claim on inclusiveness by attempting to memorialize all “innocent” victims of “the Troubles” and the controversy associated with it; and the Rossville Street mural teaches us that contestation around what is remembered about the past is ideologically and politically freighted, disavowing the notion that collective memory is a neutral concept. Beyond this, these examples point to the visual propagation of Bloody Sunday in history and the more diffuse ways in which it has been remembered in the 1990s compared with earlier periods. This visual turn can be explained in terms of a grid of factors – political developments, memory choreography, emerging technologies of memory, and the development of a tourist-led service economy – that coincided with one another from the mid-1990s onwards. Clearly, one important factor that helps explain the visual turn is that Bloody Sunday was the subject of more memory choreography during this period than earlier, and that this in turn was linked to political changes in Northern Irish society and, specifically, to the politics of peacemaking to which the official memory of Bloody Sunday was regarded as an impediment. Memory choreographers worked hard in commemorating the event and brought their own skills to the task, varying from skills in working with art to skills in street theatre, visual iconography, and community mobilization. The use of popular culture in remembering the event – especially for the symbolically important 20th, 25th and 30th anniversaries – was a Derry inflection of a global trend involving a long-term shift from print to media culture77 and newly available technologies of memory.78 In the 1990s, the Internet and new visual technologies such as CD-ROMS – which did not exist in the 1980s – played a critical role in circulating images of the event and linked with an increasing use of visual resources in popular culture generally and commemoration specifically. The heightened commemorative activity in the 1990s coincided with and was also crucially linked to political mobilization in which the families of the victims have sought a response from the British state to their demands for justice and truth. While the initial motivation of the families of the dead was political mobilization, visual culture was pressed into service in this project and this in turn fuelled further political mobilization resulting – successfully – in a new inquiry. And this political project meshed well with the economic project of city officials and tourism entrepreneurs to market Derry as an attractive tourist destination that had parted company with its difficult history





and had become a modern visitor-friendly city. City planning documents from the early 2000s tended to place heavy emphasis on marketing Derry as a bright ‘vibrant international’ city and isolated ‘memories of violence’ as an impediment to this process,79 implicitly urging the disavowal of the city’s violent past within this urban imaginary. This articulated with the strategy of the Northern Ireland Tourist Board explicitly adopts the idiom of branding the region’s image and emphasizes the critical role of tourism in future economic development strategies in a post-industrial context.80 From the urban sociology literature it is clear that this kind of marketing and imaging of urban space is now increasingly part of the political economy of post-industrial cities experiencing local economic revitalization.81 Significantly, tourist guide maps of the city in the mid-2000s included references to the Bloody Sunday memorial because the commemoration of this event – and the city’s “Bloody Sunday Weekend” – acts as an important draw for large crowds of people outside the summer tourist season. This inclusion also raised it to the level of a significant historical event in the city’s narrative about itself. Within the commemoration, the memorial is the site of an important wreath-laying remembrance ritual and elaborates a human rights/justice narrative through a plaque erected at it. Including the memorial in tourist guide maps demonstrated the ability of local city planners to reconcile the injunction to jettison ‘memories of violence’ with mobilizing the city’s troubled history as a resource for tourism. This was made possible by a ‘taming’82 of Bloody Sunday memory – via human rights/justice storylines – and represented a symbolic rejection of earlier rhetorical emphases on anti-British myth-making. This chapter’s focus on visualizing the past through the three sites of memory also brings into focus the conditions under which an act of remembrance will or will not fuel public controversy, a key question guiding Zolberg’s insightful analysis of the Hiroshima exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. 83 The factors identified by Zolberg – timing, funding, permanence and so forth – are at play in the account presented here though in different combinations in different sites of memory. In relation to the Guildhall stained-glass window, the public funding, timing and location of the memorial generated public dissent, but the Bogside mural controversy pointed to the influence of faithfulness to what happened in fuelling discontent and to its permanence or not in helping to diffuse or neutralize it. But the capacity of sites of memory to fuel controversy also turns on the attribution of blame or responsibility for difficult pasts – a factor not



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mentioned by Zolberg – and the Guildhall stained-glass window and Bogside mural controversies bore this out. The attribution of agency – and the acknowledgment of political activism – as reflected in the street mural controversy also have potential to fuel discord in relation to representing the past. We have now come to the end of our empirical investigation of the mnemonic career of Bloody Sunday. Earlier chapters placed Bloody Sunday in a historical context and examined its symbolic expression through spaces, times, bodies, discourses and images. The final chapter provides a capsule summary of the major argument of the book, considers the future of Bloody Sunday memory, and makes a claim on the collective memory literature.




Conclusion: Trajectories of Memory

In recent years we have found that, despite the passage of time, Bloody Sunday is still an event which moves almost everyone in Derry. Even the younger generation, as can be seen by the excellent poem contained in this document, and people who weren’t even born before January 72 have had the collective memory of the event etched into their young consciousness. 1996 Bloody Sunday commemoration programme In the first chapter of this book I posed a fairly straightforward question: how has the way Bloody Sunday been commemorated changed over time and how can this change be accounted for? In attempting to answer this question I talked to people who worked over the years in keeping the memory of the event alive. I examined newspaper accounts, letters, commemorative programmes, press releases and the like in search of information about when various sites of memory emerged, how they changed, who was involved in them, whether they were associated with controversy and how each connected with others. I took photographs of various commemorative events and participated as an observer in them from 2004 to the present. I listened to many people speaking informally about what Bloody Sunday meant to them. I attended the final public sittings of the Saville Inquiry. Taken together, I assembled an extensive and rich body of empirical data to bring to bear upon the key question guiding this book. Before considering the future of Bloody Sunday memory and the similarities and differences between it and other historical events in other times and places it is worth reminding ourselves of the key argument and empirical patterns identified in earlier chapters. 142



7

In this book I claim that memory choreographers, through their agency in the construction of memories, play a critical role in negotiating the spaces between official memory and vernacular memory, private remembrance and public commemoration, and global environments and local contexts. What happens in the remembering society – in terms of the contours of its political, economic and socio-cultural life – and their connection to global conditions as well as other factors like the passage of time and emerging commemorative techniques, provides the context within which the contested social organization of memory takes place. To make sense of what happened in January 1972 cultural elites almost immediately turned to the example of global historical events involving the tragic loss of life. Sidestepping the salient differences between these events and Bloody Sunday, they invoked other events to heighten Bloody Sunday’s symbolic importance and to make political claims on its behalf. Bloody Sunday became Northern Ireland’s Sharpeville and Holocaust.1 As Chapters 4 and 5 demonstrated, the mid-1970s and 1980s were different. The commemorative poster announcing the 1982 commemoration depicted the words ‘Bloody Sunday’ dripping in a pool of blood and set against a sombre black background.2 This grim visual imagery linked with commemorative discourse invoking Bloody Sunday in the construction of an anti-British myth. Year after year the thirteen men were appropriated as “martyrs” for the republican cause of bringing about an end to the union with Britain. They were remembered as ordinary people who took up the struggle against political oppression, not the gunmen the legal memory of the event defined them to be. They joined a long list of pre-existing republican martyrs, from Cúchulainn to Wolfe Tone to Pádraig Pearse, reminding republicans of the delineation between those who are heroic and those who are malevolent. Bloody Sunday commemorations, then, were as much about political protest in the present and rallying republican followers as about remembering the dead of ’72. As long as the primary constituency for commemorations was a republican/nationalist one this discourse had some appeal, but its resonance and capacity to attract wide participation was much weaker beyond a republican support base and indeed alienated potential allies including constitutional nationalists belonging to the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). Not surprisingly, then, the SDLP associated Bloody Sunday with a negative valence in the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s and 2000s – as the Bloody Sunday generation who hosted memories of the event began to die and as the passage of time put a



Trajectories of Memory 143


clear distance between “now” and “then” – Bloody Sunday no longer stood for nationalist victimhood and endurance in the face of it but as a totemic symbol of and poster child for the human struggle against injustice. This displacing of the early interpretation and representation of the event would have been unthinkable even only fifteen years previously. To take just one example of this new commemorative strategy, the programme for the 2006 commemoration announced “Towards Justice” as its chosen theme and in its front matter juxtaposed the tragic fate of the Bloody Sunday dead with the high-achieving careers of some of the British soldiers who were implicated in their deaths. A small group discussion on a Saturday morning in the Pilots Row community centre on “What Justice Demands of Saville” continued the stress on righting the wrongs of the past. 3 Two years later, at the 2008 commemoration, seminars at the commemoration engaged with topics such as “A Truth Commission for Ireland?”, “Judging Saville”, “Ways of Remembering”, “Truth Against Lies” and “Ballymurphy August 1971 – How Bloody Sunday could have been avoided”, linking the event to other events and other issues, and signalling the ‘taming’ of Bloody Sunday memory.4 Clearly, Bloody Sunday did different things in different temporal contexts. Taken together, these two framings (summarized in Table 7.1) – a victimhood framing on the one hand and a struggle for justice framing on the other – were articulated at different times, asserted different claims about Bloody Sunday, mobilized different audiences, and authorized different kinds of political action. The key difference between the earlier victimhood framing and the later justice framing was that the former served more a semiotic than an instrumental purpose.5 By this is meant that in the 1970s Bloody Sunday

Table 7.1

Framings of Bloody Sunday since 1972 Victimhood framing

Justice framing

Period

1970s–1980s

1990s–

Claim-making

British state oppression Struggle for human rights

Audience

Irish republicans

Irish republicans, Irish nationalists, Unionists, Irish state, American elites

Political actions Group solidarity

Peacemaking; legal redress

Major purpose

Instrumental

Semiotic



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commemorations were mainly occasions for shoring up Irish republican identity, engaging in claim-making about current republican grievances, and reminding republicans of their long-standing goal of a united Ireland. Commemorations during this period had much less practical instrumental import than they took on in the 1990s. In this period, by contrast, commemorations became rallying points for the quest for power to define the truth of what happened, first in calling for a new inquiry into the event and, once this inquiry was established, reminding the British state of its duty to legitimize the vernacular nationalist memory. Apart from identifying this empirical pattern involving a shift from one framing to another, this book has also put forward an explanation for the global to local and back to the global again pattern. This explanation focused on the role of memory choreographers, shifting institutional contexts, and temporal processes. In the 1970s, Bloody Sunday was “locally” owned by Irish republicans at the same time that other local and national political and civil society actors like the SDLP, the Irish state, and Roman Catholic leaders, largely disowned and disavowed it. During “the Troubles” competing memories of other atrocities meant that Bloody Sunday’s claim on public attention dissipated over time. Within the Irish republican community though, Bloody Sunday became a touchstone for reminding its constituency of the ill-effects of British state activity in Northern Ireland. Prompted in large part by fresh evidence about what happened in 1972, new memory choreographers came on board in the 1990s and weakened Irish republicans’ ownership of the event. This shift in memory choreography occurred against the backdrop of a changing political, social and institutional landscape involving the movement away from pursuing political aims through violence and the engagement in negotiation and bargaining with one’s adversaries, economic advancement among nationalists in Northern Ireland, and a recalibration of historical asymmetries in formal political power. In combination, these factors opened up new possibilities for Bloody Sunday’s depoliticization and re-framing. Does this mnemonic trajectory or “career” make Bloody Sunday unique as a political symbol? Clearly, Bloody Sunday is not unique as an historical event in being kept a live issue by active memory choreography – there are ample examples from the collective memory literature of this with reference to other events.6 Neither is it unique in respect of it taking on new meanings in different temporal contexts. Again, there are plenty of examples of this in the literature.





To take just one example, Barry Schwartz’s investigation of changes in the reputation of American President Abraham Lincoln traces a shift from an early negative reputation associated with racial inequality to a later positive one linked to racial inclusion against the backdrop of wider societal changes.7 And in terms of its temporal pathway Bloody Sunday does not stand out either and has followed the pattern of representation of other historical events like the Holocaust,8 September 11,9 the Columbine high school deaths,10 and Anzac Day,11 and of historical figures like Abraham Lincoln.12 Bloody Sunday was different, though, from the trajectory of other events like Hiroshima in Japanese memory.13 The next section considers the general lessons – in terms of actors, contexts, and temporality – which this case study teaches students of collective memory.

Actors, contexts, temporality Stepping back from this empirical study of the mnemonic life cycle of Bloody Sunday, what claim does this book have on collective memory in general? In 1998 Jeffrey Olick threw down a challenge to collective memory scholars to connect the micro-historical detail provided by ‘parochial case studies’ to broader theoretical debates.14 This book advances Olick’s injunction in a number of ways, and its theoretical contribution can be usefully summarized under three headings: actors, contexts, and temporality. Actors When thinking about collective memory this book teaches us about the importance of agency. I introduced a multi-level concept of memory work distinguishing between individual, small-group, social, and institutional levels of memory work and gave particular attention to the small-group level. Through this concept collective memory scholars have drawn attention to how commemoration actually happens on the ground through the real-life social, political and cultural activities of non-elites – whom I have called memory choreographers.15 This concept implies that memory – remembrance, more accurately, perhaps – does not occur by chance. In this case study, memory choreographers worked hard to embed Bloody Sunday within Northern Irish memory and to prolong its mythic status as an international political symbol. Setting aside the Sunday nearest to 30 January as a day of commemoration and embedding it in the republican commemorative calendar provided a



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yearly occasion for mobilizing these resources.16 Properties of the event being commemorated mattered too. They presented memory choreographers with a well-established commemorative device – a march – as an obvious means of remembering the event. The naming of the event using the ideologically charged “Bloody Sunday” and not the long enumeration of “the events on ... the procession in Londonderry on that day” preferred by Lord Widgery made it more commemorable. What memory choreographers brought to the event – skills in working with the media, pre-existing visual resources in republicanism, informal access to political networks with allies in other national contexts, ‘mnemonic webs’ linking Bloody Sunday to other events and other agendas made a difference too.17 We also saw how memory work – against the Durkheimian interpretation of commemoration and ritual as sources of consensus18 – can be highly contested, fragmented and polarizing. Social groups engage in sustained struggles over what meanings can be associated with the past and who could claim ownership of them. Whose memory choreography won depended on how well it resonated with and was culturally acceptable to ordinary people and the organizational strength of those seeking to preserve it. Collective memory, then, is not a neutral or innocent concept but one deeply implicated in power struggles and claims to legitimacy and domination. In the first few years after Bloody Sunday, ownership of the event was not clearly established. Sinn Féin (SF) and NICRA engaged in an early symbolic struggle over the meaning of Bloody Sunday. The contours of this interpretative contest were straightforwardly dichotomous: SF saw Bloody Sunday as a symbol legitimizing the use of violence. Within this particularistic story, the British state was cast as “perpetrator” and the nationalist community as “victim”. NICRA, on the other hand, argued that the event symbolized the ongoing quest for peace in a divided society. SF, quickly and successfully, “captured” the event in interpretative terms and claimed legitimacy to do this based upon its ability to politicize it. But the appropriation of the event by Irish republicans – via a nationalist victimhood genre – did not bring an end to its contestation. In the 1980s constitutional nationalists happily avoided participation in the commemoration and drew attention – via citizen’s letters and public statements – to the bad taste associated with and the negative valence of the march.19 For most of the families of the dead – who could have claimed legitimacy as memory choreographers in the 1970s – the pain associated with their tragic loss and their aversion to the event’s politicization by Irish





republicans meant they were reluctant to become associated with its public commemoration. On occasions they felt that the meaning of the original march had been disavowed by the actions of the IRA and their appeal to the memory of the “martyrs” of Bloody Sunday. They claimed that Irish republicans misrepresented the intentions of the original march and the ideals of the dead. Audience reception of the commemoration did not always mesh well with the intentions of the organizers behind it. In 1978, the IRA’s display of a machine gun during the route of the march sparked off public criticism – some from the families of the dead – of memory choreographers that such actions were incompatible with the peaceful and non-violent message of the dead and that they degraded the commemoration by linking it to sectarian political violence. At the 1990 commemoration march, the killing by an IRA bomb of Charles Love set off local controversy about the meaning of Bloody Sunday, and the following year’s commemorative speeches, consistent with Olick’s path-dependency argument, 20 explicitly made reference to the killing. So even though SF was the hegemonic interpreter of Bloody Sunday memory it did not always succeed it getting its meaning to take hold. Its commemorative influence was drained in the 1990s when the valency of Bloody Sunday was redefined from negative to positive as the families of the dead began to assert their ownership claims over the event via the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign (BSJC) and to forge political alliances with others in this truth-seeking process. Somewhat counter-intuitively, an abstract idiom was employed in the 1990s to depoliticize Bloody Sunday and fuel broader identification with the event. Historians of Bloody Sunday seemed more concerned too about neutralizing criticism of the commemoration by going out of their way to accommodate potentially disgruntled interests. Organizers, for example, sometimes made repeated efforts to secure SDLP participation on the platform at the political rally held at the end of the march. Participation by representatives from the Protestant Unionist community was also actively encouraged during this time. Indeed, compared with the 1970s, constitutional nationalists and “the other” tradition were much more involved in Bloody Sunday commemorations in the 1990s. The commemoration also became “themed” – each year a new theme was chosen, and in the early 2000s the theme reflected concerns about the process of the Saville Inquiry and, post-2004, concerns about its outcome and timing. Increasingly, other campaigns for justice were invited to participate in the Bloody Sunday commemoration to express



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their support for the families of the Bloody Sunday dead and learn from their mobilization successes. This agentic power of memory choreographers, however, is exercised within limits. In general, reconstruction of the meanings invested in the past is subject to a number of important constraints such as its institutionalization, the existence or not of people with first-hand experience of the event, the receptiveness of different publics to changes in commemorative genre, and legal barriers. 21 In the Bloody Sunday example, British state security policies requiring advance notice of marches under the Public Order Act – and low media visibility owing to the Irish state ban (Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act) on media interviews with Irish republicans – constrained SF’s construction of memories of the event in the 1970s and 1980s. Not everyone succeeded in claiming legitimacy to be a memory choreographer either – SF displaced NICRA as the hegemonic memory choreographer in the 1970s and established its legitimacy to be one because it had more organizational resources, a critical mass of followers, and an ability to suppress NICRA’s competing framings of the event. By contrast, the families of the dead – who became key memory choreographers in the 1990s – lacked these organizational resources in the 1970s and most were alienated by the politics of Bloody Sunday memory. Contexts A second important lesson of this book apart from agency has to do with contexts. The success of memory work depends on its resonance and connection to social-political-institutional contexts. In the 1970 and 1980s a victimhood frame worked because it spoke to the experiences of nationalists and republicans – experiences of discrimination, oppressive state security practices, and economic deprivation. From the mid-1990s onwards, a struggle for justice frame was articulated that sought to connect the Bloody Sunday experience to the plight of peoples in other national contexts. During this time, memory choreographers increasingly employed non-tragic mnemonic devices such as pub quizzes, concerts, and street theatre to remember this tragic event.22 As Elizabeth Armstrong and Suzanna Crage remind us, ‘openness to innovation may keep commemoration fresh’. 23 Most of this was aimed at institutionalizing the memory of the event in such things as museum exhibits and archives to ensure its mnemonic survival. So for an event to “take hold” or achieve salience in commemorative terms it requires human actors to make it pertinent to specific social and political contexts. Over the longitudinal timeframe covered by this book,





Northern Irish society underwent important political, socio-cultural and institutional changes. On the political side, Northern Irish politics changed from one characterized by antagonistic relations played out via a violent struggle between the two divided communities to a political context marked by rapprochement between nationalists and unionists through peaceful dialogue and negotiation. Changing demographics – a diminution in the size of the Protestant unionist population – have led to parallel shifts in the balance of political power. Economically, Northern Ireland moved from a less to a more prosperous society through one with continuing problems of unemployment and alienation, and against this background a victimhood discourse had less resonance than before. On the cultural side, from the 1990s memory choreographers were influenced by their location in an increasingly globalized institutional environment in which there is an ever greater stress on a transnational conception of human rights. 24 Northern Ireland’s world-system location made it particularly susceptible to these global discourses. 25 Taken together, Northern Irish people did not “hear” Bloody Sunday in the 1990s in the same way that they did in the early 1970s. Temporality Memory work too, as we saw, and following recent work in the literature, is a slow-moving process. 26 This book’s focus on commemoration trajectories over the long range and attention to shifts in historical symbolism over time helps to historicize meaning-making in relation to the past and to correct for the common tendency within the collective memory literature to historicize memory but only over somewhat limited time frames. 27 In focusing on mnemonic life cycles I have drawn attention to the fact that commemoration has its own historical pathway and that this pathway is reconstructed over time in response to shifting contexts in the remembering society and beyond. Meaning-making in relation to Bloody Sunday underwent change but so also did the sheer amount of it. Bloody Sunday commemorative activity was uneven, modulating and characterized by spikes and troughs – the early 1970s was marked by a surge, followed by a long lull period during the 1980s when there were memories of other events such as the Hunger Strikes competing with Bloody Sunday for republicans’ attention, and then the mid-1990s onwards was marked by a further intensification of memory work. Using the language of Eviatar



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Zerubavel, the career of Bloody Sunday memory – the Bloody Sunday “commemogram” – involves ‘mountains’ as well as ‘valleys’ – periods of intensive commemoration separated by long periods of mnemonic inactivity.28 As well as peak and valleys, the temporal pattern of the event also involved processes of dis-embedding and re-embedding. During the 1990s for example, memory work was disembedded from its original local context through the global discourses mentioned already and at the same time, the families of the dead reappropriated the event from its earlier “capturing” by SF. But the fact the way Bloody Sunday was commemorated changed – from an early globalizing phase to a de-globalizing one and followed later re-globalizing phase – and with variable intensity seems to be less important than the fact that it changed with little or no recourse to previous mnemonic strategies and discourses. Writing about the future of the Federal Republic of Germany’s remembrance of 8 May 1945, which marked the “liberation” of Germany, Olick writes that ‘what direction that process takes depends not only on what may come but on what has gone before’.29 This case study suggests that “what has gone before” in terms of remembering difficult pasts exerts a good deal less influence than Olick would lead one to expect. Against this, this book points to how unconstrained later Bloody Sunday commemorations were by earlier meaning-making and how weak path dependency was in this case study though, as the controversy about the 1990 commemoration revealed, it was not completely absent either. Path dependency may well be important in relation to the commemoration of other historical events like the Holocaust but it does not always apply or is not true for all collective memories. Importantly, the agentic power of memory choreographers, changes in the social-political-institutional context, and the passage of time, all seem to open up possibilities for transcending earlier meaning-making pathways. The conditions under which later commemorative symbolism is unconstrained by earlier memory choreography are: (1) when earlier meaning-making with respect to the past undercuts current peacemaking efforts, (2) when memory choreography becomes more inclusive of different political and nonpolitical interests and new memory choreographers come on board whose legitimacy is grounded in a direct connection to the event as family members of the dead, and (3) when enough time has passed to establish temporal distance from the event being remembered and allow those most directly affected by it to better deal with their tragic private losses.




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One of the two docudramas about Bloody Sunday released in 2002 to mark the 30th anniversary, Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday, concludes as it began with the press conference of the Derry Civil Rights Association (DCRA). Civil rights leader Ivan Cooper (played by Jimmy Nesbitt) addresses the media with other civil rights activists at this side. The last word in the film is left to one of these activists – Bernadette Devlin – who proclaims in the closing shot, that ‘we will not rest until justice is done’. 30 This serves to remind us that the final page has not been reached in the Bloody Sunday story. It aligns the film with the “truths” of the vernacular nationalist memory and signals to the British state that the quest for truth and justice – a recalibration between the vernacular nationalist memory and the official British state memory – remains centre stage in political mobilization around the event. One reason why the memory of Bloody Sunday has lasted so long has been the existence of an official state memory that could not be allowed to stand as the authoritative institutional account of what happened. As Lisa Yoneyama reminds us in her study of Hiroshima remembrance, when vernacular accounts about a past incident have been purged from official histories, people ‘tend to feel a painful – and, over time, growing – urgency about the task of contributing to positive knowledge through their recountings’.31 Official state inquiries as examples of the exercise of cold legal-rational authority,32 and in contrast to civil society remembrance, assert a claim to settle competing accounts of what happened and why and to have application across time and space.33 In this context, the slogan “Hold Power to Account” was more than a commemoration theme in 2007 – it also gave articulation to the asymmetry of authority between memory work at the small-group level and institutional-level memory work via formal legal inquiries.34 One wonders about the future of Bloody Sunday as a collective symbol in the post-Saville Inquiry context and as a consequence of the rewriting of the official British government memory. Will Bloody Sunday survive as an international political symbol among a postBloody Sunday generation with no autobiographical memory of it? Does its constant recycling have the potential to liquidate or routinize its meaning? When asked about the future of Bloody Sunday memory, one interviewee invoked the ‘never forget’ mnemonic device in articulating the continuing localized symbolic importance of the event for



The future of Bloody Sunday memory

Derry people and not just for human beings in general:35 ‘I think it should be commemorated in some way. Bloody Sunday should always be commemorated. I’m not sure how. It cannot never be allowed to be forgotten. Not in this city here.’36 In assessing this claim about whether Bloody Sunday memory “takes” or not into the future, actors, contexts, and temporality bear upon it. Intensive memory choreography to secure the memory of the event (and reflected in the institutionalization of Bloody Sunday memory in a range of cultural forms such as museum exhibitions, docudramas, websites, songs, newspaper commemorative supplements, poetry, drama, archives and so forth) means that the event has a global circulation and will not easily be forgotten. Michael Schudson argues that institutional retention is one of the factors influencing the “success” of a cultural object.37 A simple Internet search on Google in November 2008 using the search term “Bloody Sunday 1972” yielded 253,000 hits, which suggests that the event is now well embedded in popular media culture. Interestingly, with the passage of time, this tragic event has become increasingly remembered via a wide range of non-tragic genres,38 from t-shirts and CD-ROMs to docudramas and pub quizzes, an important signal of its becoming a “normal” memory. The answer to the “what future for Bloody Sunday memory” question also turns on the malleability of the symbol itself. Lyn Spillman advances the argument that an important factor that helps to answer the “why do collective memories last?” question has to do with their semiotic openness.39 In this account, the more “open” memories of the past are the more they “take”. Bloody Sunday is clearly a semiotically open event subject to variant and fresh interpretations as a result of creative memory choreography. This has enabled the forging of important “across-the-divide” linkages with the city’s unionist Protestant community, that a discourse of nationalist victimhood, emphasized so much in the 1970s, would have been much less likely to achieve, and the currying of the influence of political elites willing to exert moral pressure on the British government to establish a new inquiry into the events of January 1972. Semiotic openness carries certain dangers as well. Casting the event in global and civic terms may lead to the loss of its localized meaning as a significant event in the historical narrative of ordinary Derry people. Arlene Stein’s claim that drawing parallels between the Holocaust and other historical events ‘relativizes and thereby undercuts the specificity and uniqueness of that horrific and in many respects singular historical moment’ may well echo the Bloody Sunday experience.40 Nell





McCafferty’s plea in the opening paragraph of this book registers this anxiety about the event and the possibility that in their quest to make symbolic analogies and draw down the material and political advantages of this, memory choreographers may well run the risk of homogenizing individual-level memory work. Contextual influences and particularly the political dynamics relating to the developing peace process will also likely shape its future. As SF moves into mainstream electoral politics it is likely that its “street politics”, of which Bloody Sunday has been a key part, may well become less important. One interviewee emphasized SF’s important role in keeping the memory of the event alive and explicitly linked the embodied memory to the textual memory via Don Mullan’s book: ‘I think in fairness to Sinn Féin if they hadn’t taken on that role and organize the march in the early years it probably would never have developed into the massive demonstration it did develop into. I think probably the major march was the 25th, the 20th or the 25th anniversary, it may have been the 20th, it was the year that Don Mullan’s book.’41 Beyond actors and contexts, temporal processes matter as well. Commemorative symbolism does not necessarily change at the same tempo as ordinary people’s understanding of the event. Indeed, past collective memory research urges us to be cautious about making claims about the congruence between commemorative symbolism and commemorative reception,42 and social survey data asking people about what Bloody Sunday means to them would give us more confidence in making claims about this. It would also shed more light on how memories of Bloody Sunday vary according to individual-level determinants such as age, cohort, religion and political identity. The proliferation of private memories in relation to the event that were publicly narrated through the recent Saville Inquiry suggests that the commemorative field may well become more fragmented, pluralized and perhaps destabilized in the future. Among young people there is some evidence to suggest that the human rights, truth and justice storylines articulated by memory choreographers in the 1990s are being filtered through. One articulate interviewee in his early twenties, when asked about what the event meant to him, commented that Bloody Sunday is a way is a symbol of so many injustices and historical injustices and years of injustices, and centuries of injustices that this is something that changed Derry for ever. And even someone like me who didn’t experience it. There is that cloud of Bloody



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Another interviewee, in a throw-away comment reflecting on the ageing process, jokingly told me ‘we can’t go on marching for ever’,44 and that the march’s future would turn on the findings of the interminable Saville Inquiry and whether it unveils the truth about what happened, closes the gap between empirical realities and interpretations of them, or at the very least refutes the false claims about what happened. Joachim Savelsberg and Ryan King remind us that law and collective memory are closely joined and that legal procedures make claims on the circulation of information in relation to the past.45 Collective memory exerts an influence on law as well and the articulation of “truth” and “justice” storylines at Bloody Sunday commemorations clearly gestures towards the outcome of the Saville Inquiry and seeks to channel its deliberations in a particular direction. Among unionists it appears that commemorative discourses emphasizing “human rights”, “truth”, and “justice” resonate much less – mainly because of the selective forgetting of past victimization of unionists during “the Troubles” – as this articulate interviewee explained: you know I sometimes hear some nationalists saying Bloody Sunday should be a problem for the unionist community to resolve as well as nationalists. They should be on board in this campaign and you know I think any nationalist who says that needs to get a reality check. They just aren’t operating in the real world as far as unionists are concerned that our community has suffered at the hands of republicans for a third of a century. And then some republicans say why don’t you unionists whom we have spent thirty five years murdering, killing and slaughtering, why don’t you join us in trying to resolve one issue which we feel sore about? It doesn’t matter about your pain and your anger and the killings you have endured and no inquiries into all them. Why don’t you join us in getting this one issue resolved?46 From large-scale social survey data it appears that the salience of memories of Bloody Sunday may well be specific to people who live in Northern Ireland and does not extend to the wider British public. This leads one to be cautious about making strong claims about the long-run “success” of commemorative efforts in keeping the memory live in other people’s memories beyond the particular Northern Irish



Sunday still hangs over Derry in a way. Until there is justice. If there ever is and truth. The two key words are truth and justice.43


context and even within that, beyond Irish nationalists and republicans. When asked in 1990 what one or two national or global events over the last sixty years were most important to them, British people (excluding people living in Northern Ireland) made no mention of the event and most frequently mentioned World War II and political changes in Europe. Less frequent mentions were of the National Health Service, the Falklands War, and Margaret Thatcher. Surprisingly, only six respondents of a national sample of 600 mentioned events in Northern Ireland.47 Admittedly, the data tells us little about the success of post-1990 commemorative activity, which, as we have seen, was more intense than ever before and which, via political mobilization registered by high attendance levels of Bloody Sunday marches in the mid-1990s, resulted in the remarkable achievement of a second British state inquiry into the event.

Towards a comparative sociology of collective memory While this book sheds some light on contested memory work by memory choreographers, the shifting contexts within which it takes place, and its variable historical pathways, other questions are left unanswered. Future work on these untaken paths could fruitfully examine why some events in Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” were remembered as tragedies and massacres and other events were not. Memory’s conceptual cousin is forgetting. Collective memory research does not lead the way very well in relation to this because it tends to suffer from a selection on the dependent variable problem by paying much more attention to cases of successful remembrance than cases where no commemoration took place. Far more atrocities occurred during this period than were remembered. Of these, Bloody Sunday was one of the most remembered and, to be sure, it had a lot going for it in terms of commemoration; but other events – the 1972 Claudy bombings, which killed nine people, or the 1971 Ballymurphy killings, for example – which one might have expected to have been more publicly remembered were quickly forgotten and hardly marked at all. In his work on the cultural mediation of trauma, Jeffrey Alexander helps us understand these negative cases. Alexander suggests that what happens afterwards in cultural terms – such as the presence or otherwise of carrier groups, claim-making, and media, aesthetic, legal, and state mediation of the past – more than the nature of the event provide some reasons for why some traumatic historical events are remembered and others are not.48



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The 1972 Claudy bombings in County Derry were remembered via a memorial (though only in 2000 and much later than Bloody Sunday) but not a march; and perhaps a commemorative march – owing to its malleability, newsworthiness and crowd-drawing potential – helps keep the memory of the past fresher in people’s minds than the more static and fixed nature of memorials. The 1971 Ballymurphy killings share striking similarities – and differences – with the Bloody Sunday case, but who remembers Ballymurphy? In this case, eleven people were killed in West Belfast by British paratroopers between 9 and 11 August 1971 at the time of the introduction of internment. The “Ballymurphy Eleven”, as they have come to be known, were much less remembered though than the Bloody Sunday dead. Media publicity and the resultant visual evidence were crucial. The Ballymurphy killings were not subject to the media gaze. But other factors likely played a role as well – the mnemonic capacity of the families of the dead and the local community, the “resonance” of the killings, and so on. The Ballymurphy Eleven were not participating in a large public event – a march – that attracted media coverage and had fewer eyewitnesses with memories of what happened. Nor were their deaths linked to the civil rights movement. Bloody Sunday, by contrast, was a highly public and mediated event symbolically linked to the wider struggle for civil rights. The event occurred in broad daylight and was captured in official and amateur media photographic images that extended its “after-life” in time and space. Large numbers of people participated in the original march (estimated at up to 20,000) and had a personal connection to it as a result. It found its way into the legal realm via the Widgery and Saville49 inquires and the aesthetic realm via plays, songs, and poetry. It articulated with a long history of Irish nationalist–British state contestation. Quickly, it was socially constructed as a landmark historical event via its coding and framing as a representation of human evil.50 As one informant put it, ‘we’ve been fortunate – the fact that Bloody Sunday was so big and captured in some part on TV and all that’,51 contrasting its public nature as a ‘media event’52 with less publicized events more akin to the Ballymurphy example such as, ‘you have some fella go down a country lane, or taking a wrong turn in Belfast or somewhere’53 that are much more easily forgotten. Both events are empirical examples of what Li-chun Lin refers to as ‘government atrocity’, 54 though ones with variable “success” in terms of commemoration and remembrance. Now, in the late 2000s, it is not this “Bloody Sunday was different” narrative – or “Bloody Sunday exceptionalism” – that is being propagated and recalled





at commemorative events, but the parallels shared with other victims of injustice in Northern Ireland and beyond. This book provides empirical evidence about nationalist commemorative activity in relation to one particular seminal event in recent history, but it would be interesting to explore its comparative possibilities more by examining, for example, the trajectory of Protestant commemorations and whether the same mnemonic life cycle – from exclusivist to inclusivist – is observable in the case of “the other” tradition. By making such comparisons sociologists would be better placed to make assessments about the relationship between social structural factors and cultural shifts and their relative influence on meaning-making and interpretation in relation to the past. Anecdotally, there is some evidence that Protestant commemorations of the past have – like Bloody Sunday – become depoliticized and less explicit in reminding people about the painful history of Northern Ireland and the contribution of “the other” to this past. The commemoration of 12 July – “the Twelfth” – for example, has – in line with Bloody Sunday commemorations – become more festival-like in recent years, signalled by its newly christened “OrangeFest” title. Speakers from “the other” tradition are increasingly part of commemorations on both sides of the sectarian divide and this signals a move towards a more shared understanding of ownership of the past and an opening up of the “whose Bloody Sunday?” and “whose Twelfth?” rhetorical questions. Comparisons of the Bloody Sunday case with other republican commemorative events – the Hunger Strikes and the civil rights movement – is also called for. Interestingly, the 2008 commemoration of the 1968 civil rights struggle includes seminars, lectures and exhibitions, all mnemonic devices employed by historians of Bloody Sunday. A comparative analysis of the commemoration of a traumatic event in a society less dependent on global pressures and trends would be useful in determining the relative importance of global power in the adoption of human rights norms. It may well be that small societies and economies like that of Northern Ireland which are peripherally located in the global cultural arena tend to have a higher level of global cross-currents than larger countries which act more as arbiters and producers of cultural goods than as consumers of them.55

Collective memory as cultural form Cultural sociologists nowadays study a wide range of cultural forms from newspapers, television and websites to art, music and dance. In



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recent years, the study of collective memory as a cultural form has gained increasing popularity from different disciplinary vantage points. Indeed, there seem to be as many routes into collective memory as there are out of it. Such is the case that, relatively recently, this field was characterized as one in search of a centre,56 but this may well be its strength rather than its weakness. Wendy Griswold’s well-known diamond-shaped conceptual framework offers an interesting and powerful tool for understanding cultural objects.57 For Griswold, the meaning a cultural object takes on, whether a dance, novel or art work, or in this case an historical event, depends on the dynamic interaction between the cultural form, the agents behind it, the context in which it is embedded, and its audience. Faced with understanding any cultural form then, Griswold compels us to ask four key questions: What is the nature of the object? Who is behind it? Who is the audience for it? What context sustains it? On the face of it, this framework seems particularly pertinent to the study of collective memory. The conceptual categories of actorhood and contexts and the attention to commemorative reception, as we have seen, have been examined in detail in this book and clearly fit within this framework. Missing from Griswold’s schema, however, is a strong appreciation of temporality. When thinking about the Bloody Sunday case, I was struck and puzzled by the long-range shift in how it became talked about, symbolized and appropriated. I mentioned in the first chapter how sociologists of memory have been urging students of memory, for a good while now, to think of memory much more in historical terms than they have been inclined to do up to now and I identified strongly with this plea and sought to bring it to bear on this in-depth historical case study. Some cultural objects may well be understood without being attentive to their historical pathways, but collective memory is not one of these. The study of collective memory compels us to pay attention to the historical construction of the past and the variable and often surprising paths memories take over time. Remembering and commemoration have a dynamic past of their own. Mnemonic life cycles are complex and shaped by human agents who mobilize political, social and cultural resources in support of their commemorative activity. At different times, Bloody Sunday was “heard” in different ways by different collectivities and did different things in response to local and global contextual influences and circumstances. The collective memory projects investigated in this book, involving spaces, times, bodies, discourses, and images, called attention to how




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different commemorative genres took on new meanings as a result of creative memory choreography, shifting social-political-institutional contexts, and long-term temporal processes. Collective memory, more than other cultural forms that are the focus of our sociological enquiries, makes a plea, then, for a strong programme of historical – and comparative – sociology.


Appendix A: data collection and analysis strategies and reflections This appendix contains more detailed information about the methodological approach adopted in this study and the strategies for collecting and analysing the empirical data. It consists of three parts: (1) an account of the fieldwork and data drawn upon, (2) the interview schedule, and (3) the coding scheme for commemorative posters and speeches. The appendix also presents some reflections on the carrying out of my research. The key question guiding this book is the extent to which the memory of Bloody Sunday has undergone change over time and the context and social forces shaping this memory “career”. To help answer this question I employed a methodological design involving the collection of archival, interview, participant observation and visual data. Different chapters employ different kinds of data. Chapter 2 mainly draws on secondary sources to present an account of Bloody Sunday’s historical context. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 all employ archival data alongside interview data and chapters three, four and six involve the use of participant observation data supplemented by interviews. The data for this book was collected over a six-month period of fieldwork in Derry in the summer of 2004 and was supplemented by data collected during return visits to Derry for the Bloody Sunday commemoration from 2004 to 2009. During the fieldwork stage in 2004 I chose to live in the Bogside because I felt that this would help me to learn more about the immediate physical environment in which Bloody Sunday took place. When people asked me what I was doing I told them that I was a graduate student at the University of Notre Dame and that I was doing research on Bloody Sunday. I turn first to the collection of the archival data. A wide range of archival material was analysed in this study, including pamphlets, posters, brochures, film footage, letters of correspondence, minute books, press releases, and newspaper articles. Initially, I identified archives with potential relevance to my research through the Directory of Irish Archives and via informal conversations with other researchers.1 As a result of this I visited five archival repositories: the 161





Northern Ireland Political Collection at the Linenhall Library, Belfast, the Ulster Television archive in Belfast, the Radio Teilifis Éireann (RTÉ) Archives, Donnybrook, Dublin, the archives of Derry City Council, and the National Library of Ireland, Dublin. In the Linenhall Northern Ireland Political Collection I examined the Bloody Sunday boxes, Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association boxes, Civil Liberties Organizations boxes, Civil Rights Organizations boxes, Murals box, Provisional Sinn Féin boxes, Northern Ireland Office Cuttings Files (Londonderry Civil Rights March 30.1.1972, Civil Rights Association, Bogside and Creggan, Londonderry, Londonderry Development Commission, People’s Democracy boxes. In the RTÉ and Ulster Television archive I examined film footage – mostly from news bulletins – of Bloody Sunday commemoration marches. After contacting the RTÉ archivist identifying the material I needed, it was posted to my address. By contrast, I conducted my archival research in the UTV archive in person. I also carried out documentary research in the Central Library, Derry, where I examined the library’s newspaper clippings collection on the following topics: Bloody Sunday clippings and other relevant material, Murals, Bogside, Bogside Artists, Artists, Bogside, Gasyard, Brandywell, Bogside Community Association News file, Creggan News file and Creggan Magazines (General) file. I also examined the library’s microfilm archive of the Derry Journal and Londonderry Sentinel newspapers for media coverage of Bloody Sunday commemorative activity from 1972 to 2009. Additional newspaper research was carried out in the Belfast Central Newspaper Library. In Derry City Council’s Harbour Museum archive I examined the Bridget Bond collection, the minute books of the Londonderry Development Commission 1972–3, and letters of correspondence of the Londonderry Development Commission 1972–3. In addition to this, I examined commemorative posters, brochures and other ephemera held in the Museum of Free Derry, then located at the Gasworks, Bogside, Derry. I also carried out research in the National Library of Ireland, Dublin, where I examined its microfilm archive of the Evening Press, Sunday Business Post, and Irish Daily Star newspapers. For secondary sources on Bloody Sunday I visited the libraries of the Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Ulster (Magee and Coleraine). Following Hill’s observation that ‘researchers continually reshape their understanding of the past as they fit, sort, shift, and reinterpret more and more data into evolving sociohistorical frameworks – guided by theory and creative sparks of insight’, 2 I approached the archive



162

in an iterative way. By this is meant that as I visited each archive on a number of different occasions I attempted to make sense of earlier examinations of the material in the light of new finds or new data. I also thought of the archival and interview data collection not as mutually exclusive but as processes that guided each other. I used the interviews as an ‘auxiliary method’,3 in conjunction with the archival data collection in that new data that emerged through one guided the collection of data through the other. For example, early on in my fieldwork key informants made reference to commemorative activity such as the Guildhall stained-glass window that I did not know about from my earlier archival work and this led me to follow up debates around this in my later archival visits. By ‘triangulating’ the data in this way, new and unanticipated questions, angles, complexities and insights continually emerged in the back-and-forth dialogue between the interviews and the archival work. My archival searches were not always as productive as I expected. At times I spent many hours working my way through archival boxes and folders with a disappointingly meagre yield in terms of material relevant to my research focus. At other times, though, my first encounter of the day with archival material – often in a box of unsorted documents – turned out to be crucially important. The chance discovery in the Linenhall library of typed letters of correspondence between NICRA and the Londonderry Development Commission, for example, about the planning for the Rossville Street memorial represented a kind of archival “epiphany”.4 I was fortunate to be able to photocopy these archival finds in the Linenhall library and then bring them home with me to read in the comfort of my rented student housing. The availability of photocopying facilities also allowed me to make quick progress through the archival material though sometimes I found myself rushing through it so eager was I for more new discoveries. I also found that the socially constructed categories of the archive were sometimes more disabling than enabling of my research endeavours. For example, very few of the items listed in the Linenhall’s “finding aid”5 mentioned Bloody Sunday and my initial visit to the archive suggested – on the face of it anyhow – that few subsequent visits would be needed. Experienced archival researchers would know differently. Initially I constructed a list of people and organizations – Bridget Bond, NICRA, Bogside Community Association, for example – and this helped me to think about what boxes might contain relevant information about Bloody Sunday even if they were not categorized as “Bloody



Methodological Appendices 163


Sunday” boxes. This task of getting behind the archive’s categorizations represented a challenging and at the same time pleasant experience and led to several archival “epiphanies”. It also brought into focus the ideological agendas embodied in archives and that they are not necessarily neutral repositories of the past. As Sturken observes ‘the archive determines what will speak for history’,6 and what gets preserved and what does not. After several months of visiting the archives I then set about the difficult task of making sense of it and putting it together – and integrating it with the interview data – to tell an interesting story about remembrance and commemoration. The archival data analysis process involved the organization of the material in a temporal and topical way.7 I organized the archival material by topic – such as the march, the Guildhall stained-glass window, the murals, the memorial and so on, and with respect to the march which was the main focus of the present paper, I organized the material temporally, that is by decade. I also constructed a spatiotemporal chronology of Bloody Sunday commemorative events to help me get a better sense of the spatial and temporal distribution of commemorative activity over more than thirty years (see appendix). My analysis of commemorative speeches and posters was guided by the coding scheme set forth in appendix C. Archival data document what happened in relation to the past but it is not as well positioned to tell us about how people felt about the past. Asking questions of people helps to fill this gap. Interview data for this study comes from thirty-one in-depth, semi-structured interviews carried out with members of the victims’ families, memory choreog raphers, former civil rights activists, participants in Bloody Sunday commemorative events, and community leaders over a six-month period of fieldwork in Derry in 2004. Further interviews took place at the 2005 and 2008 commemoration. Interview questions included questions about respondents’ background, involvement in Bloody Sunday commemorations, and attitudes and opinions about various sites of Bloody Sunday memory. All the interviews were conducted by me and in person. Interviewees were identified through the archival research and through snowball sampling. In general, I found the interviewees to be very comfortable answering questions about Bloody Sunday. Many of my interviewees were highly experienced in speaking in public about the event through their involvement in the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign and had no difficulty at all in speaking openly about it. All the interviewees thanked me for the interview and for the opportunity to speak about Bloody



164

Sunday. Occasionally, interviewees found it difficult to talk about their dead relative and one interviewee began to cry during an interview, though happily continued to answer my questions. Some interviewees seemed to find the interview an outlet for expressing deep feelings about the event. One respondent, for example, told me that in the interview – which seemed to generate data rather than simply being a source of data collection – he relayed feelings and emotions that he buried within himself and seemed to think that I was startled by it: ‘have you been shell shocked? I didn’t particularly mean to do it. I didn’t even realize I felt all this till I started talking about it ... suddenly this stuff welled up here.’8 Because of the politically and emotionally charged nature of the event, other respondents asked to say certain things off-the-record – when this happened I turned off the dictaphone and turned it on again when they were happy to speak again on the record. These interviews followed an interview schedule (see Appendix B) but were flexible enough to take account of different levels of knowledge of the memorial and other sites of memory among interviewees. Because I was interested in a particular group of people – those directly involved in organizing Bloody Sunday commemoration events or those involved in controversies associated with it – I followed a purposive snowball sampling procedure after making first contact with memory choreographers.9 Referrals by one interviewee led me to contact others. Interviewees were also identified through the archival data collection. In other interviews I sought to maximize variation among respondents by asking questions of people who differed in terms of age, gender, political orientations, and religious beliefs. The interviews took place in different contexts – interviewee’s place of work, home, public locations such as the riverfront and restaurants, and the Bloody Sunday Centre. Prior to each interview respondents were asked to sign a consent form indicating their voluntary participation in it. After each interview – each of which was recorded – with the consent of the interviewee – using either a digital dictaphone or tape-recorder – I transcribed them and I carefully read and re-read each transcription, identified “meaning units” or passages about the same issue in them and from this isolated different analytical constructs.10 The transcribing yielded about 180 single-spaced pages of data. After each interview I also wrote up brief fieldnotes about each one including things like the physical setting, whether I felt at ease or not, whether the interview was interrupted by phone calls or other distractions, and the rapport I developed with the interviewee. In keeping with the back-and-forth nature of the relationship between theory and data in qualitative research the data analysis did not proceed in a straightfor-





ward way.11 I was continually pushed back into reading the transcripts by my reading of the theoretical literature and vice versa. I also draw on participant observation during the annual Bloody Sunday commemorations from 2004 to 2009 and commemorative events organised as part of the “Bloody Sunday Weekend”, a week-long programme of seminars, film screenings, quizzes, lectures and exhibitions that constitute the commemorative programme. I attended ex hibitions, watched film screenings, listened to panel discussions, shared cups of tea with staff at the Bloody Sunday Centre, participated in the commemorative march and Sunday morning memorial service, attended the final sittings of the Saville Inquiry, listened to Bloody Sunday lectures, and shared a pint with team members at Bloody Sunday fundraising quizzes. I attended Ancient Order of Hibernians events and watched people viewing the Bloody Sunday exhibition. I made sure that when attending events on the commemorative programme that I arrived early and stayed on after them to hear what people had to say informally. I also spent some time in the Bloody Sunday Centre (then located on Shipquay Street) speaking informally to its staff and relatives of the Bloody Sunday dead over cups of warm tea. I wrote notes about ideas and insights that came to me while observing and participating in these various events. Finally, I took photographs of commemorative events – with a digital camera – and some of these are used in the book. Taken together, the collection and analysis of archival, interview, participation observation, and visual data allowed me to put together an original and empirically grounded account of commemorative change over time.

Appendix B: interview Schedule Preliminary questions Can you tell me about yourself? How long have you been involved in organizing Bloody Sunday commemorations? Can you tell me about this? Bloody Sunday memorial Around the early 1970s was there any conflict about its location, design or other aspects of its planning? How much involvement of the Bloody Sunday families was there in its planning?



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How has the memorial changed over time? What changes were made to the memorial in the 1990s? How did you go about making these changes and why? What does the memorial mean to you?

Can you remember the first Bloody Sunday march you attended? What was the earliest march you remember? How were the early marches different from the later ones? To what extent are you involved in organizing the march? What does this involvement entail? What major changes have occurred in the organization of the march since the 1970s? What does the march mean to you? Guildhall Stained-Glass Window Can you remember if there was much debate about what form the Guildhall memorial would take? How involved were the families of the dead in its planning? Why was the window erected in the 1980s? What does the window mean to you? Bloody Sunday Murals Who was involved in the planning of the murals? Were any associated with controversy? If so, can you tell me about this? How was the controversy resolved? What do the murals mean to you? Bloody Sunday Commemoration Why do you think Bloody Sunday has been talked about in global terms in recent times? What is the likely future of the commemoration? What impact will the outcome of the Saville Inquiry have on it? How much confidence do you have in the Saville Inquiry? Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign When and how did the BSJC begin? Who came on board and why?



Bloody Sunday march

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Appendix C: coding scheme for Bloody Sunday commemorative posters and speeches

This coding scheme has to do with the Bloody Sunday commemorative posters and the images, colours and words depicted on them. 1. Colour: has to do with colours employed in poster. 2. Image: has to do with whether poster displays positive, negative or neutral imagery. 3. Orientation: has to do with whether poster makes mention of local/ national or global events/circumstances. 4. Presentism: has to do with whether poster makes reference to present-day concerns/issues. 5. Complexity: has to do with whether poster employs one or two images or several layered images.

Commemorative speeches coding scheme This coding scheme has to do with the Bloody Sunday commemorative speeches given at the rally at the end of the annual march. 1. Presentism: has to do with whether speech makes reference to present-day concerns/issues. 2. External Critique: has to do with whether speech criticises external organization or entity e.g. Irish Catholic bishops, SDLP, Irish state, British state. 3. Emotion: has to do with whether speech makes reference to emotions with a positive, negative or neutral valency. 4. Orientation: has to do with whether speech makes mention of local or global events/figures/trends. 5. Culpability: has to do with whether speech makes mention of actors responsible for the events of Bloody Sunday. 6. Philosophical Concepts: has to do with whether speech makes reference to abstract ideas e.g. freedom, truth, justice, healing, peace, civil rights. 7. Nationalist Grievances: has to do with whether speech makes reference to nationalist grievances or goals e.g. British withdrawal, United Ireland.



Commemorative posters coding scheme

8. Othering: has to do with whether speech makes reference to us vs. them differences e.g. Protestants vs. Catholics. 9. History: has to do with whether speech makes reference to historical events or figures in Irish history. 10. Exceptionalism: has to do with whether speech makes reference to extent to which Bloody Sunday was different or not from other events.




Preface 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Zerubavel 1997. Conway 2003. Walton 1992. Conway 2005. Bodnar 1994. Spillman & Conway 2007. Ragin 1992. For discussion of the stranger from a sociological perspective see Simmel’s classic work (Simmel 1950). Olick & Robbins 1998. Dunn 2000; Hayes & Campbell 2005; Herron & Lynch 2007; Dawson 2007, 2005. Hayes & Campbell 2005. Mullan 2002; Pringle & Jacobson 2001. Bloody Sunday (Paul Greengrass 2002). McCann 2006. Dawson 2005. Dawson 2007. Dunn 2000. Herron & Lynch 2007. McBride 2001.

1

Introduction: Actors, Contexts and Temporality

9. 10.

1. On the Holocaust as a collective action frame or storyline, see Stein (1998). The Holocaust refers to the systematic mass killing of European Jews by Germany during the Nazi era between 1933 and 1945. The names of historical events like “Bloody Sunday” and “the Holocaust” have become cultural shorthands – or ‘referent image[s]’ (Binder 1993) for human horror (Boyer 1996; Irwin-Zarecka 1994). The invocation of the Holocaust very soon after Bloody Sunday was an ideologically freighted cultural schema that helped to make the strange familiar (Alexander 2003a; Kane 1997; Leavy 2007; Levy and Sznaider 2005; Polletta 1998) Zerubavel sees the drawing of historical analogies and comparisons as a discursive exercise in preserving historical continuity between past and present and as an example of mnemonic typification (Zerubavel 2003b, p. 51). The analogy between the Holocaust and Bloody Sunday is a false or unsuccessful one when one considers the vast difference between the two events in terms of the number of people who lost their lives and the nature of their deaths. Fine argues that magnitude, metaphoric continuity, analogous causation and comparable 170



Notes

2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

consequences represent the major bases for comparing historical events (Fine & Beim 2007). Derry Journal, 1 February 1972, p. 3. There are many already existing “Bloody Sunday” events in world history. One of these took place in Selma, Alabama, on 7 March 1965 during the American civil rights struggle. As a civil rights march was taking place, it was attacked by police and seventeen people were seriously injured. An earlier “Bloody Sunday” in Irish history occurred in November 1920 when spectators at a Gaelic football match in Dublin came under fire from British soldiers. Other days in the week have been prefixed with ‘bloody’ to give Bloody Monday, Bloody Friday and so on. To my knowledge, the earliest reference to a ‘bloody’ event in Irish history is the rebellion of Sir Phelim O’Neill in 1641 (Fitzpatrick 1903). Thanks to Michael Hill for his archival research about ‘bloody’ events in global history. Derry News, 31 January 2005, p. 9. For an interesting discussion of “moral recovery” in the context of Japanese and German attempts to commemorate their respective difficult pasts, see Hashimoto (1999). Faus 2008. Nippert-Eng 1996. Sunday World, 29 January, 1978. An Phoblacht, 16 January 1976. The concept of field comes from the work of Pierre Bourdieu. See Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992). Jacobs 1996. Longley 2001. Mullan 2002. Winter 2006, p. 136. For more detail on previous usages of the concept see Irwin-Zarecka (1994) and Jordan (2006). The concept of memory work is analogous to the concept of identity work (Schwalbe & Mason-Schrock 1996) found in the social psychology literature. In my thinking about these different levels of memory work, I drew upon Lewis and Weigert’s interesting typology of time delineating between self time, interactional time, institutional time, and cyclic time (Lewis & Weigert 1981). I also found King-Ó Riain’s levels of ‘race work’ useful (King-Ó Riain 2006). Thanks to Seán Ó Riain for suggesting that memory work be conceived in terms of different levels of analysis. Halbwachs 1992. Irwin-Zarecka 1994. Vinitzky-Seroussi 2002, p. 32. Foster 2001, p. 33. Fine 2001. Irwin-Zarecka 1994. Lewis & Weigert 1982. Burton & Carlen 1979. McCann 2006; Dawson 2007. Dawson 2007. Viterna & Fallon 2008.



Notes 171

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

Notes Ryan & Gamson 2006. Granovetter 1973; McPherson, Smith-Lovin & Brashears 2006. ‘Mexican duo visit Derry’, Derry Journal, 11 June 1996, p. 15. Durkheim 1995. Brekhus 2008; Weigert 1991. Durkheim 1995. Kertzer 1988. Kane, 1997. Schudson 1989. Kane 1997; Schudson 1989. Turner 1974; Gusfield & Michalowicz 1984; Kane 1997; Schudson 1989; Zubrzycki 2006. Pfaff & Yang 2001. Jacobs 1996, p. 1266. For more on “talk” as an aspect of identity work see Schwalbe & Mason-Schrock (1996). Spillman & Conway 2007. Schwartz 1991b. Olick & Robbins 1998. Olick & Robbins 1998; Fine & Beim 2007. Fine & Beim 2007. Fine & Beim 2007, p. 5. Emigh 1997. For an example of comparative historical sociology using negative cases see Skocpol (1979). Skocpol 1979; Pierson & Skocpol, n.d. Skocpol 1979. Schwartz & Schuman 2005. Kansteiner (2002) urges students of collective memory to pay more attention to commemorative reception as against the standard emphasis on commemorative symbolism. Zhang & Schwartz 2003; Schwartz 1996; Beiner 2007a; Spillman 1998. Gillis 1994; Schwartz 1996; Rappaport 1998; Cole 2001; Sturken 1997; Middleton & Edwards 1990; Kansteiner 2002; Climo & Cattell 2002; Olick 2008. Eyerman 2001, 2004. Lowenthal 1986; Coser 1992b; Olick 1999. Schwartz 1991b, 1996. Warner 1959; Zhang & Schwartz 2003. Li-Chun Lin 2007. Olick 1992. Olick & Robbins 1998. Beiner 2007b, p. 368. Roach, 1996. Bryan 2000. Schwartz 1991b, p. 234; Swidler & Arditti 1994, p. 309. Lang & Lang 1988. Latour 1988. Olick & Levy 1997. Spillman 1997. Schwartz 1991a, 1997. Schudson 1989.



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70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

Zerubavel 1997; Viterna 2006. Longley 2001. Zerubavel 2003b, p. 105. Zubrzycki 2006. The concept “sites of memory” circulates widely in the collective memory literature. It comes from the work of Pierre Nora (1989). Tarrow 2005. Cerulo 1995. Rivera 2008. Hirsch 2008. McKittrick et al. 2001.

2 Bloody Sunday in Historical Perspective 1. For a detailed account of the history of the IRA see English (2003) and Taylor (1997). For more detail on storytelling in relation to Irish experiences of colonialism see Kane (1997). 2. Turner 1974. 3. Foster 2001. 4. Nelson 2008. See Gibbons (2001a) for more detail on the global horizons of Irish nationalists. 5. For more detail about the historical position of the Irish Catholic Church see Dillon (1993). 6. For more on constructions of Irishness among eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury British political elites see de Nie (2004). 7. O’Toole 1997. 8. Ó Tuathaigh 2007. 9. Ibid. 10. Nelson 2008. 11. Coleman 1999. 12. Ó Tuathaigh 2007. 13. Conway 2008. 14. Kennedy, Giblin & McHugh 1988. See also Ryan (2000). 15. Fitzgerald 2005. See also McCann, 1993. 16. Fitzgerald 2005; Kennedy, Giblin & McHugh 1988. 17. O’Sullivan 2006; O’Hearn 1998. 18. Lee 1989. See also Ferriter (2005). 19. O’Driscoll 2008, p. 65. 20. Swidler 1986. 21. Ó Dóchartaigh 1997; Bryan 2000; English 2003; Dunn 2000. 22. Ó Dóchartaigh, 1997. For more on state repression as a response to collective action in Northern Ireland and employing Derry as a case study see White (1989). 23. Tarrow 2005, p. 17. 24. McAdam, Tarrow & Tilly 2001, p. 41. 25. Tarrow 2005. 26. Polletta 1998. 27. Ó Dóchartaigh 1997; Bryan 2000; Purdie 1990.



Notes 173

Notes

28. Purdie argues that NICRA was born at a conference in Maghera, County Derry, 13–14 August 1967 (see Purdie 1990). Founding members of NICRA were former members of organizations such as the Irish Workers League, the Connolly Association, the Belfast Trades Council, the Communist Party of Northern Ireland. The Wolfe Tone Societies were formed in 1964 to organize the commemoration of the birth of Wolfe Tone. 29. Farrell 1976, p. 245. 30. People’s Democracy was founded at the Queen’s University Belfast by a group of students. It organized a seventy-five-mile march from Derry to Belfast in January 1969 that was violently broken up at Burntollet Bridge outside Derry by the RUC and the B-Specials, eventually reaching its destination, the Guildhall Square in Derry city centre. 31. Purdie 1990; see also Sandage (1993). 32. Feldman 1991. 33. Clearly, detailed and extensive historical accounts of the event already exist (Mullan 1997; McCann 1992, 1993, 1998; McClean 1997; Pringle & Jacobson 2001; Grimaldi & North 1998; Walsh 1999, 2000; Faus 2008), so my purpose here is to provide a brief capsule summary of it. 34. Fine 2001, p. 10. 35. Pfaff and Yang 2001, p. 550. 36. See Nell McCafferty’s account of Peggy Deery’s life and family (McCafferty 1988). 37. This comes from the author’s fieldnotes (2 February 2009). 38. Merton 1936. 39. Walsh 2000. 40. ‘Derry numbed and restless in aftermath of killings’, Irish Times, 1 February 1972, p. 5. 41. ‘Derry numbed and restless in aftermath of killings’, Irish Times, 1 February 1972, p. 5. 42. Derry Journal, 28 January 1992, Bloody Sunday supplement, p. 12. 43. Derry Journal, 1 February 1972, p. 1. 44. Mullan 2002. 45. New York Times, 1 February 1972, p. 36. 46. Derry Journal, 1 February 1972, p. 1. 47. Irish Times, 1 February 1972, p. 1. 48. See Nell McCafferty’s report in the Irish Times, 3 February 1972, p. 6, entitled ‘Misery and loneliness descend on Derry’. 49. Irish Times, 1 February 1972, p. 5. 50. Irish Times, 1 February 1972, p. 1. 51. Taoiseach is the Irish term for Prime Minister. 52. Irish Times, 1 February 1972, p. 5. 53. See Fine (2001) for more detail on the concept of multiple audiences. 54. Rivera 2008. 55. Widgery 1972. Such is the importance of the Widgery Report that it was included in a recent collection of canonical written texts in Irish history (Aldous & Puirseil 2008). Early legal textual critiques of the Widgery Report include Boyle (1972) and Dash (1973). Walsh (1999) was a later textual critique. 56. Widgery 1972, p. 39. 57. O’Toole 2008, p. 6.



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58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

Widgery 1972, p. 38. From the author’s fieldnotes (September 2004). Zerubavel 1995, p. 11. Purdie 1990, p. 4. McCafferty 1988, p. 14. Republican News, 28 January 1978, p. 12. Ruane & Todd 1996. General and excellent overviews of Northern Irish society are to be found in Rose (1971), Lyons (1971), Lee (1989) and Whyte (1990). For an account from an explicitly Marxist perspective see McCann (1993). For a more recent engagement with changes specifically within Irish republicanism see Bean (2007) and Maillot (2005). An interesting ethnography of group distinction in a nationalist workplace and engaging with the role of memory in prolonging inter-group conflict and shaping everyday social relations can be found in Kelleher (2003). Feldman 1991. English, 2003. Girvin 1999. See also English (2003). Fitzgerald 2005. English 2003, p. 10. Maillot 2005. Evans & Sinnott 1999. For the British Prime Minister’s full statement and more detail on the Saville Inquiry see (accessed 16 June 2009). Coleman 1999. See the CAIN website (accessed 6 February 2009). Kennedy, Giblin & McHugh 1988. Breen, Heath & Whelan 1999; Ruane & Todd 1996. Breen et al. 1999. Fitzgerald 2005; Kennedy, Giblin & McHugh 1988; Ruane & Todd 1996. Gudgin 1999. Kennedy, Giblin & McHugh 1988; Sturken 2007, p. 4. Gudgin 1999. Gudgin 1999. See also Li & O’Leary 2007. Gudgin 1999; Ruane & Todd 1996. Ruane & Todd 1996, p. 143. Ruane & Todd 1996, p. 144.

3 A ‘Simple People Who Want a Simple Memorial’ 1. Belfast Telegraph, 3 October 1973, LHNIPC NIO Cuttings Files, Londonderry Civil Rights March. 2. Fine 2001; Teeger & Vinitzky-Seroussi 2007; Jordan 2006; Wagner-Pacifici & Schwartz 1991; Olick & Robbins 1998. 3. Vinitzky-Seroussi 2002.



Notes 175

Notes

4. The concept of settled/unsettled society used here comes from the work of Ann Swidler (Swidler 2001). 5. For a comprehensive history of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association see Purdie (1990). NICRA was the key organizer of civil rights marches in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Founded in August 1966, it was broad church made up of socialists, trade unionists, communists and republicans, and advocated for the civil rights of Protestants and Catholics alike. Its main ideological opponent was Provisional Sinn Féin, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army (‘the Provos’), a republican paramilitary organization whose chief goal is a united Ireland. The term “the Provos” relates to a split in the republican movement in 1969 between the left-wing Official IRA, also known as “the Stickies” or “the Officials”, and the militant Provisional IRA, also known as “the Provos”. 6. Irwin-Zarecka 1994, p. 141. 7. Teeger & Vinitzky-Seroussi 2007; Vinitzky-Seroussi 2002; Wagner-Pacifici & Schwartz 1991; Schwartz & Bayma 1999; Gregory & Lewis 1988. 8. Teeger & Vinitzky-Seroussi 2007; Vinitzky-Seroussi 2002; Wagner-Pacifici & Schwartz 1991; Misztal 2003. 9. Bell 2006. 10. Alexander 2003; Bell 2006. 11. Wagner-Pacifici & Schwartz 1991, p. 379; Vinitzky-Seroussi 2002. 12. Wagner-Pacifici & Schwartz 1991. 13. Kertzer 1988, p. 69. 14. Vinitzky-Seroussi 2002. 15. Vinitzky-Seroussi 2002, p. 43. 16. Simon 2003, p. 125. 17. Ray 2006. 18. Brewer 2006; Graham & Whelan 2007; Longley 2001; Lundy and McGovern 2001; Hamber 2007; Ray 2006. 19. Ardoyne Commemoration Project, 2002. 20. McKittrick et al 2001; Graham & Whelan 2007; Longley 2001. 21. Lundy & McGovern 2007. 22. Bloomfield 1998; Graham & Whelan 2007. 23. The full Bloomfield report (1998) is available online at . 24. Tavuchis 1991; Hamber 2007; Saito 2006. 25. Zolberg 1998. 26. Bridget Bond was a ‘significant personality’ (Gregory & Lewis 1988, p. 219) behind the planning and securing of institutional support for the memorial. Significantly, an appreciation written after her death in the Derry Journal foregrounded her role in the planning for the Bloody Sunday memorial: ‘The Civil Rights monument in Rossville St., erected to honour the memory of those murdered on Bloody Sunday (30H–1-72), was unveiled by Bridget Bond and her name is engraved on the memorial. Of all those who struggled for civil rights, none was more deserving of this honour than her” (Derry Journal, 6 February 1990, p. 10). She is one of the ‘wise women hidden from history’ in Nell McCafferty’s account of the Maiden City (see Bell, Johnstone & Wilson 1991, pp. 58–60). She famously led the DHAC in a sit-in in the Guildhall in 1969. Her last public appearance was at the



176

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

unveiling of the Bloody Sunday memorial. She remains, however, one of the largely ignored and unsung heroes of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. Nell McCafferty, in the preface of a collection of some of her writings, said of Bridget Bond that she ‘started the fight for Civil Rights when it was neither fashionable nor popular’ (McCafferty 1984, p. 7). A former member of DCRA described her as ‘an incredible incredible human being and a very liberated woman. Bridget really was civil rights in Derry. On reflection it was amazing because she was a female, which was amazing. It was a very male period and when Bridget spoke everybody listened’ (interview with author, 31 January 2005). He went on to say that “unfortunately Bridget died before anybody really got a significant interview she had so much to tell” (Interview with author, 31 January 2005). NICRA bulletin, 13 February 1972, LHNIPC, NICRA box 2. Derry Journal, 8 February 1972, p. 6. Evening Press, 21 July 1972, p. 6. Moriarty, 1997; Gregory & Lewis, 1988. LHNIPC, NICRA box 15. LHNIPC, NICRA box 15. Letter, NICRA to Harrow NICRA, February 21, 1973, LHNIPC, NICRA box 15. Irish Times, January 24, 1973, p. 11. Irish News, ‘Can this help peace?’, December 20, 1972, NIO Cuttings Files, Londonderry Civil Rights March. Minutes of meeting of regional executive of DCRA, 3 January 1973, Bridget Bond Collection, Derry City Council archives, Derry, Northern Ireland. Minutes of meeting of regional executive of DCRA, March 11, 1973, Derry City Council Archives, Derry, Northern Ireland. Letter, Stewart to NIHE, May 10, 1972, LHNIPC NICRA box 5. Jordan 2006. Interview with author, 23 July 2004. The Londonderry Development Commission replaced the Londonderry Corporation in 1970. Letter, Stewart to Mackinder, 8 June 1972, LHNIPC, NICRA Box 5. Letter, Mackinder to Stewart, 9 June 1972, LHNIPC, NICRA box 5. Letter, Armstrong to NICRA, n.d., LHNIPC NICRA box 5. Letter, Armstrong to NICRA, n.d., LHNIPC NICRA box 5. The photographs survive in the Bridget Bond collection in Derry City Council’s archive. Daily Telegraph, 4 October 1973, LHNIPC, NIO Cuttings Files, Londonderry Civil Rights March. Irish Independent, January 16, 1974, LHNIPC, NIO Cuttings Files, Londonderry Civil Rights March. Sturken 2007, p. 272. Irish Times, 22 January 1973, p. 9. Thomas Kinsella’ poem ‘Butcher’s Dozen’ is arguably the best-known Bloody Sunday poem. But other Irish poets have also penned poems in memory of Bloody Sunday. Seamus Heaney, a Nobel prize winner for literature, wrote two poems about Bloody Sunday, ‘The Casualty’ and ‘The Road to Derry’. The latter contained the memorable line ‘and in the dirt lay justice like an



Notes 177

52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

Notes acorn in winter’; the poem was reproduced in a special Bloody Sunday commemorative newspaper supplement carried in the Derry Journal to mark the 25th anniversary. Literary critic Seamus Deane, author of the novel Reading in the Dark, wrote After Derry, 30 January 1972. Plays by Brian Friel (The Freedom of the City), Lawrence McClenaghan (The Long Auld Road), Patricia Mulkeen (Just Another Sunday) and Frank McGuinness (Carthaginians) also remember the events of 30 January 1972. There is no shortage of popular music remembering Bloody Sunday either: U2’s song ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ is perhaps the best known, and one through which many people first come to hear about Bloody Sunday, but there are others such as Christy Moore’s ‘Minds Locked Shut’, John Lennon’s ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ and songs by less well-known bands such as Blackthorn (‘London’s Derry’), the Cardiff Red Choir (‘Derry Streets’), and Dinkeas (‘The Derry Massacre’). For more detail on literary and theatrical representations of the event see Herron and Lynch (2007). Minutes of meeting of regional executive of DCRA, 4 January 1973, Bridget Bond Collection, Derry City Council Archives, Derry. Charles Morrison was a member of the DCRA and he and Michael Harkin had worked together in the NIHE (Interview with author, 31 January 2005). Derry Journal, 25 January 1974, p. 5. Thanks to Charles Morrison for bringing this photograph to my attention. Leaflet issued by relatives of the Bloody Sunday martyrs and the Executive Committee of NICRA, LHNIPC, NICRA box 1. NICRA memo, LHNIPC, NICRA box 24. Derry Journal, 11 January 1974, p. 9. Daily Telegraph, 4 October 1973, LHNIPC, NIO Cuttings Files, Londonderry Civil Rights March. NICRA Notes for Stewards, LHNIPC, NICRA box 2. Irish Times, 28 January 1974, p. 1. Derry Journal, 29 January 1974, p. 1. Londonderry Sentinel, 30 January 1974, p. 9. This curious feature of the memorial was not given much attention by memory choreographers when I asked them about its design. It may be explained by the fact that the membership of NICRA came from both the Protestant and Catholic communities although it was predominately Catholic. Jeffrey 2000, p. 107. Sturken 2007, p. 114. Interview with author, 19 August 2004. Winter 1995. Beiner 2007, p. 253. An Phoblacht/Republican News, 2 February 1984, p. 8. Vinitzky-Seroussi 2002a; Jordan 2006. Derry Journal, 7 April 1998, p. 4. Kurasawa 2007, p. 32. Derry Journal, 1 June 1993, p. 5. Derry Journal, 1 June 1993, p. 5. Free Derry Wall refers to the gable end of a house, now simply a wall, in the Bogside area of Derry city that was painted with the slogan



178

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

“You Are Now Entering Free Derry”. The area in and around this wall is known as “Free Derry Corner” and is distinguished by the sheer “amount of history” that took place there (Walton 2001, p. 249). Writing about the Bogside in the year before Bloody Sunday, Seamus Deane characterized it as more a condition than a street (Deane 1971) and drew attention to its ‘ghetto atmosphere’ (Deane 1971, p. 1a) and how the geography of Derry city reflected and reinforced its religious and class distinctions. Derry Journal, 8 August 1994, p. 5; Derry Journal, 6 June 1995, p. 11. Irwin-Zarecka 1994. Yoneyama 1999. Walton 2001, p. 5. Sturken 2007. Interview with author, 29 July 2004. Interview with author, 23 July 2004. Warner 1959, p. 280. Foote 2003. Scott 1996, p. 385. Yoneyama 1999, p. 180. The Widgery Tribunal, which sat in Coleraine from 21 February to 14 March 1972, was established by the British government to unveil what happened on Bloody Sunday. This report became the official state memory of the event. Because it paid little attention to – and was fundamentally at odds with – the vernacular nationalist memory, Luke Gibbons describes it as an example of ‘history without the talking cure’ (Gibbons 1998).The Saville Inquiry – also known as the Bloody Sunday Inquiry – was formally established by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in January 1998, and sat from April 1998 to November 2004. This inquiry represented an attempt to unveil ‘what happened’ on Bloody Sunday – as against ‘what is said to have happened’ (Trouillot 1995, p. 13) in the earlier 1972 Widgery Tribunal chaired by Lord Widgery – and to rewrite the official British state memory of the event. More detail is available at . The Stormont regime refers to Stormont castle in Belfast, the seat of political power in Northern Ireland. Interview with author, 23 July 2004. Interview with author, 23 July 2004. Interview with author, 23 July 2004. Interview with author, 20 August 2004. Interview with author, 21 August 2004. Vinitzky-Seroussi 2002, p. 40. Sturken 2007, p. 169. Sturken 2007, p. 183. Vinitzky-Seroussi 2002. Jordan 2006, p. 96. Jordan 2006. Jordan 2006. Gibbons 2001b. Derry Journal, 7 July 1992, p. 9. Bogside and Brandywell Area reports file, Central Library, Derry.



Notes 179

180

Notes

104. Emigh 1997, p. 649. 105. Jordan 2006. For more examples of successful and unsuccessful commemoration see Walkowitz & Knauer 2004.

On the March

1. This comes from the author’s fieldnotes (28 January 2007). 2. For representative examples see Irwin-Zarecka 1994; Bodnar 1991; Misztal, 2003; Spillman 1997; Igarashi 2000; Cole 2001; Winter 1995a, 1995b; Wertsch 2002. For a review of the collective memory literature from a specifically sociological vantage point see Olick & Robbins 1998. See also Jedlowski 2001. 3. For more on this see Connerton (1989). Work by Stoller (1994), Lee (2000), and Kleinman & Kleinman (1994) also uses Connerton’s analysis as a conceptual jumping-off point. 4. The distinction between settled/unsettled cultures used here comes from the work of Ann Swidler (2001). 5. Connerton 1989, p. 4. 6. Connerton 1989, p. 4. 7. An effort to critique and extend Connerton’s analysis can be found in Spillman & Conway (2007). 8. Connerton 1989, p. 72. 9. Connerton 1989, p. 45. 10. Connerton 1989, p. 45. 11. Halbwachs 1992. Also see Schwartz (1991b, pp. 221–36). 12. NICRA’s ‘repertoire of contention’ (McAdam, Tarrow & Tilly 2001, p. 41) included marches and sit-ins. In the 1970s, because of the reaction of the British state to its political claim-making around housing and job discrimination, law and order issues came to the fore. For a classic account of the organization see Purdie (1990). See also Ó Dochartaigh (1997). 13. See Kertzer (1988). 14. For more detail see Jarman (1997). See also Bryan (2000). 15. For an example of this see Kelleher (2003). 16. See Jarman (1997). 17. Zerubavel 2003a. 18. This comes from the author’s fieldnotes, 28 January 2007. 19. Durkheim 1995. 20. See Jarman 1997; Kertzer 1988; Roach, 1996. See also Gibbons (2001); Withers (1996). 21. Derry Journal, 27 January 1978. 22. NICRA press statement, 1 January 1973, LHNIPC, NICRA box 1. 23. Republican News, 4 February 1978, p. 6. 24. An Phoblacht/Republican News, 3 February 1979, p. 6. 25. Interview with author, 26 July 2004. 26. Derry Journal, 10 December 1974, p. 6. 27. NICRA press statement, 1 January 1973, LHNIPC, NICRA box 1. 28. NICRA press statement, 1 January 1973, LHNIPC, NICRA box 1. 29. NICRA press statement, 1 January 1973, LHNIPC, NICRA box 1.



4

30. Derry Journal, 28 January 1973. Suggested Text for Leaflet for Marchers at the 1974 NICRA commemoration, LHNIPC, NICRA box 24. NICRA press statement, 22 January 1974, LHNIPC, NICRA box 24. 31. Letter, NICRA to Alfie Byrne, New Zealand, 3 February 1976, LHNIPC NICRA box. 32. Jarman 1997, p. 150. 33. An Phoblacht/Republican News, 3 February 1983, 12. 34. McCann 1993, p. 40. 35. Derry Journal, 1 February 1983, p. 6. 36. James Wray, letter to the editor, Derry Journal, 4 February 1983, p. 11. 37. Derry Journal, 15 February 1983, p. 6. 38. Derry Journal, 8 February 1983, p. 6. 39. The Birmingham Six refers to six men who were imprisoned for the bombing of two pubs in Birmingham on 21 November 1974. Their convictions were overturned in 1991 by the British Court of Appeal. 40. Derry Journal, 30 January 1990, p. 6. 41. Derry Journal, 6 February 1990, p. 8. 42. The Sentinel, 31 January 1990, p. 12. 43. Derry Journal, 30 January, p. 2. 44. Derry Journal, 30 January 1990, p. 9. 45. Londonderry Sentinel, 24 January 1990, p. 15. 46. Derry Journal, 2 February 1990, p. 3. 47. Olick 1999, p. 382. 48. Derry Journal, 24 January 1992, p. 1; Derry Journal, 31 January 1992. 49. Derry Journal, 31 January 1992. 50. Anonymous, letter to the editor, Derry Journal, 6 March 1992, p. 4. 51. Anonymous, letter to the editor, Derry Journal, 4 March 1997, p. 14. 52. Derry Journal, 31 January 1995, p. 2. 53. Irish News, 6 February 2003, 19. 54. An Phoblacht/Republican News, 7 February 2002, p. 10. 55. Jarman reports that some Twelfth (12 July) parades in the 1820s drew crowds of 50,000–60,000 (Jarman 1997, p. 53) and that Orange Order parades in the 1870s attracted up to 100,000 (ibid., 65). In Derry, the 1960 Apprentice Boys parade commemorating the siege of the city drew a crowd of 40,000 (Jarman 1997, p. 75). Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us that ‘commemorations feed on numbers’ (Trouillot 1995, p. 129) and that the ‘numbers game’ helps to underwrite public support for the political goals of commemorative activity. 56. In 1991, a republican internment parade went to Belfast City Hall for the first time on its way to the Falls Road (Jarman 1997, p. 151). 57. An Phoblacht/Republican News, 30 January 1992, p. 1. 58. An Phoblacht/Republican News, 3 February 2000, p. 20. 59. Interview with author, 15 August 2004. 60. The Bogside artists, a group of Derry artists, put together a set of six life-size puppets of British paratroopers and hung them from the Derry Walls overlooking Free Derry Corner during the 1998 commemoration. The puppets were painted yellow to signify the cowardly actions of the soldiers (Kelly, Kelly & Hasson 2001). 61. An Phoblacht/Republican News, 6 February 1997, p. 10.



Notes 181

Notes

62. Interview with author, 20 October 2004. 63. An Phoblacht/Republican News, 6 February 1997, p. 11. 64. For more detail on the organization of public events using a comparative analysis and paying particular attention to their internal structuring – against the more common tendency to read rituals as texts from the outside – see Handelman 1990. For more on the use of non-tragic genre to commemorate tragic events see Wagner-Pacifici 1996. 65. See Stoller 1994, pp. 634–48. 66. Irish News, 31 January 2000, p. 3. 67. Irish News, 6 February 2003, p. 19; Derry Journal, January 30, 2001, 11; Irish News, 29 January 2001, p. 4; An Phoblacht/Republican News, 4 February 1999, pp. 10–11; An Phoblacht/Republican News, 6 February 2003, p. 10. 68. An Phoblacht/Republican News, 6 February 2003, p. 11. 69. Derry Journal, 11 July 1997, p. 3. 70. A sub-committee of the BSI, the BSWC, organized the annual commemorative events from 1992. For more detail on the origins and evolution of various organizations with Bloody Sunday in their title see Dawson (2007). 71. The Derry Journal reported that the newly formed group’s spokesperson, veteran civil rights activist Eamonn McCann, stated that ‘the group had been formed this year after the twentieth anniversary commemorations had revealed that the pain and anguish felt by the relatives was as strong as ever’ (Derry Journal, 17 April 1992, p. 2). The aims of the BSJC were threefold: (1) to campaign for the British government to acknowledge the innocence of the dead, (2) to repudiate Widgery’s Report, and (3) to prosecute the soldier’s responsible for the killings. See Dawson 2007 for more detail. 72. On 1 May 1993, the BSI was renamed the Pat Finucane Centre (1993). Commenting on the new PFC in 1993, Paul O’Connor stated that ‘the transition from the BSI to the PFC reflects the success in terms of work and profile which the Initiative has achieved over the past four years. Increasingly our workload has reflected a social justice and human rights agenda in addition to the issue of redressing the injustice of Bloody Sunday’ (Derry Journal, 30 April 1993, p. 2). He went on to say that since the establishment of the BSJC in 1993 ‘it has since become clear that real confusion has been created in the minds of many people with two groups working closely together with “Bloody Sunday” in their title. It is for this reason that members of the BSI decided to change the group’s name to the Pat Finucane Centre’ (Derry Journal, 30 April 1993, p. 2). The PFC, named after the human rights lawyer killed in February 1989 by the UDA in collusion with a British MI5 agent, was established as a human rights organization. 73. This organization is composed of members of the families of the Bloody Sunday dead, academics and local community activists. A more detailed account of the origins and development of the BSI and BSJC can be found in Dawson (2007). 74. Interview with author, 20 October 2004. 75. Interview with author, 13 August 2004. 76. Interview with author, 13 August 2004. 77. Interview with author, 20 August 2004. 78. Interview with author, 20 August 2004.



182

Notes 183

1. For an exhortation to collective memory scholars to pay more attention to local–global linkages see Jordan (2006). 2. Connerton 1989, p. 37. 3. Halbwachs 1992, p. 38. 4. Halbwachs 1992, p. 178. 5. Halbwachs 1992, p. 178. 6. Smith 1990, p. 180. 7. Smith 1990, p. 179. 8. Brenner 1999, p. 40. 9. Brenner 1999. 10. Giddens 1991, p. 17. 11. The full study is Boli & Thomas (1999). A shorter truncated version of this is contained in Meyer (2004). 12. Meyer 2004. 13. Meyer 2004; Cole 2005; Conway 2006. 14. Cole 2005. 15. Meyer & Rowan 1977, p. 341; Fourcade & Savelsberg 2006. 16. Savelsberg & King 2005. 17. Mazlish 2005; Ruodometof 2005. 18. Misztal 2003, p. 18; Bell 2006, p. 3. 19. Beck 2002, p. 31. 20. Jordan 2006, pp. 21–22. 21. Levy & Sznaider 2006, p. 20, 2002. 22. Levy & Sznaider 2006, p. 28. 23. Levy & Sznaider 2006, p. 182. 24. Levy & Sznaider 2006, p. 190. 25. Burawoy at al. 2000, p. 341. 26. Ben-Porat 2006. 27. Kurasawa 2007, p. 13. 28. Cole 2005; Kurasawa 2007. 29. Kurasawa 2007. 30. An Phoblacht, 1 February 1977, p. 1. 31. Armstrong & Crage 2006. 32. An Phoblacht, 18 January 1974, p. 7. 33. An Phoblacht, 3 February 1979. 34. An Phoblacht, 4 February 1982, p. 10. 35. Ferriter 2005. 36. Irish Times, 29 January 1973, p. 1 37. Irish Times, 29 January 1973, p. 1. 38. Armstrong & Crage 2006, p. 730. 39. Schudson 2001. 40. Assmann 1995. 41. Fishman 2004, p. 63. 42. Kurasawa 2007, p. xi. 43. The concepts of salience, valence and ownership come from the work of Jansen (2007). 44. Halas 2008, p. 111.



5 ‘The Holocaust that was the Bogside of Sunday’

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

Notes Derry Journal, 28 January 1992, p. 2. Derry Journal, 3 February 1995. Mullan 2002. Interview with author, 15 August 2004. The theme of the 2002 commemoration, “One World, Many Struggles”, foregrounded the similarities between the Bloody Sunday case and other examples of injustice across the globe, clearly invoking a global interpretation of the tragic events of January 1972. This slogan was a variation on the “one world, one struggle” slogan employed by civil rights activists in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s (Prince 2007, p. 2). This comes from the author’s fieldnotes (31 January 2009). Armstrong and Crage 2006, p. 726. Interview with author, 29 July 2004. Interview with author, 29 July 2004. Interview with author, 26 July 2004. Interview with author, 26 July 2004. Interview with author, 26 July 2004. Yoneyama 1999, p. 44. Interview with author, 15 August 2004. Interview with author, 9 August 2004. Spillman 1998. Assmann 1995. Ben-Porat 2006. Ruane & Todd 1996. Fitzgerald 2005, p. 152; Ben-Porat 2006, p. 203. Fitzgerald 2005; Ben-Porat 2006. See the Derry City Council Tourism Development Strategy and Action Plan 2002–2006 http://www.derrycity.gov.uk/downloads/EconomicDevelopment/ Tourism%20DevelopmentStrateg y %20and%20Action%20Plan1.pdf (accessed 1 February 2009). Yoneyama 1999, p. 45. Adams 2003; Derry Journal, 11 June 1996, p. 15. Rolston 1991. Brubaker & Feischmidt 2002, p. 740. Ben-Porat 2006. Fitzgerald 2005. Brenner 1999; Ben-Porat 2006. Ben-Porat 2005. Fitzgerald 2005. Fitzgerald 2005; Ben-Porat 2006. O’Clery 1996; Cochrane 2007; Ben-Porat 2006. Cochrane 2007; Ruane and Todd 1996. Fitzgerald 2005; Ben-Porat 2005. Cole 2005. Gibbons 2005, p. 564. Cole 2005, p. 479. I owe this point to Rebecca King-Ó Riain. ‘Time for Truth: Bogside to Basra’ 2005 Bloody Sunday commemorative programme (Bloody Sunday Trust, 2005). Kurasawa 2007, p. 3.



184

Notes 185 Kurasawa 2007, p. 21. Kurasawa 2007, p. 127. Kurasawa 2007, pp. 130, 160. Tarrow 2005, p. 121.

6 The Politics of Visual Memory 1. 2. 3. 4.

Schudson 1989. Doss 2008. Herron & Lynch 2007; Blaney 2007; Browne 2002; Sweeney 2005. A number of newspapers carried commemorative supplements – using textual and visual material – to mark either the 20th or 25th anniversary commemorations. Among the newspapers carrying special pull-out supplements were the Derry Journal (Derry Journal, 31 January 1997; Derry Journal, 28 January 1992; Derry Journal, 1 February 2002), Irish News (Irish News, 30 January 1992), Sunday Tribune (Sunday Tribune, 12 January 1992), Sunday Business Post (Sunday Business Post, 25 January 1998), Irish Star (Irish Star, 22 January 2002), and An Phoblacht (An Phoblacht, 28 January 1978; An Phoblacht, 28 January 1980). Interestingly, and in line with Meyers’s Israeli study of commemorative supplements (Meyers 2002), most appeared in local, special-interest, or tabloid newspapers rather than national broadsheets. Earlier supplements appeared in An Phoblacht/Republican News in 1978 and 1980. Each of these newspapers tended to recycle a small number of canonical images of the event such as the handkerchief-waving Fr Daly and the thirteen coffins of the dead lying in repose in St Mary’s Catholic Church in the Creggan. The supplements also tended to include significant interviews with people associated with the event, either with the families of the dead or with political and cultural elites. Mentions of the official British state memory, official Irish state memory, or vernacular unionist memory were rare – almost all tended to privilege the vernacular nationalist memory. Photographs were sometimes included without a caption to anchor their meaning as if to say that they spoke for themselves. For example, the Derry Journal supplement for the 20th anniversary reproduced the front-page of the 4 February 1974 which carried a photograph of the coffins of the dead lying before the altar of St Mary’s Church in the Creggan and the caption stated images like this ‘need no words to tell their story’. Reportage also tended to bear similarities to Holocaust photography (Zelizer 1998) – consider, for example, the Derry Journal supplement for the 25th anniversary commemoration carried the image of Father Tom O’Gara literally looking at death in the face as he gazed at the body of Barney McGuigan lying in a pool of his own blood. The caption read ‘the ultimate atrocity: Father of six, Barney McGuigan, lies dead as a shocked Father Tom O’Gara looks on. This scene was only one of the many horrors witnessed on Bloody Sunday’ (Derry Journal, 31 January 1997, p. 1, Bloody Sunday 25th anniversary commemorative supplement). Such photographs of people bearing witness to death – rather than depicting dead bodies – were common in representations of the Holocaust (Zelizer 1998). For an insightful analysis of newspaper commemorative supplements in the Israeli context see Meyers (2002). Compared with earlier supplements in An Phoblacht/Republican News in the late 1970s, more recent supplements tended to pay greater attention – in



86. 87. 88. 89.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

Notes keeping with the trajectory of political discourse examined in Chapter 5 – to other “massacres” claimed to be international political symbols such as Sharpeville and Sarejevo. The Irish Star supplement in 2002 makes explicit reference to these events. Derry Journal 25 February 1997. Interview with author, 29 July 2004. Interview with author, 20 August 2004. Interview with author, 15 August 2004. Irwin-Zarecka 1994. For more on temporal structures in organizations see Fine (1990). Barthel 1996, p. 362. Zolberg 1998. In the summer of 2005, a new Museum of Free Derry was constructed and opened in Glenfada Park, about a hundred yards from the Bloody Sunday memorial. Dedicated to preserving the history of the Bogside, Bloody Sunday features as a central part of it. The museum consists of an exhibition area as well as a National Civil Rights Archive of over 10,000 items mostly related to the civil rights struggle. An earlier version of the Museum of Free Derry – located in the Bloody Sunday Centre first at Shipquay Street and then in Foyle Street – consisted of an exhibition space. This exhibition included a slideshow, shown in a dark room, with a four-part structure: (1) The Struggle for Civil Rights, (2) Events immediately proceeding Bloody Sunday, (3) Events on the day, and (4) The Impact of Bloody Sunday, various photographic images, and artefacts relating to the event, and like the current Museum of Free Derry, strongly appealed to the aural and visual senses. Derry Journal, 28 July 2000, p. 14. Doss 1999, p. 6. See the Bloody Sunday Trust website at . This comes from the author’s fieldnotes (2 February 2009). Barthel 1996, p. 345. This comes from the author’s fieldnotes (1 February 2009). This comes from the author’s fieldnotes (1 February 2009). Beiner 2007a, p. 197. This comes from the author’s fieldnotes (25 January 2005). This comes from the author’s fieldnotes (25 January 2005). This comes from the author’s fieldnotes (30 January 2009). At the banner’s unveiling, Eamonn McCann spoke of the importance of preserving the banner for future generations. He also reminded the attendance of the expressed wish of the families of the dead to be given a copy of the Saville report at least at the same time as it is given to the Northern Ireland Office. He went on to point out that the Bloody Sunday Trust was engaged in ongoing campaigning and lobbying of Members of Parliament to achieve this objective. This short speech highlighted the continuing coupling of commemoration and campaigning that characterized the remembrance of the event from the mid-1990s on. See Giamo’s analysis of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (Giamo 2003). Herron & Lynch 2007.



186

27. Wegenstein 2002, p. 222. 28. This comes from the author’s fieldnotes (2 February 2009). See also Derry Journal, 30 January 2009, p. 2. 29. This comes from the author’s fieldnotes (2 February 2009). 30. Barthel 1996. 31. Interview with author, 23 July 2004. 32. This comes from the author’s fieldnotes (8 August 2004). 33. Sturken 2007. 34. Interview with author, 2 February 2008. 35. Interview with author, 2 February 2008. 36. Interview with author, 2 February 2008. 37. Letter to editor, Derry Journal, 11 February 1997. 38. This comes from the author’s fieldnotes (July 2004). 39. The Sentinel, 24 January 2001, p. 7. 40. Sluka 1992; Rolston 1991; Vannais 2001. 41. Wagner-Pacifici & Schwartz 1991, p. 413. 42. Interview with author, 4 August 2004. 43. Kurasawa 2007, p. 36. 44. Kelly, Kelly & Hasson 2001. 45. An Phoblacht/Republican News, 4 February 1993, p. 16; The Sentinel, 30 January 1992. 46. Woods 1995, p. 45. 47. Jordan 2006, p. 66. 48. Zolberg 1998. 49. Hot Press, 20 September 1995, LHNIPC, Murals box. 50. Derry Journal, 1 September 1995, p. 31. The Bogside Artists responded to Nell McCafferty’s criticisms in a multi-authored article in the November 1995 issue of a local magazine, Fingerpost. A photograph of the montage mural appears on the cover of the magazine and alongside the Bogside artists’ article. In this article the artists take issue with McCafferty’s claims and argue that their painting was based on photographs of the day. They go on to point out that Bridget Bond was depicted in the mural when Nell McCafferty saw it and that the mural attempts to represent an important event in Derry’s history (Fingerpost, November 1995, p. 16). The public debate about the mural generated a number of citizens’ letters to the Derry Journal. One letter made the point that “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland was a male-dominated period and that representing the role of women in this period is a difficult endeavour (Derry Journal, 8 September 1995, p. 4). Another letter argued that women were underrepresented in the mural and that it should be re-painted (Derry Journal, 5 September 1995). A letter to the Londonderry Sentinel thanked the artists, the Duddy family, SF councillor Mitchell McLaughlin, Tony Doherty of the BSWC, and the local business woman who funded the mural (Londonderry Sentinel, 14 September 1995, p. 19). 51. Fingerpost, November 1995, p. 16. 52. Derry Journal, 5 September 1995, p. 11. 53. Hogan 1996. See also Giamo (2003). 54. Between December 1688 and August 1689, Derry was under a state of siege as the Protestant King William of Orange held out against the Jacobite army of King James. For more on the history of Derry see Hume (2002).



Notes 187

Notes

55. Smith 2003, p. 44. 56. This comes from the author’s fieldnotes (July 2004). 57. McCaffrey 2003, p. 54. Sinn Féin first contested elections in Northern Ireland in 1981. See also Bean (2007). 58. McCaffrey 2003. 59. A reading of a selection of Sean Carr’s letters to the editor of the Derry Journal over the years suggests that he is a republican or, if not, is sympathetic to a republican way of thinking. 60. Derry Journal, 29 June 1984, p. 6. 61. The window was considered by the Cultural Sub-Committee, the Amenities and Leisure Committee, and the Finance and General Purposes Committee of Derry City Council. 62. Derry Journal, 25 January 1985, p. 4. 63. Derry Journal, 1 February 1985, p. 9. 64. Bourdieu & Passeron 1977. 65. Derry Journal, 22 January 1985, n.p. 66. Minutes of Derry City Council meeting, January 1986. 67. Londonderry Sentinel, 24 August 1988. 68. Feldman 1991, p. 262. 69. Derry Journal, 19 September, 1988. 70. Londonderry Sentinel, 30 January 1985, p. 13. 71. Widows’ Mite is an organization representing widows of men killed by the IRA and INLA in Derry. See Londonderry Sentinel, 30 January 1985, for more detail on the Widows’ Mite reaction to the Guildhall stained-glass window. 72. Derry Journal, 8 December 1989, p. 5. 73. Derry Journal, 15 December 1989, p. 4. 74. Walkowitz & Knauer 2004. 75. Hirsch 2008. 76. Zelizer 2002. 77. Olick & Robbins 1998. 78. Olick 1999. 79. See the Derry City Council, Tourism Development Strategy and Action Plan 2002–2006 available at (accessed 28 January 2009). 80. See the Northern Ireland Tourist Board’s website at (accessed 29 January 2009). 81. Ren 2008. 82. Yoneyama 1999, p. 45. 83. Zolberg 1998.

7

Conclusion: Trajectories of Memory

1. McCann 2006. 2. Commemorative posters in the 1970s and ‘80s tended to use the colour red – the colour of human violence (Cerulo 1995, p. 213). Cerulo argues



188

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

that the elaborateness of expressions of national collective identity is linked to world-system location and ‘intranational focus’ (Cerulo 1995, p. 101). Her analysis predicts that peripherally located countries will adopt elaborate identity productions, and periods characterized by high intranational focus will involve symbolic production with low levels of elaborateness. The simplicity of early Bloody Sunday commemorative posters, directed at Irish nationalists united against the malevolent use of British state power, and the complexity of later commemorative posters, aimed at a more international audience, is largely consistent with this argument. “Towards Justice” commemorative programme (Bloody Sunday Trust, 2006). Yoneyama 1999. Schwartz, Zerubavel & Barnett 1986, p. 160. In this work Schwartz, Zerubavel & Barnett make a distinction between instrumental and semiotic invocations of the past. Jordan 2006; Vinitzky-Seroussi 2002. Schwartz 1997. Levy and Sznaider’s work on Germany’s Holocaust memory tells us that the early post-war years were characterized by a focus on victimhood during which German people were reminded of their “sinned against” status at the hands of Communists and allied forces that resulted in the dislocation of Germans and the development of a national refugee crisis. In the 1960s this narrative shifted to one emphasizing German’s “sinner” status and its history of victimhood was disavowed. The 1990s was a period marked by a revisiting of an earlier refugee story invoking German victimhood but a clear attempt was made to reclaim this as a European-wide experience as well. So this period involved facing in both universalistic and particularistic directions. See Levy & Sznaider 2005. Leavy 2007. Leavy 2007. The commemorative career of Australian national remembrance of Anzac Day – both in Australia and beyond in places such as Gallipoli, Turkey – appears to have taken on a similar pattern to the Bloody Sunday case with early low mnemonic activity in the 1970s followed, in the 1990s, by fresh intensive commemoration linked to wider trends in the development of tourism. For more detail on the Australian case see West (2008). Schwartz 1997. Schwartz’s analysis shows that the Lincoln memorial was built in the 1920s, several decades after his death and not, as one might expect, in the late 1800s, and Lincoln Day events were much more common in the early 1900s than the late 1800s – closely resembling the temporal pattern of Bloody Sunday memory. Japanese commemoration of the bombing of Hiroshima, for example, was initially framed in global terms and only later in national terms. Saito explains that this was linked to a quest to refurbish Japanese collective identity as it evolved from a violent to peaceful society and, within the city of Hiroshima, to difficulties experienced by survivors in remembering an event so recent. Geopolitical considerations mattered too, and particularly maintaining civil relations between Japan and the United States.



Notes 189

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Notes The later nationalization of Hiroshima memory is connected to the availability of new technologies of memory, such as photographic images, with greater resonance than earlier ones like books in recalling memories of the past, the movement of Japan from an occupied state to an independent one but also, crucially, to the chance discovery in March 1954 of fish with radioactive traces which set off memories of once forgotten Hiroshima survivors. Commemoration took the form of anti-nuclear demonstrations, the unveiling of a memorial, and a conference. This nationalizing of Hiroshima memory – which cut across party political lines – legitimized claims for redress from the state by survivors of the event and led to another form of commemoration, state-provided care for Hiroshima victims as a legitimation of their painful memories. See Saito (2006). Olick 1998, p. 4. Jansen 2007; Vinitzky-Seroussi 2002. Armstrong & Crage 2006. Schwartz 1997, p. 489. Durkheim 1995. The concepts of ownership, valence and salience come from the work of Jansen (2007). Olick 1999. Schudson 1993. Wagner-Pacifici 1996. Armstrong & Crage 2006, p. 727. Cole 2005. For more detail on world-system location and its relationship to symbolic production see Cerulo (1995). Olick 1999. Vinitzky-Seroussi 2002. Zerubavel 2003b, p. 31. Olick 1999, p. 400; Jansen 2007. Paul Greengrass, Bloody Sunday (2002). Yoneyama 1999, p. 134. Weber 1978. Burton & Carlen 1979. Bloody Sunday commemoration programme (Bloody Sunday Trust, 2007). Beim & Fine 2007. Interview with author, 26 July 2004. Schudson 1989. Wagner-Pacifici 1996. Spillman 1998. Stein 1998, p. 534. Interview with author, 19 August 2004. Schwartz & Schuman 2005; Schuman, Vinitzky-Seroussi & Vinokur 2003; Kansteiner 2002. Interview with author, 20 August 2004. This comes from the author’s fieldnotes (August 2004). Savelsberg & King 2005. Interview with author, 22 August 2004. Scott & Zac 1993.



190

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

Alexander 2003. Alexander 2003b. Alexander 2003a. Interview with author, 26 July 2004. Hoskins 2004. Interview with author, 26 July 2004. Li-chun Lin 2007, p. 6. Janssen, Kuipers & Verboord 2008. Olick & Robbins 1998. Griswold 1994.

Methodological Appendices 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Helferty & Refaussé 2003. Hill 1993, p. 68. Kvale 1996, p. 98. For more elaboration and examples of archival serendipity see Hill 2005. Hill 1993. Sturken 1997, p. 80. Hill 1993. Interview with author, 27 July 2004. Sarantakos 1993, p. 77. Weiss 2004. MacLeod 1987.



Notes 191

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References




Adams, Gerry, 83, 87, 88 actors, and collective memory, 146–149 Ahern, Bertie, 56, 104 Alexander, Jeffrey, 156 Amenities and Leisure Committee, 136 American commemorative activity, 127 American Indian movement, 100 An Phoblacht/Republican News, 34, 55, 80, 100 Ancient Order of Hibernians, 90, 114, 129, 166 Anglo-Irish Agreement, 35, 114 anti-colonialism, 4, 26 anti-imperialism, 4 anti-internment march, 29–31 Anzac Day, 146, 189n11 archival data analysis process, 164 archive, 103 Ardoyne commemoration, 45 Armstrong, Elizabeth, 149 Armstrong, Michael, 49 Attwood, Alex, 88 autobiographical memory, 6 Ballyhaunis Civil Rights Association, 48 Ballymurphy killings, 108, 156, 157 Beck, Ulrich, 98 Beim, Aaron, 13 Beiner, Guy, 16, 55 Belfast, 40 Belfast Agreement, 88 Belfast Central Newspaper Library, 162 Best, William, 136 Birmingham Six case, 85, 89 Blair, Tony, 37, 38, 179n87 “blanket protest,” 35 Bloody Sunday (docudrama), 119, 120, 152

Bloody Sunday Centre, 121 Bloody Sunday Commemorative Committee, 86 Bloody Sunday Initiative (BSI), 86, 87, 103, 108–109 Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign (BSJC), 8–9, 56, 57, 118, 133, 148 Bloody Sunday march, general properties, 76–79 Bloody Sunday memorial, 47–55, 110, 123–124 design, 51, 52 design proposals, 49–50 fundraising, 47–48 inscription, 45, 54–55, 59 ownership of, 57 plaque, 59–61 reception of, 62–64 redesign, 61–62 site, 49 transformations of, 55–62 unveiling of, 52–54 wreath, 50–51 Bloody Sunday Memorial Garden proposal, 67 Bloody Sunday memory, future of, 152–156 Bloody Sunday Trust (BST), 104, 123 Bloody Sunday Weekend Committee, 104 bodily social memory, 72 Bogside and Brandywell Development Association (BBDA), 67 Bogside Community Association, 81 Bogside street mural, 120, 121, 122, 141 Bond, Bridget, 9, 47, 48, 49, 51, 54, 132, 176–177n26 Bradley, M., 136 Brady, Hugh, 135 breach stage, in social drama, 23 Brennan, Brian, 54 207



Index

Index

Britain, 26 political change, 110–111 British army, 137 Broadcasting Act, 36 Brockway, Lord Fenner, 50, 51 Byrne, Alfie, 83 Campaign for Social Justice, 29 Campbell, Gregory, 137 Carr, Sean, 84, 135 Catholic Church leaders, 4 “Catholic disadvantage,” 38, 39 Catholicism, 25 ceremonial conformity, 97 China, 45 civic remembrance, 45 civil rights agenda, 28–35 civil rights movements, 33, 101 Claudy bombings, 156, 157 collective memory, 6, 11–12 actors and, 146–149 as campaigning, 105 comparative sociology of, 156–158 constructionist perspective, 15–16 contexts and, 149–150 continuity perspective, 16 as cultural form, 158–160 and globalization, literature on, 96–99 past–present nexus, 15–17 temporality and, 150–151 Collins, Margo, 51 colonialism, 23, 45 Columbine high school deaths, 146 commemorative change, direction of, 14–15 commemorative discourses, temporal trajectory of, 102–103 commemorative posters, 188n2 coding scheme for, 168 commemorative speeches coding scheme, 168–169 comparative sociology, of collective memory, 156–158 Connerton, Paul, 70, 71–72, 92–93, 96 consensual commemoration, 42 constitutional nationalism, 4, 28, 37, 75, 147

contestation around memories, 45 contexts, and collective memory, 149–150 controlled consensus model, 42 Cooper, Ivan, 51 Cope, John, 86 cosmopolitan memory, 98–99 Crage, Susanna, 149 cultural activity, memory work as, 10–12 cultural form, of collective memory, 158–160 Daly, Edward, 4, 34, 51, 86 data collection and analysis strategies, 17–18, 161–166 Deane, Seamus, 178n51 Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), 137 demography, 26–27, 38, 109–110 Derry anti-internment march, 29–30 and civil rights agenda, 28–35 as tourist site, 22, 57–58, 62, 110, 140 Derry Citizen’s Action Committee, 29 Derry City Council, 67, 135 Derry Civil Rights Association (DCRA), 48, 125, 152 Derry Housing Action Committee, 29 Derry Journal, 1, 32, 47, 51, 54, 56, 84, 87, 103, 132, 135, 162 Derry Memorial Fund, 48 Derry Women’s Action Committee, 75 Devine, Pat, 85, 136, 137 Devlin, Bernadette, 51 difficult pasts memories of, 41, 43–45, 151 transformation of, 55–62 Directory of Irish Archives, 161 Dóchartaigh, Fionnbarra Ó, 132 Doherty, Margaret, 2 Doherty, Patrick, 31 Doherty, Tony, 86, 133 Donaghy, Damien, 30–31 Donaghy, Gerard, 31



208

Index

Easter rising, of 1916, 27 economic modernization, 27–28 embodied remembrance, 10, 70, 71, 78–79, 90, 92–93, 99 English, Michael, 67 Enola Gay exhibition, 133 ethnic identity, 100 Europe, 109 Evans, Geoffrey, 38 Evening Press, 162 Eyewitness Bloody Sunday, 104 Federal Republic of Germany’s remembrance, 151 film, 98, 120 Fine, Gary Alan, 13 Flags and Emblems (Display) Act (1954), 35 Ford, General, 29 Foster, Roy, 24 fragmented commemoration, 42, 67 Frank, Anne, 99 Free Derry Corner, 57, 58, 62, 178n75 Free Derry Wall, 58, 178n75 Gallagher, Hugh, 84, 136 the Galway of the North, 57 gender omission, 132 Gibbons, Luke, 179n87 Giddens, Anthony, 98 Gilmore, Hugh, 31 Glasgow commemorative parade, 100 global city commemorative activity, 100–101 globalization and collective memory, literature on, 96–99 glocalization, 99 Good Friday Agreement, 37 Gortananama, 67 Green, Len, 135 Greengrass, Paul, 152

Grimaldi, Fulvio, 131 Griswold, Wendy, 159 group identity, 96 Guerrero killings, 10 Guildhall stained-glass window, 120–121, 127, 133–138, 139, 140 Guy, Jim, 136 Habour Museum archive, 162 Halbwachs, Maurice, 6, 74, 96 Harkin, Michael, 51 Harrow NICRA, 48 Havord, Michael, 49 Heaney, Seamus, 177n51 Heath, Edward, 33 Hiroshima remembrance, 59, 140, 146, 152, 189n13 historical perspective, Bloody Sunday in, 23–40 historical symbolism, 88–89 history, as storytelling, 24–28 Holocaust, 146, 170n1 The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, 98 Hot Press, 132 How Societies Remember, 70, 96 human rights, 22, 99, 103, 108, 115, 150, 154–155 Hume, John, 29, 83 hunger strikes, 35 identity, social construction of, 10 individual-level memory work, 5–6 industrialization, 26 of human rights discourse, 98 of the past, 120–129 institutional-level memory work, 5, 7 Internet, 98 interviews, 164–165 Irish- Americans, 127–129 Irish Daily Star, 162 Irish Front, 75 Irish Independence Party (IIP), 135 Irish News, 48 Irish Prisoners of War Committee, 100 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 2, 23, 33, 35, 37, 148



Downing Street Declaration, 37 Dublin commemoration, 101 Dublin Wolfe Tone Society, 29 Duddy, Jack, 31, 131 Duddy, Kay, 126 Durkan, Mark, 88

209

Index

Irish Republican Army (IRA) – continued ceasefire, 86 prisoners, 35 Irish Times, 31, 32, 48, 54 Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona, 6, 43 Israel, 105 Jacobs, Ronald, 4 Japan, 45 Johnson, John, 30, 31 Jordan, Jennifer, 56, 67, 98 justice claims, 9, 22, 92, 103, 107, 108, 129, 144, 154–155 Kelly, Michael, 31 Kennedy, Edward, 56 Kertzer, David, 10, 44 King, Cecil, 50 King, Martin Luther, 29 King, Ryan, 155 Kinsella, Thomas, 50, 177n51 Kurasawa, Fuyuki, 57, 116, 130 Lagan, Frank, 30 legitimacy claims, 2, 4, 5, 7, 33, 34, 147, 149 Levy, David, 98, 99 “the Liberator” see Daniel O’Connell Lin, Li-chun, 157 Lincoln, Abraham, 146 Lincoln memorial, 189n12 Linenhall Northern Ireland Political Collection, 43, 162 London commemorative march, 100 Londonderry Development Commission (LDC), 49, 162, 163 Londonderry Sentinel, 54, 162 Lost Lives, 45 Love, Charles, 84, 148 Lundy, Patricia, 46 Lynch, Jack, 32 Mackinder, J. C., 49 Magilligan Strand, 29–30 march, 7, 63 global activity, 100–101

hegemonic phase, 75, 83–86 origins and meaning, in Northern Ireland context, 75–76 pre-hegemonic phase, 74–75, 79–83 quest for power to define the truth, 75, 86–92 “Martyrs’ Memorial,” 55 Mawhinney, Brian, 86 McCafferty, Nell, 1, 31, 32, 33, 132, 133, 153–154 McCann, Eamonn, 124, 125, 182n71 McCaughey, Revd Terence, 51 McClean, P. J., 54 McCorry, Kevin, 50, 79 McDaid, Michael, 31 McElhinney, Kevin, 31 McGonagle, Declan, 136 McGovern, Mark, 45 McGuigan, Bernard, 31 McGuinness, Dodie, 137 McKinney, Gerard, 31 McKinney, William, 31 McShane, Rory, 51 meaning-making, in relation to Bloody Sunday, 16, 22, 45, 150, 151 memorialization politics, 43–46 memory assessment, problem of, 45 memory choreographers, 6, 59, 143 memory work collective-level, 7 as cultural activity, 10–12 individual-level, 5–6 institutional-level, 7 as political activity, 8–9 scope and limits of, 12–14 small-group level, 6 as social activity, 9–10 social-level, 6, 62 Mexico, 10 Meyer, John, 97 Milan commemoration, 100 Morrison, Charles, 51 Morrow, Revd John, 48



210

Index

narratives, 98 and history, 24–28, 44 Nash, William, 31 National Air and Space Museum, 140 National Front, 100 nationalists, 2, 3, 4, 19, 22, 34, 36, 37–38, 57, 75, 76, 84, 97, 91, 116 Nelis, Mary, 57 New Ireland Forum, 37 New Labour, 111 New Lodge Six killings, 89 New York Times, 32 Newcombe, Cathal, 50, 51 NICRA, 74, 75, 147, 163, 174, 176n6 Northern Ireland, 27–28 civil rights movement, 29, 33 economic changes, 38–40 marches, origins and meaning of, 75–76 political changes, 35–38, 42 social changes, 38, 42 Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), 4, 29, 33, 42, 43, 47, 49, 55 Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE), 49 Northern Ireland Tourist Board, 140 O’Connell, Daniel, 25, 26 O’Connell, William, 87 O’Connor, Paul, 182 official memory, 3, 5, 9, 33, 34, 92, 118, 129, 133–138, 139, 152 Official Unionist Party, 136 Olick, Jeffrey, 86, 148, 151 “Open Up The Files” campaign, 89 Orange marches, 11

Orange societies, 26 O’Sullivan, Donal, 32 Otherizing, 5 Palestine, 105–106 Palestine National Council, 100 pan-nationalist front, 87 paramilitaries, 33–34, 35, 37, 137 Park, Glenfada, 124 Pat Finucane Centre, 10, 89, 182n72 path dependency, and commemoration, 148, 151 peace process, 5, 37, 46, 87, 93, 107, 110, 154 Penal Law period see Plantation period Peoples, George, 136 People’s Democracy (PD), 29, 75, 174n30 People’s Gallery, 58 performative embodiment, 10, 11–12 Plantation period, 25–26 political claim-making, 11, 21, 23, 45, 55, 74, 143 political discourse, 10, 11, 45 political efforts, permanent solution, 37 political mobilization, 8–9, 139 political pragmatism, 108–109, 116 presentism, 94 Protestants, and Bloody Sunday, 4–5, 19, 89, 103, 104 Provisional Irish Republic Army (Provos), 28, 80, 85, 176n5 Provisional Sinn Féin, 82, 176n5 public discourse, 44 Public Order Act, 149 Purdie, Bob, 33, 174n28 Radio Telifís Éireann (RTÉ) Archives, 162 redressive action, in social drama, 23 reintegration—schism, in social drama, 23 religion and Irish national identity, 25–26 as social framework of memory, 96 Republican News/An Phoblacht, 34, 55, 80, 100



Mullan, Don, 104, 154 multi-city commemorations, 100–101 multi-level model, of memory work, 5–8 multivocal commemoration, 42 Museum of Free Derry, 58, 121–123, 138 Myers, Kevin, 119

211

Index

republicans, 2, 4, 6, 9, 20, 33, 34–35, 36, 37, 74–75, 81, 83, 93–94, 96, 100–101, 103–104, 107–108, 110–111, 114, 115–116, 143, 145–148 ritual re-enactment, of the past, 72–74 Roach, Joseph, 17 Robertson, Roland, 99 Robinson, Mary, 57, 101 Rossville Street memorial/mural, 3, 10, 11, 20, 21, 58, 65, 67, 75, 93, 129–133, 139, 163 routinization, of memory work, 106–107 Rowan, Brian, 97 Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), 137 Ruane, Joseph, 40 Sands, Bobby, 36 Savelsberg, Joachim, 155 Saville, Lord, 56, 58 Saville Inquiry, 7, 23, 33, 38, 89, 119, 148, 154, 157, 179n87 Schudson, Michael, 153 Schwartz, Barry, 17, 44, 130, 146 sectarian discrimination, 28, 38 sectarian seam, 40 Selma, 171n3 Sentinel, 85 September 11 attacks, 127, 146 Simon, Scott, 45 Sinn Féin (SF), 2, 4, 43, 47, 55, 74, 75, 107, 135, 137, 147, 154 and march, 83–86@3:versus NICRA, 74–75, 79–83 Sinnott, Richard, 38 small-group-level memory work, 5, 6 Smith, Anthony, 96 Smith, Philip, 134 social calendar, 6 Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), 4, 28, 37, 75, 83–84, 87, 136, 143 social drama, 23–24 breach stage, 24 crisis stage, 24 redressive action stage, 24

reintegration–irreparable schism stage, 24 social-level memory work, 5, 6, 9–10 social modernization, 27–28 Socialist Workers Party, 100 societal resources, access to, 26 South Africa, post-apartheid, 42 southern Irish society, 27–28, 103 spatiotemporal chronology, xvi–xxii Speaker’s Corner, 41 state-level memory work, 7 Stein, Arlene, 153 Stewart, Edwina, 49, 51, 54 Stoller, Paul, 89 stories see narratives Sturken, Marita, 50, 127, 164 Sunday (docudrama), 119, 120 Sunday Business Post, 162 Sunday World, 2 symbolism, 10–11 Sznaider, Natan, 98, 99 Taiwanese memory, work on, 45–46 Teeger, Chana, 42 temporality, and collective memory, 150–151 territorialization, 97, 98, 113 thrupenny bit, 50 Todd, Jennifer, 40 Toronto commemoration, 100 Troops Out Movement, 100 “the Troubles,” 2, 4, 23, 35, 145 truth claims, 8, 9, 21, 86–92, 103, 104, 108, 129, 145, 154–155 Turner, Victor, 23–24, 35 “the Twelfth,” 158 2:28 memorial, 45–46 Ulster, 26 Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), 137 Ulster Television archive, 162 unemployment, in Northern Ireland, 39 unionists, 2, 11, 19, 37, 104, 126, 136, 137, 155



212

vernacular nationalist memory, 3, 34, 49, 54, 55, 59, 66, 124, 143, 145, 152 victimhood discourses, of Irish nationalists, 25 framing, 103, 144, 149, 189n8 selective remembrance/forgetting of, 45, 48, 75, 138, 155 Vietnam War, memory work on, 184 Vinitzky-Seroussi, Vered, 42, 44, 45, 56, 64, 66 violence, for political change, 2–3, 4 visual memory, 118–141 Wagner-Pacifici, Robin, 44, 130 Warner, W. Lyold, 59 Wegenstein, Bernadette, 125–126 Westland Street mural, 131

213

Widgery Tribunal report, 3, 7, 23, 33–34, 89, 179n87 Widgery, Lord, 33, 60, 147 Widows’ Mite organization, 137 Wilford, Derek, 60 Winter, Jay, 4 Wolfe Tone Societies, 29, 174n28 world society theory, 97–98, 99, 117 Wray, James, 31, 54, 83 Yitzhak Rabin memorial, 44–45, 64 Yoneyama, Lisa, 59, 152 Young, John, 31 Zambian Ndembu tribe, 23 Zerubavel, Eviatar, 33, 150–151 Zolberg, Vera, 47, 120, 140



Index

Commemoration and Bloody Sunday: Pathways of Memory (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies)

Memory and Political Change (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies)

On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies)

Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies)

Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies)

Northeast Asia's Difficult Past: Essays in Collective Memory (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies)

Regimes of Memory (Routledge Studies in Memory and Narrative)

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

MEMORY

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Commemoration and Bloody Sunday: Pathways of Memory (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies)

Memory and Political Change (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies)

On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies)

Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies)

Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies)

Northeast Asia's Difficult Past: Essays in Collective Memory (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies)

Regimes of Memory (Routledge Studies in Memory and Narrative)

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

MEMORY

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

Memory

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