How we think about BLOODY SUNDAY
Why haven't the events of Bloody Sunday 37 years ago faded from the public mind? Not least because of hard work by committed people motivated by high ideals, argues DR BRIAN CONWAY of the Department of Sociology at NUI Maynooth.
His book on Bloody Sunday is being published later this year.
A great deal has been said and written about Bloody Sunday. The Saville Inquiry alone generated a massive volume of material. Hardly a book exists now on recent Northern Irish politics, history and society that does not mention the event. Journalists, psychologists, historians, geographers, lawyers, and literary critics have all turned their attention to it.
For all this, the event has received meagre attention from sociologists and we know little about how Bloody Sunday as a collective political symbol has changed over time and why. This book engages with this question in an explicit way. It looks at this important event from a new angle by examining how it has been interpreted and made sense of in different ways in different times and for different audiences. I'm particularly interested in how the event was initially talked about it in global terms, how this symbolism was closed down in the 1970s and 1980s, and how it made a comeback in the 1990s.
I open the book with a short story. Bloody Sunday was a deeply-contested and emotionally-charged event. In the first few days after the event different people worked hard to put forward their definition of what happened. The British state used the idiom of 'gunmen and bombers' to describe the dead. From the Bogside and wider nationalist community a very different story got told. Very soon after the event nationalists linked it to the Holocaust.
When I looked at how Bloody Sunday was talked about as time passed in the mid-1970s and 1980s I noticed that this early global story was hardly mentioned and all but disappeared. In its place emerged a story about Bloody Sunday as an example of British injustice and another event in a longer history of colonialism.
A gear change took place again the 1990s when the global storyline re-emerged with frequent parallel-drawing between Bloody Sunday and other peoples experiencing injustice and oppression in other times and other places. In the book I try to explain why this storytelling about the event changed over time and I link the change to the work of people who cared enough about the event not to allow it to be forgotten.
Many innocent people were killed in Northern Ireland during 'the Troubles' and many were forgotten and subsumed into the over three thousand deaths of the period. One of the factors that helped to prevent Bloody Sunday falling victim to oblivion was that enough people existed who wanted to keep it in the public consciousness and who knew that this required resources and time and effort over the long haul.
These people are the focus of my book.
Frequently they had to struggle against other rival groups who understood and made sense of the event in different and often conflicting ways. But I also realize that the people who worked to keep the event alive in other people's memories did not work within a vacuum. They were embedded in a society that underwent change and for this reason I also draw attention to the important role of wider political, cultural, economic and demographic changes at a national and global level in shaping how the event got remembered and commemorated.
The bigger point I try to make is about collective memory – that what we remember about the past and how we remember it depends not on the work of some kind of ‘invisible hand’ but on dedicated people caring deeply about the past and being guided in this by moral, political and legal motivations.
Insider or outsider?
My interest in Bloody Sunday has mainly to do with chance. In the mid 2000s I was a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame and at the time was reading literature about social identities. Reading some of this literature set off an interest in collective memory – how people represent the past – and I immediately identified with Bloody Sunday as a good empirical example of this from the Irish experience.
I feel that I bring something of an insider and an outsider perspective to the event. Because of my southern Irish identity I have an insider relationship to it. At the same time, because I researched and wrote about it from my vantage as a graduate student in a U.S. university, was not born at the time of the event, and have no family or personal connections to Derry, I approach it through an outsider lens as well.
Though one can never really fully disavow or transcend one’s own values and interests, my use of sociological concepts and methods has guided my work and helped me to study it in an objective and dispassionate way.
In the summer of 2004 I spent six months conducting interviews in Derry about Bloody Sunday and carrying out archival research in Derry and Belfast. Since 2004 I have also attended the annual Bloody Sunday commemoration. I’ve presented papers about Bloody Sunday at academic conferences in Ireland, America, UK, and other parts of Europe. I’ve also written articles about it in journals such as Memory Studies and Symbolic Interaction.
I’ve been continually fascinated by the event and by the frequent parallels between the Bloody Sunday experience and other similar events in other contexts. My engagement with it over the last number of years has helped me to better understand that how people remember the past does not stand still. It shapes and responds to changes in the wider culture and society.
One of the most interesting aspects of working on the book has been the collection of interview and archival data. I interviewed a wide range of people about the event – including some of the families of the dead – and was struck by their resourcefulness and courage in their long quest for truth. Through my archival research I learned about the origins and development of different sites remembering the event and their rich diversity.
Not all of the work involved was easy going though. A difficult aspect of it involved integrating the theoretical ideas I had been reading about the last few years with the empirical research I was doing alongside it and telling an interesting story about this.
I grew up in Portlaoise. My parents – Patricia Conway and Frank Conway – come from Charlestown, Mayo and Ennistymon, Clare, and I have four brothers – Paul, Joe, Noel and Gerard. I received my secondary education in St. Mary’s C.B.S. Portlaoise and then studied at University College Dublin for my undergraduate degree. After this I went to America, first to the University of Pittsburgh, and then to the University of Notre Dame, where I completed my doctoral dissertation in 2005 on the memory of Bloody Sunday. I currently work as a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
My book on Bloody Sunday – published by Palgrave Macmillan and based on my earlier Ph.D. work – is due for publication in October 2009. A launch will take place in Dublin and Derry.
My goal in writing this book has been to contribute to debates about how people remember difficult pasts like Bloody Sunday and to show that this requires hard work by committed people motivated by high ideals and doing this over a long period of time.
The book is dedicated to the memory of the people who died on Bloody Sunday.
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Thursday 09 February 2012
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