Bloody Sunday 50th anniversary: ‘The thing I can remember the most clearly was the silence’

Eamonn McCann was 28 when Bloody Sunday happened and he has been incremental to the campaign for justice for the victims and their families. He helped set up the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign and has written countless publications on the day itself and the events that happened after.
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Asked to recall the events of half a century ago, Eammon McCann says: “I find it bizarre that it happened 50 years ago. To use a cliché, I remember it like it was yesterday. It doesn’t seem like much time at all. It’s not in the past, it’s in the present both for me and many other people in the Derry area.”

“I still find it very emotional to talk about Bloody Sunday, like everyone else who was there on the day,” he says. “It’s a terrible memory but a necessary memory too. I can still see everything happening. “My memory of it was quite scattered, it wasn’t a set event that I was there to spectate at. The day was a chaotic day, walking up to Creggan, the marching itself and then the shooting started.

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“My main preoccupation was the size of the crowd. No one knew in advance that the number of marchers would be the size it was. People thought the violence the week before in Magilligan would deter people from going but it also was thought it might have made more people go out of anger. It’s very difficult to know what was expected. It was massively significant.

Eamonn McCannEamonn McCann
Eamonn McCann

“It was difficult to know how many were shot. People were killed at the barricades of Rossville Street and people were killed on Rossville Street itself. Jackie Duddy was killed in the forecourt of the flats. They weren’t all lying in a heap, it was different episodes of shooting in the same confined space.

“I remember being back, after the shooting, at Nell McCafferty’s house at Beechwood Street. There was packs of people coming from the demonstration to see what was happening and as I can remember, the first time I had an idea of how many were killed was when I was standing with Tommy McCourt, Bernadette McAliskey and a few others.

“There was a lot of discussions around how many exactly had been killed but Bernadette had clout so she was able to phone from Nell’s house asking for the names of the dead. She said ‘I’m the MP for the area Bernadette Devlin and I want a list of who was killed’. I can remember the hallway was packed and the silence was beginning to ascend as Bernadette just kept writing.

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“She wrote a name, then wrote another one, then wrote another one. It was about the fourth name that it came through to me and the others that this was a lot more serious than we thought. This wasn’t just a couple of shootings, this was a massacre.

Eamonn McCann and Bishop Edward Daly at Free Derry Museum opening 2007. Picture: Hugh GallagherEamonn McCann and Bishop Edward Daly at Free Derry Museum opening 2007. Picture: Hugh Gallagher
Eamonn McCann and Bishop Edward Daly at Free Derry Museum opening 2007. Picture: Hugh Gallagher

“The thing I can remember the most clearly was the silence. The silence after the shooting, the silence the next morning. People just standing around talking. Business was being done but it was just silence. Silence on the night of the shooting, the next morning when you walked around as people tried to understand what was happening and speculate who was shot where.

“I remember, naturally, it dominated every aspect of life. It took some time for people to realise the enormity of what had taken place. We weren’t unused to shooting but this was different.

“There was other people disbelieving that this was happening. They were resisting what they had just seen because it was so appalling. People were lost, walking down to the area and trying to find loved ones. People were coming and going.

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“It took me a long time to be able to talk about Bloody Sunday and be able to control my voice. Bloody Sunday was terribly important, both as a single event but also what it showed us about life generally in Derry during the Troubles. It was a singularly upsetting event. More so than I realised at the time.

“It’s impossible to say with any confidence what would have happened if Bloody Sunday did not take place but we can look at where the trends were. In the previous three years before Bloody Sunday, an awful lot of the reforms the civil rights movement were demanding were actually conceded. A points system for the allocation of housing to end discrimination around housing; Derry Corporation was abolished and commissioners sent in. The corporation meant that a minority of unionists were in the majority of roles in the corporation as it were. That was the most blatant example of gerrymandering as a whole in the history of the North. That tells you an awful lot about how sectarian the unionist bosses at the time actually were. The fact that all of this was won before Bloody Sunday shows a different story. All this was on its way. The civil rights movement had succeeded in winning things that were unimaginable a couple of years before. I find it hard to see what was achieved since with the armed struggle that wasn’t already being achieved under pressure from the civil rights movement.

“I hear a lot of people say the civil rights movement, they were beaten off the streets and that’s where the IRA came from. That is absolutely untrue. The civil rights movement had made significant strides over those couple of years. Had it been left to grow, it might have even won more. Over the past 50 years, the most rapid time of reform was over the late 60s and early 70s. The weapon was not armed struggle. The weapon was mass mobilisation of the people.

“There’s an argument that needs to be teased out in future years because it’s an argument that’s hardly ever dealt with because people don’t want to deal with it, which is understandable. I thought that we wouldn’t have had the violence of the IRA and the retaliatory violence of the loyalist paramilitaries if not for Bloody Sunday. An awful lot of people’s politics got a boost from Bloody Sunday, both armed struggle republicans, if I can call it that, but also loyalist paramilitaries who were emboldened by what happened. As things descended into violence, the sectarian hooligans of the UDA and the UVF benefited from that time of chaos and violence. It wasn’t a rational situation.

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“There’s no doubt at all that we have a level of mental ill health in the north that is not proportionate to our size. It’s very difficult to read these things but I would argue that we have higher levels of mental ill health than anywhere else in these islands. Any divided society - whether that be divided by class or politics or both as we are here in the north, it leaves behind disturbed minds and it is damaging to mental health in general.

“I think the North of Ireland would have had a higher instance of mental ill health even if there hadn’t have been any Troubles at all. It’s the marginalisation of the North. It’s always the case that the North of Ireland has been worse off than Scotland, worse than Wales and a lot worse than England in economic times. There was always that alienation in the North where we were a place apart.

“The political situation in the North had certainly done damage to the mental health and the emotional equilibrium of everybody here.

“History weighs very heavily on us. Its true everywhere that society today is a reflection of history. In Northern Ireland, we have had such a history of division and contradiction and a great sense of fellow feeling for one another - people are every proud of where they came from - but also it’s full of these terrible divisions that were bequeathed to us by history. I think that issue has shaped us.”

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“Northern Ireland is a very peculiar place with peculiar history,” says Eamonn McCann.

“There’s nobody like us! For such a small place there’s so many divisions. You have big great countries that aren’t criss-crossed by so many divisions. You have to understand that in order to understand the present.

“From a standpoint of 2022, unless you can look back on some sense of what was created in the 100 years of Northern Ireland, on the divided society it became and still is some ways; in order to see who you are you have to see where you came from. That is truer in the North than any other place I know. We are products of our history. We should know our history in order to know ourselves.

“Having said all that, if you are 16, 17, why would you look back? A lot of young people have their own problems. I can understand why someone would say ‘why look back? What’s done is done, let’s look forward’. But it’s important that history in this part of the world is something to be conquered, not just something to be remembered.

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“Bloody Sunday, looking back, was so male dominated. Everybody shot or wounded apart from Peggy Deery were all men. They were all of military age which suggests to me it was discriminate shooting. This was on both sides too, there were no armed women shooting into the Bogside. The people doing the killing and the people being killed were overwhelmingly men. Men of war. When I look back on things I wrote about Bloody Sunday and the Troubles as a whole, often I didn’t even mention one woman. It used to be the slogan ‘one man, one vote’, when you look back at that now, what an outrage!

“That was shouted at marches with 50% women. One man, one vote? What sort of madness, ignorance and stupidity was that? I think we need to own that as well, as men who were produced by that period. We need to own that. That’s one reason I believe that men who came through the early to later parts of the Civil Rights Movements must stand up straight now for women’s rights. We marginalised, or at the very least connived in the marginalisation of women. We must remember that in terms of Bloody Sunday - of the division of orange and green and Catholic and Protestant and republican or unionist or Irish or British, there was also a division between men and women. Which arguably is as bad now as it was then. That’s a factor of Bloody Sunday that it would do men, in particular, to remember that and keep that memory alive. There’s lessons in that too for any justice around the peace protest.

“Hardly any women apart from Bernadette (Devlin) were remembered. The civil rights movement was started by women. In ‘71 to ’73, the natural domination of men, I use that in the unfortunate cultural sense in Ireland, started to take over. You need to revise history, not to alter the facts of the matter, which you can’t, but to alter the context in which we had traditionally seen it, and understand that issues like discrimination and oppression of women was one of the determining factors of the way things worked out in the North before and after Bloody Sunday.

“That’s hardly mentioned. Its possible to read long articles and even books that give the impression that what was happening here was a war between the nationalists on one hand and the British army on the other - that’s a grotesque over simplification. There was many other things happening. If we’re serious about history, we should be serious about all history and not just our own particular take on it.”