Bloody Sunday: ‘Our peace walls have been raised higher, not torn down’
Fifty years ago this weekend, Britain’s 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment opened fire on a civil rights march in Derry, killing 13 innocent people. Our wounds have never been allowed to heal, writes Leona O’Neill
The Northern Ireland of today has come a long way from the grim and grainy black and white pictures on the television showing streets on fire and angry young men in flares rioting with the police. Now we’re known for Game of Thrones and Jamie Dornan and, well, also riots.
We might have had an image change in recent years, but the ghosts of the past still haunt us here. We still drag around our invisible baggage of hurt, division and distrust accumulated over generations. Our peace walls have been raised higher, not torn down. And every so often the scab is ripped off our collective wound and someone pours salt in it.
Yet life continues as normal. People go to work and school. Business and tourism are buzzing. The dark days of the past, when they arrive, stand out with glaring irregularity now. These are different times. We have come so far. We have fought so much to get as close to normal as our society will allow. We don’t ever want to go back. We are afforded hope now.
This weekend, on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, many of us are reflecting back.
The Northern Ireland of my father’s generation looked a lot different to the one his grandchildren now inhabit. Protestants ran everything here – the government, the civil service, the legal system, the police, and most businesses. The vibrant and powerful civil rights campaign in America inspired Catholics living in this Protestant-dominated and controlled state to rise up in the 1960s and have their voice heard on issues such as gerrymandering and discrimination. They demanded equality.
A wave of anger rose from the streets of Derry, Northern Ireland’s second-biggest city. It rose from the dilapidated overcrowded Catholic housing estates in Creggan and the Bogside, where generations were crammed in together in damp houses, unable to escape their circumstances. A rage was born from people on the coalface of crushing poverty, sick of non-existent rights and unionist domination and discrimination. People had had enough and, emboldened by the happenings in America, took to the streets.
The Northern Ireland civil rights movement was born, and my father William J Breslin, a pacifist, a husband, a father, and a history teacher, was one of the founders of that movement.
Over the next few years he marched with his fellow civil rights activists and was beaten off the streets by police. Marches were banned as the unionist government tried to quell any challenge. But Catholics had found a voice and as images of peaceful marchers being attacked by a ferocious Protestant police force beamed across the world, the world started to pay attention. In many ways the issue that sparked the Troubles was not religion or political beliefs, but the simple quest for equal rights.
During this time, hatred between Catholics and Protestants grew, entire streets of homes were burnt down, divisions intensified. Families who had lived side by side happily and for whom religion previously didn’t matter, had to flee to areas and huddle in numbers for safety among “their own kind”. Now the smoke rising from the industrial cities like Belfast wasn’t just from the chimneys, it was from burning barricades and from houses razed to the ground to create a no man’s land between Catholic and Protestant neighbours.
My father, a Bogside man, was a teacher in a local secondary school. I often wondered how he felt as he saw his country slip slowly into chaos. What it felt like to see armed British soldiers arrive on our shores to “keep the peace”. To live through the daily riots, to see the divisions grow and the walls grow with them, to feel a police baton crack against his skull as he asked to be treated equally, to watch as the barbed wire and army fortifications rose up from once familiar landmarks, to see his friends and neighbours arrested and interned without trial.
I asked him once if they knew at that point that they were on the periphery of an abyss. He said they didn’t, until Bloody Sunday, a day when everything changed utterly.
Fifty years ago this weekend, on those ceaselessly CS gas-choked streets of Derry’s Bogside, Britain’s 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment opened fired on a civil rights march, killing 13 innocent people, including seven teenage boys, and wounding 18 more.
I was born into the Troubles, three years after Bloody Sunday. Until I was in my twenties, I knew nothing except bombs and bullets and murder and mayhem
After the chaos, the shouting, the thunderous footsteps of the soldiers, the crackling radio updates from the army, the snap of gunfire, the blood on the ground, the icy numbness of shock, the chaos, the panic, the frenzied running for life, the bodies of family, friends, neighbours dead on the pavement, the fear and the tears, something more than silence descended. After the gunfire and screaming had stopped, a palpable rage rose.
As the smell of death and gunpowder still hung heavy in the air and the blood ran into drains, universes were knocked off their axis. In those minutes, generations of lives were altered, paths and destinies were forged that would see a bloody and brutal war waged that filled the graveyards and jails. The bullets didn’t stop with the victims that day. They travelled down through the years, down through the generations. They are still travelling.
More than 3,500 men, women and children died here during our Troubles. Historians attest that Bloody Sunday was the main catalyst for IRA recruitment. In the days following the atrocity men and boys queued up to sign up to the IRA. The event had a devastating effect on the course of our Troubles. The bullets not only snuffed out 14 lives – one of the injured died several months after the incident – and those left behind but slaughtered the non-violent civil rights campaign. Nothing would ever be the same again. Not for my father, not for me, and not for my children.
I was born into the Troubles, three years after Bloody Sunday. Until I was in my twenties, I knew nothing except bombs and bullets and murder and mayhem. As children of the Troubles, we had very unusual experiences. My friend remembers as a child wandering out of nursery school to the little flower garden where a policeman in a white forensic suit was picking brain matter off the school’s sunflowers following a murder. While walking to the shop for sweets when I was seven years old, I saw the British army riddle a car full of IRA men who had just attacked their base. My friends had their houses raided by police, their fathers killed, their fathers imprisoned. Catholic girls were tarred and feathered if they were thought to be having relationships with soldiers. Catholic boys were shot in the knees and ankles if they were caught doing crime. All normal.
When I was a teenager I saw a fresh-faced young policeman, not much older than myself, murdered in the street. The news on our televisions was of police officers gunned down on their doorsteps, Protestant workmen lined up and shot on country lanes, Catholics beaten to death for walking into the wrong area, bodies found on back roads. Our schools and cinemas and nightclubs would be evacuated due to bomb alerts, our shops burnt down by incendiary devices, there was nothing in our city centres except burnt-out buildings and army checkpoints.
Catholic and Protestants were educated separately, socialised separately and many didn’t meet someone from “the other side” until they were at university. The soundtrack of our young lives was Wham, Bros, exploding bombs, gunfire and Lambeg drums in the marching season. We walked on glass-strewn streets to get to teenage discos, which sometimes had to lock down because of riots raging on the street outside. All normal.
We had been brought up on a diet of daily horror, so much so that when peace broke out after the Good Friday Agreement, a lot of us had to adjust to a new normal. It felt uneasy, unnatural. We lived in a state of ceaseless readiness and hypervigilance and had become accustomed and desensitised and numb. We almost had to feel again, given permission to hope.
I met my husband the year before the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998 and peace was made permanent. We lived in West Belfast. Our street was nicknamed “RPG Avenue” due to the fact that the IRA frequently used it to fire rockets at passing police patrols. It was a stone’s throw from the Belfast peace lines – huge 25ft-high iron, brick, steel structures running for miles separating Catholic and Protestant housing estates. Gates would be opened during the day and closed at night to stop attacks. All normal.
We had both seen so much by our early twenties we didn’t want to see much more. We were planning to leave this place and go make a new life in America, raise our children in a place that doesn’t steal their innocence, somewhere where life isn’t just as hard, where life isn’t just as cheap. Somewhere, anywhere but Northern Ireland.
The Omagh bomb in 1998, when 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twins, were murdered by the Real IRA – republicans opposed to the Good Friday Agreement and peace – solidified that notion. It was another cruel, brutal, and unthinkable atrocity when hatred had snuffed out innocent lives just as the Shankill bomb, the Enniskillen bomb, the Greysteel massacre and countless awful atrocities that had peppered our life’s journey before it.
Then the notion of Brexit was born and with it some of that toxicity which had poisoned our youth seeped back into society
But we believed the promises made in the Good Friday Agreement about peace, prosperity, hope and a new day and we stayed.
A government was made, Catholics and Protestants ruled together from Stormont. We bumped along the road to peace, getting knocked off course every so often. We endured summers of rioting when marching season runs into bonfire season and the scab is ripped off the wound again as people celebrate their various cultures and traditions – often offending the “other side” while doing so. It’s the way it always was, it’s the way it always will be. All normal.
But something was different. The killing had stopped, mostly. Sporadic murders were better than daily ones. People could enjoy going to bars without the fear of a gunman walking in and spraying the place with bullets. People didn’t automatically think “car bomb” if they saw an abandoned vehicle. Mindsets changed. People became more positive. Business thrived. Beautiful cosmopolitan city centres rose up from the ashes of abandoned and bombed buildings. A new Northern Ireland was born, one that was confident, quirky, resilient, interesting for reasons other than our Troubles and great “craic”.
When we were growing up we never saw tourists. No one ever wanted to come here, bar reporters. In these new days after the Good Friday Agreement, Japanese and American visitors flocked to the Falls and Shankill roads and the Bogside, taking pictures of locals from their shiny tour buses as if we were residents of some manner of zoo.
Troubles tourism was big business. Hotels sprung up, new restaurants, museums recollecting our histories from every angle imaginable. For the most part we got used to positivity, which had been in very short supply for decades. It wasn’t perfect. Our peace was still fragile. But we made plans, we had hope, we had a future.
Then the notion of Brexit was born and with it some of that toxicity which had poisoned our youth seeped back into society. For the first time in a long time it made people think profoundly about their identities, a complex contemplation. Northern Ireland is a mishmash of people who think of themselves as either Irish and aligned to the Republic of Ireland, or British, aligned to England, among others of course. People held tightly to their sense of identity, growling at those they perceived were trying to steal it.
Talk of hard borders between the north and south of Ireland – harking back to the Troubles when movement was restricted by the army – disturbed the ordinary nationalist person who mostly voted against Brexit. And worse, it galvanised dissident republicans who vowed to bomb and shoot any manner of border structure. There were real fears that type of action would reignite the violence and restart the Troubles.
But the border had to go somewhere, and it went down the middle of the Irish Sea. Beyond the complexities with trade and regulations, members of the loyalist and unionist community – who mostly voted in favour of Brexit – were outraged by this symbolic severing of the ties between England and home.
They see the sea border as yet another stripping back of their Britishness. To provide a measure of how fiercely people here hold dear to their identities, you need only look at the flag protests. Ten years ago, politicians in Belfast decided that the union flag would only be flown at City Hall on designated days as opposed to all year round. City Hall was attacked by loyalists, windows smashed, and two full weeks of ferocious rioting and street blockades brought Northern Ireland to a standstill.
A stroll along the Shankill Road with its 30ft murals of the Queen and union flags flown from most lamp posts roars that this particular corner of Belfast is more British than Birmingham. The people there are wedded firmly to their Britishness, they wear it proudly on their chests. So, it was a given that anger over the Northern Ireland protocol – which saw the introduction of the Irish Sea border – would spill over onto those very streets in April of last year.
Twenty-three years after the Good Friday Agreement was signed, young, masked men, who were born into peace, lobbed petrol bombs onto hijacked buses and threw missiles over the peace line at their Catholic neighbours in violence that saw almost 30 police officers injured.
Five nights of ferocious rioting, the worst seen in Northern Ireland for years, only ceased as a mark of respect to the Queen after Prince Philip died, again a mark of their loyalty and devotion to the British sovereign.
There continues to be marches and rallies and protests that bring thousands of loyalists onto the streets to vent their fury over the protocol.
In many ways Northern Ireland has come a long way from those dark days in 1972 and in many ways, in many places we are still there, unable to shake off the shackles of our past.
We can never be accused of being a progressive place. But at least we are trying, albeit 20 years after everyone else.
Long gone are the days when our playparks are chained up on Sundays so that children will honour the Sabbath instead of enjoying themselves – although our shops still don’t open until 1pm on that day. Same-sex marriage has only been legal for a year now. Abortion has been legal for just two. Both issues caused major contention and controversy.
Our peace lines have got higher and our some of our young people, who have no recollection of the Troubles, act on the romanticised narrative of the violence here, spoon-fed by those who were no doubt damaged by the darkness and brutality of the past.
I watched a young woman – journalist Lyra McKee – murdered by dissident republicans and die at my feet at a riot in Creggan
Violence is still there. We have almost weekly “punishment shootings” – where paramilitaries shoot young people in the knees as a “punishment” for perceived wrongdoing.
We still have riots and it’s the young people, often already struggling to navigate life in socially and economically deprived areas, who are burdened with a criminal record that will put further barriers to a job and a good fulfilling life in their way. We have perfected the vicious circles in this corner of the world.
Our politics has got more extreme. It seems in the last few years we have dug our trenches deeper and have moved away from reconciliation to whatever this new normal is – a constant jarring of one another. It can be hard to watch.
I look back on these 50 years and how far we have come, and how far we have still yet to travel.
The Good Friday Agreement was signed and we were promised peace over 24 years ago. Since then, in this peace time my four children, their friends and this young generation have experience of bomb scares, explosions, murders, punishment shootings, raging riots, sectarian attacks. I watched a young woman – journalist Lyra McKee – murdered by dissident republicans and die at my feet at a riot in Creggan. Because of my work as a journalist, my children have experience of paramilitary intimidation. Children along the peace lines in Belfast still live with fear, they witness hatred spill over into street violence. There is so much division and awful sectarianism growing like poisonous weeds unabated in places.
Our problem is that our wounds have never been allowed to heal, not properly. This weekend my city, Derry, will mark the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, a day that left an indelible mark on everyone in this city. Yet in some loyalist communities, flags celebrating the Parachute Regiment – by whose hand the victims died – have been erected to goad the grieving families. The flags cheer the murder of teenagers and torment the now pensioners left behind. That’s how we do things here. All normal.
In the summers monstrously high bonfires will be erected in both Catholic and Protestant areas by young people. They will be furnished with crude and offensive signs, effigies and even coffins mocking the dead, as well as the flags and symbols of the “other side”, to be set ablaze as families watch on. All normal.
But it’s not normal. We may think it is because we have ourselves normalised the most bizarre and hate-filled behaviour.
This is Northern Ireland. This is how we do things. In the worst days of the Troubles, people just got on with life as the streets burnt. People walked past white sheet-covered dead bodies to get to work. People looked forward to “bomb damage sales” to get a bargain. Children had pipe bombs thrown at them on the way to school. But still we carried on regardless. That “take-it-on-the-chin” mindset now needs to change if we are to cure this sectarian cancer that is still poisoning our society.
My children and the young people of this bright new generation, who were promised so much, deserve so much more.
Leona O’Neill has been a journalist in Northern Ireland for 24 years, working for the likes of the ‘Belfast Telegraph’, ‘Irish News’, Al Jazeera and Vice News. She is currently a lecturer in journalism at Ulster University and is an avid campaigner for journalism safety
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