WARNING – Some readers may find this article upsetting

In this, my final post about the city of Derry/Londonderry, I’m going to try and explain what led to the terrible events of 30^th January 1972 – Bloody Sunday. Of all the articles I’ve written about the Bogside, this one is the most harrowing, but it would be unforgiveable of me not to include it.

If you cast your mind back to the previous post, the Battle of the Bogside led to the British Army being brought into Derry to help keep the peace. No deaths resulted from the battle but there were more than a thousand injuries, many of them serious. The arrival of the army ended the violence in Derry (at least for a while) but the Bogside events had led to trouble in Armagh, Newry, Omagh, and particularly Belfast where six people were killed. One was a Protestant, Four were Catholics shot by the RUC, including a 20 year old British soldier home on leave from Germany, and a 9 year-old boy in his bedroom in the Divis flats.

The other fatality was a man shot by a Loyalist sniper helping people flee their homes in Bombay Street which had been set ablaze. Virtually the whole of the street was destroyed, and in total some 150 homes were burnt out: The army was now drafted in to West Belfast as well. In September, to prevent similar sectarian altercations, a ‘temporary peace line’ was drawn up behind Bombay Street separating the Protestant Shankhill Road and Catholic Falls Road areas – a peace line that is still here today but far more substantial.

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Originally posted 2025-04-23 14:23:34.

WARNING – Some readers may find this article upsetting

My travels have taken me to all sorts of places: Some have been exciting, some a haven of peace and tranquility, and others just fascinating, but then there have been places like Derry – where The Troubles in Northern Ireland began. For those of us who want to try and understand how and why the conflict happened, I’ve embarked on writing several articles to try and make some sense of it all, but please bear in mind that I didn’t write the original script, I’m just recording what happened. I realise that not everyone wants to read topics like this, and so I’ve included a Trigger Warning at the top of the page to warn people about the content before they start reading it.

The Civil Rights marches that I previously discussed, were intended to be peaceful protests by Catholics, not to campaign for a United Ireland, but for equal rights with Protestants, and although Northern Ireland had more protestants than Catholics, in Derry it was the other way round. Both the Duke Street March and the Long March from Belfast ended with violence in the Catholic Bogside, and locals put much of the blame for that onto the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).

After the way those marches ended up, if Catholics in Derry had any doubts before, they now knew for definite where the allegiances of Northern Ireland’s police force lie – and they weren’t going to put up with being the victims any longer; and so to prevent the RUC from entering the Bogside, barricades started to be erected. On a building at the corner of St Columb’s Street (as it was then, Free Derry Corner now), the words “You are now entering Free Derry” were painted to let the RUC know that if they couldn’t respect peaceful protests, then any future attacks on Bogside Catholics would be met with a similar response.

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Originally posted 2025-04-12 10:59:32.

 WARNING – Some readers may find this article upsetting

During my series of posts about Derry/Londonderry, I’ve attempted to show how the city eventually became the spark that lit the fuse for the so-called ‘Troubles’ of Northern Ireland, and although hostilities officially came to an end with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, it didn’t necessarily mean that the Protestant and Catholic communities were immediately one big happy family again, and as my previous post about the Creggan and Fountain Estates showed, it was going to take a quite a bit more time for the wounds to heal, and these posts about the Bogside will attempt to show you why.

Those of you who did manage to read that previous post may also remember that Paul, my taxi driver, dropped me off at a café just outside the city walls, which meant that I had to walk up Waterloo Street into The Bogside which, as the name suggests, was once a boggy area lying underneath the ‘Hill of Doire’ where St Columba set up his first monastery, and where St Columba’s Cathedral now stands. As I walked along the pathway under the city walls it was difficult to find a spot which wasn’t covered in broken glass. I’ve been to numerous places where broken glass has been a problem, but this was the worst I’d ever come across, and then it dawned on me why that might have been. On the city walls above is a large wire fence to protect buildings from being petrol bombed, and all this glass could well have been a return compliment. I don’t know for sure of course, but it would have made sense.

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Originally posted 2025-04-02 14:59:31.

My previous eight posts about Derry/Londonderry largely concentrated on how the city grew to become an integral part of the Anglo-Irish conflict. Trouble started when the Norman/English were invited over to Ireland to help the King of Leinster regain his throne, but all it achieved was a simmering resentment that periodically boiled over into further hostility. Becoming ever more complex, these hostilities involved not just Ireland and England, but Scotland as well, and to complicate matters even further, not all the Irish involved were Catholic and not all the English/Scottish were Protestant.

The Partition of Ireland in 1921 was supposed to resolve the problem once and for all, but it didn’t, and during the second half of the 20^th century ‘The Troubles’ began when a civil rights march in Derry descended into chaos. For the next thirty years Northern Ireland became embroiled in a bitter sectarian war that only officially ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

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Originally posted 2025-03-26 15:29:29.

In 1964 Bob Dylan released an album entitled ‘The Times They Are a – Changin’ and they certainly were: During the first half of the 20^th century, ordinary working men were expected to die for their country, women were expected to play second fiddle to men, and those who didn’t have white skin could expect nothing except discrimination – but by the end of the Second World War attitudes had started to change.

In the United States, Bob Dylan was just one of many folk singers who were increasingly turning their attention towards writing and singing songs protesting against the Vietnam War and social injustices. These ‘Protest’ songs were closely connected to the Civil Rights Movement, and as Georgia congressman and activist John Lewis said “If it hadn’t been for music, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings”.

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Originally posted 2024-10-12 09:19:52.

In previous articles, we started out by recounting how Derry was founded, through to why the English were invited into the country and then how eventually they took control. The argument about whether Ireland was Catholic or Protestant appeared to have been settled when the Protestant English king William III defeated the Catholic king, James II at the Battle of the Boyne, but the history of Ireland has never been that simple.

After that historic Battle Ireland continued to be ruled by a succession of Protestant monarchs as part of the United Kingdom and Ireland, but the Irish population as a whole remained mostly Catholic. A succession of failures by the British government to appease Catholic concerns (not least the Great Famine of the mid-19^th century) led to calls for the country to break from the union, and by the first part of the 20^th century the clamour for change was gathering pace.

As we’ve already seen, things were different in the north of the country where, since the Plantations, most of the Protestants lived – but not everyone who lived in the north were Protestant. To try and keep the majority of both sections of the Irish community happy, the government put forward a plan where six of the nine Ulster counties would be partitioned from the rest of Ireland. The three predominantly Catholic counties that were excluded were Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal. The aim of this plan was to provide independent Home Rule for both Catholics and Protestants, but which at the same time would remain part of the union under British jurisdiction.

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Originally posted 2024-09-28 11:22:26.