The Trouble with Derry

I feel raw. Rawer than I have in a long time, and I daresay that's a good thing. I appreciate Northern Ireland, but I can't pretend that I had a fun day in the city of Derry, on the border of that country and the Republic of Ireland.

Or maybe it's Londonderry. That's an important distinction—technically it's Londonderry, but if you're a nationalist, one of the ones who aligns more with the Republic than the United Kingdom, then you're not too happy about that. This city has the only complete walled city centre in Ireland, but a focus on its historical significance would do a disservice to what happened here much more recently than that.

We're not dealing with ancient history of pagans and myths anymore. Bloody Sunday was in 1972, and it was only in 2010 that those who were murdered during the peaceful protest were declared innocent after the longest public inquiry in British or Irish history. Derry was an epicentre for the tumultuous strife across religious and political lines, of terrorism and bombs and chaos, where thousands were killed and the scars still bleed.

All under the guise of an innocuous name. Simply the Troubles.

There is a walled interior city in Londonderry, a unique anomaly that doesn't exist anywhere else in Ireland and was quite cool to walk around and gaze at the historical city as it stood hundreds of years ago (much smaller than the sprawling mass that exists now, with fewer Primark shopping plazas and traffic lights). I think it would be possible to visit Londonderry and focus on the distant past, on the siege and the heroic moment where the Apprentice Boys shut the city gates in 1688.

I found it impossible to concentrate on that, with the immediacy of the surrounding area. Apologies to any students of Irish history who might be reading this if I screw up any of the facts. This is all just part of my interpretation of the place and the past.

In the early 1900s, Ireland was a part of the British Empire and stretched from Cork to Antrim and everything in between. That's not to say that it was always an amicable thing—judging from some of the sites we visited, like Enniscorthy and Vinegar Hill, seat of the 1798 rebellion, and Dublin with the 1916 Easter Rising, I'd venture a guess that it often wasn't amicable. That's been a constant theme I've discovered, the process by which citizens of the Emerald Isle came into their own identity. In different parts of the country, the attitudes were different. By and large, nationalist sentiments ran strongest amongst those in the southern part of Ireland, and religion reflected that—these were predominantly Catholic, a manifestation of a rejection of English Protestant rule.

Alright, we're good so far? In 1921, there's an Anglo-Irish Treaty, and Ireland becomes two countries. There's the Republic of Ireland, which is what people usually mean nowadays when they say “Ireland”, and there's Northern Ireland, still as much a part of the U.K. As Wales or Scotland. Northern Ireland is much smaller, just the six counties of Fermanagh, Tyrone, Armaugh, Down, Antrim, and Londonderry. The capital city is Belfast, on the eastern coast.

That isn't the end of the story, by any means, because there's considerable animosity between those unionist loyal to Great Britain in the north, and those nationalists in the south who wanted to be a free state. Londonderry is somewhat uniquely situated, in that there was a very strong Catholic, nationalist majority, but the political elite was controlled by the English protestants. In effect, it was really hard to be a Catholic here following the separation of Northern Ireland and Ireland, and these people faced unemployment, poor living conditions in the so-called Bogside part of the city, and discrimination.

Follow the historical context, and in the 60s we start to see the emergence of the civil rights movement. Londonderry was a natural place for that to boom in Northern Ireland, with protests in the streets and a moniquer of Free Derry established as a symbol of freedom and equality.

In the streets the citizens protested against the powers that be. Those powers were the British Empire, no small force to be reckoned with, and it created a clear imbalance of power. An imbalance of power with riot police and guns.

“I can't believe the news today,” Bono begins on “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” Unbelievable is what it was. On January 30, 1972, the British Parachute Regime responded to a peaceful protest on the streets of Londonderry by opening fire. Can I repeat that date, just in case you skimmed over it? January 30, 1972. People had been to the moon by that time. We have seen ancient ruins, but this was yesterday in the grand scheme of things. You don't need to try to imagine what the streets would have looked like way back then or what different way the river would have ran, because the city as it is, plain if not somewhat grim, is as it was on Bloody Sunday.

We stood where the protestors stood and died. We passed people who could easily have been there that day.

If that's not unsettling enough, there was eventually an inquiry to determine where the blame should lay. The protestors were absolved of any blame and were labelled as innocent, and the killings were unjustified and unjustifiable. That decision was released in 2010. Again, let me repeat that date: 2010.

We visited the Free Derry museum, a chilling collection of memorabilia right in sight of the events of Bloody Sunday and along the concourse of murals and monuments lining the Bogside. A photograph of a protestor, taken moments before he was shot to death, his jacket in a glass case with the bullet hole through the back shoulder eerily visible. The camera that filmed the atrocity before the student journalist became a victim. A chilling vision into a past that, no matter how you spin it, is not that past.

I never felt unsafe, walking the streets of Londonderry. But I certainly didn't feel welcome, felt like there's a heaviness in this place. The civilized western world is fully capable of being barbaric in the name of arbitrary divisions. And if the fact that a European country once implemented a genocide of Jewish people and Rosa Parks was forced to sit in the back of a bus is too far removed from the comforting picture we have of 2014, remember that young people with dreams, ambitions, friends, lovers, a life, as well as a vision of a peaceful future were murdered point blank during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Keep in mind that I had my driver's licence in 2005 when the IRA announced an end to its armed campaign in Northern Ireland. It wasn't long ago at all, and a four hour direct flight to Dublin carries with it another reminder: it's not far away from us, either.

Try to keep that in mind. I certainly will.

Cheers,

rb