Political Sunday: Bloody Sunday and The Battle of Bogside

A combination of last week's celebration of "Bloody Sunday", Saint Patrick's Day, and my tribal homeland inspires this non Washington Landscape post.

 

Last weekend there were remarkable remembrances of the march across the bridge in Selma, Alabama. And for good reason - the event, now referred to as "Bloody Sunday", brought about a significant change in civil rights. Besides being the 50th anniversary, this years remembrance of that day had added meaning given the events in Ferguson, New York as well as other communities.

 

The term Bloody Sunday calls up in my mind another protest march that turned much more violent and had very long lasting consequences and lead to many more deaths and acts of violence for decades afterward. A civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland ended with dozens of people shot including 14 killed. Bloody Sunday was recalled by the band U2. The band would often introduce the song as not a "rebel song", as there was in Ireland a genre of rebel music glorifying the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

 

A bit of footage of the Bloody Sunday event. And for those that want to dig deeper into the Troubles, a documentary on the Battle of Bogside which took place three years earlier and resulted in the British Army taking over policing in the Bogside which eventually led to the Bloody Sunday Disaster. The Battle of Bogside was truly a remarkable event that should have led to rapid political change. The lack of substantive action by the United Kingdom was the real tragedy.