A black Sunday that just won’t pass

She went to the demonstration to show off her new coat she got for Christmas. Her mother had bought it on a down payment. With ten children she could not afford the coat her oldest daughter wanted so badly. After Bloody Sunday, Alana Burke never saw that jacket again. “I have no idea what happened to it.”

Burke still gets tears in her eyes when she talks about that particular Sunday in 1972, this Sunday exactly fifty years ago. What started as an afternoon “for fun” for her and a friend ended in the hospital. She was hit by a British Army armored car. Burke still has problems with her right leg. “The driver later said in a statement that he thought I was a dog. A dog.”

In an upper room of the Museum of Free Derry, a modest museum right on the spot where British soldiers carried out a massacre on January 30 in 1972, Alana Burke tells how that Sunday influenced the rest of her life. Every year they hold a commemoration, but this year it hits her extra. “They often ask me how to deal with such an event. Not. It will not work.”

Kevin McDaid and Joe McKinney also join, they were also at the demonstration. Their brothers Michael McDaid, 20, and William McKinney, 27, were shot dead – they were two of 14 innocent Catholic protesters killed. Fifteen others were injured.

They are now neatly groomed late sixties with walking shoes and reading glasses. They come from large Catholic families: Burke and McKinney were ten at home, McDaid had twelve siblings. They were then seventeen and eighteen years old and wanted to stand up for their civil rights. Catholics were oppressed in Northern Ireland and, for example, were only allowed to vote. It was the time of discriminatory window papers, Kevin McDaid recalls: “No Irish, no blacks, no dogs.”

Demonstrating was normal in those days, they took to the streets almost every week, they say. “Maybe there were some rocks thrown, but the atmosphere was relaxed that day,” says Joe McKinney. Until around four o’clock in the afternoon the first shots were fired. „I heard the sharp crack of the shots and knew: these are real bullets. I didn’t see Willie again, he had gone on his own because he wanted to take pictures. He worked at a local newspaper. It was only in the evening that I heard that he had been shot.” That Monday, his mother couldn’t stop crying. “That’s when I first heard what pain sounds like.”

Decades of struggle

Bloody Sunday is regarded as one of the darkest moments in British modern history. And an escalation of the Troubles, a nearly thirty-year struggle between Republican Catholics who want a reunification of Northern Ireland and Ireland and Protestant unionists who want to belong to the United Kingdom. It was not until 1998 that a peace agreement was reached, the Good Friday Agreement, which established self-government and virtually abolished the borders between Ireland and Northern Ireland. Relative calm returned. Tension lingers, though. For Catholics it is called Derry here, for Protestants Londonderry. Black graffiti has been painted over ‘London’ on road signs along the highway.

Brexit and the external border

The fragile peace is under extra pressure now that the United Kingdom has left the European Union; Suddenly those boundaries matter again. The UK and the EU are renegotiating the agreements they made about the EU’s external border in the Irish Sea, i.e. between the UK and Northern Ireland, so that no borders had to return to the island itself. But that border in the sea is causing great chagrin among Protestant Northern Irishmen who want to belong to the UK and now feel excluded.

Outside the museum, the high-rise flats have vanished, where Alana Burke was crushed and the boys fought their way through bullets, tear gas and panicked protesters. The low-rise buildings feature large murals of armored vehicles and protesters wearing gas masks. Placards announcing Sunday’s commemoration are everywhere, plus a billboard calling for a quick referendum on Irish reunification. A white wall near the memorial to the victims reads in large letters ‘There is no British justice’.

satisfaction

Because that is what bothers the next of kin: fifty years later, there is still no question of legal redress. None of the British soldiers have been prosecuted, although it has been established that they had no reason to fire. In 2010, Judge Lord Saville, after years of investigation, made short shrift of previous statements by the British side that Catholic youths had been the first to open fire. They had been unarmed and innocent.

There was talk of prosecuting ‘soldier F’, who probably shot William McKinney, but the British public prosecutor decided last year that the evidence against him was unlikely to stand and dropped the case. The next of kin’s request for a legal review of this decision and the decision not to prosecute some other soldiers is still pending.

The family members see in this long legal history a confirmation that their rights and emotions do not matter to the United Kingdom. Look at the UK government’s controversial proposal, Joe McKinney says, to draw a line under the Troubles because it would “help Northern Ireland reconcile”. Criminal investigations into the entire thirty-year period would according to the plan are no longer possible – it would amount to amnesty for all. “For whatever you’ve done, theft, murder, rape, it’s all buried.”

Kevin McDaid doesn’t expect any prosecution at all. According to him, the British government is trying to stretch everything as long as possible until the soldiers are dead. “But that doesn’t mean we can stop fighting.” Although they have to pay for their lawyers themselves, while the government pays for F and the other soldiers. “And you can count on them getting help from the best lawyers.” And then the soldiers are just the ones who pulled the trigger. “The higher officials are always protected.”

Economic growth

Since the UK’s exit from the EU, trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland has increased significantly. Business benefits of the current status of Northern Ireland: in practice they are still part of the internal market of the EU, but they also belong to the UK. And the Johnson government is seeking to further limit controls of goods between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK in new negotiations with Brussels.

Controls or not, so far in Derry they have not noticed any of this economic growth. “No new factories have opened here in thirty years,” says McKinney, “this corner of Northern Ireland gets little attention or money from Belfast.” Derry is indeed not rich. Five of Northern Ireland’s ten poorest neighborhoods are located in this district. In the suburbs, the front yards are bare, except for litter containers and some porcelain dogs. Join the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, is painted on walls in Creggan, a Nationalist neighborhood.

From research from the Queen’s University in Belfast shows that, despite tensions between the fanatic flanks, the identity issue is becoming less and less of concern to residents of Northern Ireland. The majority of Northern Irish people, 42 percent, no longer see themselves as unionists or nationalists, as they did five years ago. Young people, in particular, don’t seem to care. Logical, Kevin McDaid grumbles, they have something else on their mind. “Whether they are Protestant or Catholic, the question is whether young people have a future here. My cousin has a degree and is a chemical engineer, but he works in a shoe store. There is simply no work.”

Northern Ireland’s parliament elections are due in May and the nationalist party Sinn Féin, once the ‘political wing’ of the IRA, seems to be doing well there. One of their election promises is a referendum on Irish reunification. And Northern Irish people themselves also think that such a reunification has become more likely after Brexit: 58 percent consider it real, 20 percentage points more than a few years ago. It seems to McKinney, McDaid and Burke great too. They don’t even have a British passport, they feel Irish. But will it ever come to that? Kevin McDaid: “I don’t think anymore while I’m alive.”