Remember Bloody Sunday – the civil war in Northern Ireland

Sunday, January 30, 1972: In the Northern Irish city of Derry (officially Londonderry), thousands demonstrate peacefully against the continued discrimination of the Catholic minority in the part of the Emerald Isle that belongs to Great Britain. Suddenly British paratroopers opened fire from their automatic rifles. A few minutes later, 13 Catholic demonstrators lay shot dead on the street. A fourteenth later dies from his injuries.

Bloody Sunday 1972 and the aftermath

The "Bloody Sunday" in Derry went down in history in a tragic way - as the largest massacre of its own citizens sanctioned by the British government in the 20th century. In June 2010, after a 12-year investigation, a truth commission set up by the government concluded that the army had fired on the demonstrators first and without provocation.

Prime Minister David Cameron then publicly apologized for "Bloody Sunday." What happened that Sunday was wrong, he said in the House of Commons. "It was neither justified - nor justifiable."

“Bloody Sunday” led many Northern Irish Catholics to flock to the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Catholic paramilitary organization with its political arm Sinn Fein. The civil war that broke out in Northern Ireland in 1969 thus reached a new dimension.

The Northern Ireland conflict as a media project in 1973

As part of a media project on the Northern Ireland conflict, I visited the hotspots of the conflict in Derry and Belfast with two colleagues in the summer of 1973. In the Bogside, the Catholic part of Derry, traces of “Bloody Sunday” were still visible: bullet holes and traces of blood on the walls of houses.

Contacts with representatives of the two wings of the IRA (Provisional and Official IRA) and the respective Sinn Fein factions as well as connections with members of the Protestant camp gave us a direct, sometimes dangerously close insight into the activities of the rival camps and into the combat zones with almost daily demonstrations, street fights and bomb attacks.

There was also a ferment in the Republic of Ireland in the summer of 1973, as we discovered during a trip to the south of the island. Protest actions that we observed in Dublin were directed against, among other things, high rent prices and housing speculation.