Hello. Welcome to Irish passport. Let’s do it. Welcome to the Irish passport. I’m Tim Mc Inerney. I’m Naomi O’Leary. We’re friends. Cé he bhfuil tú Naomi? Go hana mhaith ar fad, Tim. This is your passport to Irish culture, history and politics. I’m recording. 1 2 3. OK.
(Singing) Overcome! We shall overcome. Londonderry This was the peaceful prelude to days of rioting and violence. The beginning of a new and bloody chapter in the grim history of the city. As the Apprentice Boys Parade, a traditional Protestant march, wound its way through the street, there was no hint of the violence that to rip Londonderry apart. It was only when the march was almost over that tempers began to get frayed. The crowd linked arms, and within minutes, Londonderry was in the grip of the most savage and senseless rioting it has yet seen — with Bogside, the battleground.
It is time that we decided, Catholic and Protestant, that our enemy is not the ordinary working man who differs in religion. Our enemy of the Ulster Unionist Party and particularly the Ulster Unionist Party’s insurance policy: The Loyal Orange Order.
How and why? Fourteen unarmed civilians were shot dead by the British Army on the 30th of January, 1972 — an event which has fuelled nationalist anger for a generation.
The government is satisfied that British soldiers recklessly fired on unarmed civilians in Derry yesterday and that any denial of this continues and increases the provocation offered by present British policies both with the minority in Northern Ireland and to us.
What happened should never, ever have happened. The families of those who died should not have had to live with the pain and the hurt of that day and with a lifetime of loss. Some members of our armed forces acted wrongly. The government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the armed forces. And for that, on behalf of the government, indeed, on behalf of our country, I am deeply sorry.
In Derry, shots were fired as officers dealt with petrol bombs from close to the city walls and at police patrols.
Over seventy petrol bombs and two explosive devices were hurled at police and what they described as a prolonged and sustained attack, while police fired four baton rounds in the bogside. A senior police officer said while many young people are involved, it’s clear the violence has been instrumented by a more sinister adult dissident Republican element.
Welcome back to the Irish Passport podcast. You might have guessed there from that intro that today we’ll be talking about the city of Derry, its dramatic role in Irish history and how that legacy continues to reverberate today.
Now, this is actually the first of two episodes that we recently made in Northern Ireland during one of the most contentious periods for the province. That’s the peak of the marching season, around July the 12th. The marching season is a huge celebration of Protestant and unionist culture. It takes place all over Northern Ireland during summer season. And in the past, it has often been mired in controversy and violence. In our next episode, we’ll be visiting some of the bonfires and marches at the very center of those celebrations. But for the time being, we’re going to focus in on Derry.
Marching season actually isn’t such a big thing in Derry. The city has its own celebrations in August. The Apprentice Boys parades, which are taken as an example of how such originally Protestant unionist parts of culture can be made more inclusive and a successful cross-community event. But this year, tensions were mounting in the city in the run up to July the 12th. And we wanted to visit to find out why.
The clips you just heard there at the beginning, give a hint about how Derry has been at the very center of divisions in Northern Ireland for decades. This was where the civil rights marchers challenged the systematic discrimination of the Northern Irish state back in the 1960s, and it was also where the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972 shocked the world, laying the foundations for 30 years of conflict in the province.
The final clips that you heard there only date to last month. Those were news reports describing unrest that was happening just as we arrived in the city on the 10th of July. An alarming sign after 20 years of relative peace and a potential warning of how political uncertainty is fueling tensions.
In particular, the mounting chaos of Brexit negotiations and the continued economic neglect of the city as we’ll hear, have stoked fears the Derry’s fragile peace could be threatened once again.
First of all, let’s explain, for anyone who doesn’t know, that it’s a bit unusual for people from the Republic of Ireland — like ourselves — to travel north of the border during the 12th of July period. After all, this is a period when symbols of Irishness are burned on bonfires, and it’s often been a trigger for intercommunity violence in the past. So, rightly or wrongly, there’s a bit of a feeling that we’re not really welcome in Northern Ireland during the period.
Right. And this feeling was reflected actually in loads and loads of warnings that we got from different people from North and South before we made the trip. And during the trip and after the trip, actually. In particular, the fact that our car had a southern registration plate was a worry to us anyway, because we had to be careful where to park it or where to drive it even on this particular week.
Now, some of those fears might have been overblown, and some of them could have been completely justified. But, the fear itself is real about this period and it reflects attitudes towards the 12th in the South. There’s not that much knowledge, there’s a bit of puzzlement, and there’s a deep wariness and a general feeling that it’s better to stay away.
Right. Exactly. And that’s exactly what we didn’t want to play into, right?
Correct. We wanted to do the opposite thing and try and understand this incredibly significant cultural tradition from all angles.
Yeah, sure. And I think maybe for our international listeners, it’s worth mentioning that there is nuances here that exist between the north and the south. You know, there is whether it’s for good or for bad. A huge gap in lived experience at play, you know, on both sides of that border. But like, there’s nothing even vaguely comparable really to the marching season in the Republic of Ireland — certainly not in any meaningful scale, anyway. So people like ourselves can be hugely ignorant about the intricacies involved. You know, when you actually grow up within this cultural context and we just wanted to admit that straight off the bat.
Yeah. So if we’ve overlooked anything or missed something and you’d like to let us know, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us on our Facebook page or @PassportIrish on Twitter.
Here we are.
That’s it. You can see it.
Look at that. There’s a “hard border, soft border, no border” 1916 Society’s poster.
Here’s some fireworks for sale.
Immediately (laughing). So the border is a bit more visible than normal, actually, because there’s anti-Brexit posters.
That is true. Yeah. Otherwise you would never really know.
And suddenly we’ve got miles.
And we’ve got miles! OK, we’ve got all the all the markers. Otherwise, the countryside is the same.
Tim, we are now in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The border, is it just over to our left? There’s a farm to our left, and it looks like the water probably goes right through that field. Because you can see on the map that it literally runs along there to our left. And then it goes through, like, a little pond or little lake that’s over there. The border goes straight through that. There was no way that this can be a hard border.
This isn’t possible.
It’s not. No, it’s not possible. Look at this. It’s picture postcard beautiful.
So, I mean you would have to somehow block all of this? This is open, open, open, rolling fields. You could just… You could drive 100 tractors through it.
And the road is just winding between it. Little clusters of cows on either side. Little black and white cows.
Tensions were high as we pulled into the city of Derry. There had been a few nights of low-level unrest in the Catholic and nationalist Bogside area, with groups of young people chucking stuff at police and trying to attack the small Protestant stronghold, the Fountain, nearby. When we arrived in Derry late on the night of the 10th, that computer that was giving us directions that you heard there, directed us right into the riot.
Sure. Right. Now, and I should say a word for Naomi’s calm behind the wheel when the satnav tried to kill us there, because we did you know, we did actually just turn a corner and drive straight, really, into a flaming van. But you maneuvered around it very calmly, Naomi.
It was actually really interesting to be put right in the situation of the centre of the riot, which we wouldn’t have chosen to go into because it had been reported on by lots of media outlets as a riot. But even though I’m using that word, it’s a it’s an overstatement, really. You know, it was a it was a pretty calm riot. It was basically a bunch of kids, you know, children. And the youngest of them looked to be ten or eleven, with a few teenagers standing around as well.
Sure. Right. We heard in some other local reporting that the van had been hijacked earlier on in the evening and set alight. And over a few nights, these young people had been throwing stones and petrol bombs at the police. And the police were very clearly avoiding confrontation. We could see them watching from the city walls above. And that’s something that has very special historical significance, as we’ll see.
Yeah, we should say that this kind of scene is not representative at all of Derry in recent years. Local people we spoke to were unanimously annoyed by the disorder — and kind of puzzled about why the kids were doing it. And they also told us that dissident Republicans were orchestrating it to try and goad the police into a confrontation. And according to the police, the group behind it is a paramilitary splinter group who call themselves the New IRA. Later on, gunshots were fired at police.
Right. So this seems to be a relatively new development. And we’ll look at the potential motivations behind it soon. What’s interesting to note straightaway, though, is that these kids in the Bogside that we saw, you know, facing off with the police on the hill above, they were playing out a community conflict that has been taking place right there in those very same locations for literally centuries. In so many ways, Derry is a kind of ground zero for the cultural and political divide in Northern Ireland as a whole.
I look at Derry as being that sort of the Jerusalem for unionism. This was their sieged city. This is one of their great stands. And, you know, in 1689, which led to the Battle of the Boyne and cemented the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland and also the Protestant Throneship in the United Kingdom.
That’s Steve Bradley. He’s a regeneration consultant and a commentator who spoke to us in the Great Hall of the historic Magee University in the city. We’ll be hearing more from him in a moment. But Tim, maybe we should quickly review how this city became such a contested space in the first place.
Okay, right. Well, I mean, Steve’s metaphor of Derry as the Jerusalem of Northern Ireland is quite a good one, actually. You know, because since its establishment as a colonial settlement, this city has never stopped being a hugely symbolic contested space.
Of course, famously, this actually extends to the name of the city itself. So nationalists and people in the Republic of Ireland almost always refer to the city as Derry, which comes from the Old Irish word Daire, which means the place where oak trees grow. Unionist and people in Britain, however, will often refer to the city as Londonderry, which was the name given to the town after it was settled by English and Scottish colonists in the 17th century.
Sure. Right. So you’ll often see it on maps as Derry/Londonderry, which has given it the nickname sometimes Stroke City. The official name in Northern Ireland, I believe, is just Londonderry, while the official name and the Republic of Ireland is Derry. But even north of the border, you’ll often see that London part painted over on street signs.
Saying Londonderry would be pretty strange for us because we’ve always known it as Derry. And it’s also a bit of a mouthful. It’s a lot more syllables in there. So, we’ve decided the style of this podcast is to stick with Derry.
Anyway. People have been living in Derry since at least the sixth century. Saint Colmcille actually had a monastery there called Doire Colmcille, which means Colmcille’s oak grove. During the colonial plantations of Ireland, in the seventeenth century, though, we see this huge wave of English and Scottish settlers building this walled citadel in Derry. That’s the same walled city that you can see today. We talked a bit about these plantations in our first episode. These were settlers who were being sent over in their thousands to establish a new Protestant English-speaking colony in Ireland. It was contemporaneous colonization of America are not that different, really. The native Irish, who were, of course, Gaelic and Catholic, were driven off the land in this region, which kind of set the tone for this profound ethno-political divide that we still have today.
This history provides the rough template for the two communities that exist — side by side — in Northern Ireland today. Descendants of the English and Scottish planters are still mostly Protestant, and because of their strong historical links with England and Scotland, they largely support a continued union with Britain. Descendants of the quote unquote “native Irish” are mostly Catholic, and many of them support joining the independent republic to the south. That’s why people still use Protestant and Catholic as a kind of shorthand for the two political factions on the islands.
Now, if you ever visit Derry, you’ll see immediately from the streetscape of the city that it was a planned fortified settlement. In fact, some of our American listeners might recognize the exact same street patterns in colonial settlements on the East Coast of the USA, because, of course, the English were building similar garrison towns around there at the same time.
Same template.
Yeah, same template. You know, it’s kind of like an IKEA city. Derry’s construction was funded by a selection of London guilds, and that’s why it was given the prefix London on its completion in 1613 and where it got that name, Londonderry.
So these seventeenth century settlements were essentially about gaining political control of Ireland, but they were also about promoting colonial culture in Ireland through the transplantation of whole populations. So cities like this were supposed to be beacons from which the colonial English culture could be disseminated and eventually, they hoped, replace the culture of the native Irish.
Right. Of course. And that, of course, never happened. That plantation never really went any further than the north of Ireland. And what’s interesting in that context is that settler cities like this were, of course, deeply dependent on the native Irish that they were trying to replace. You know, they needed them. They needed them for trade and labour and the like. So you see the establishment of a colonial English-speaking Protestant population within the walls of Derry and a kind of counter-city of native Irish growing up outside the walls. So from the beginning, you have the native Irish both being an economic necessity and a constant military threat to the city.
It’s something that really left an imprint on the city up to the present day. So the city walls still point their cannons down to where the native Irish once gathered. But today, that area is a major nationalist residential district known as the Bogside.
The walls, amazingly, are still functional fortifications. On top of the 17th century, ramparts, massive iron structures are built on top of that — kind of gates — which have been extended even higher with this kind of another layer of dense wire mesh. How far would you say it goes up? Maybe 10 metres, I suppose.
Several stories. Several stories proposed to a picture on Twitter. I took a picture of Tim just like gazing up at this huge fencing, like and he’s just minute beside it.
Right. So that fence, built on a fence, built on a fence, built on a rampart — that’s all still to to shield a Protestant enclave that’s on the other side. And to stop projectiles being hurled at it from below. It’s an absolutely amazing example of history — really, quite literally — being built upon history, you know. So each stratum tells its own story.
One of the most famous conflicts that these walls have seen was the great siege of Derry in 1689. That was when the city was surrounded by an Irish Catholic army for 105 days. The holding out of the city is still celebrated every August by the British identifying residents of the city in what are called Apprentice Boys parades.
Three hundred years after that, though, Derry found itself kind of politically under siege in a very different way. After Ireland’s war of independence in 1922, which you know well, after listening to our podcast episodes I’m sure, listeners. After that independence, the island was split in two. And of course, a border was drawn around the majority Protestant Unionist counties in the north, and that part would remain in the UK — and that’s a modern day in Northern Ireland. The 26 southern counties of the island became an independent state, which is now the Republic of Ireland. Derry, however, found itself just inside this new jurisdiction of Northern Ireland, and it really was nose to nose with this highly fractious border.
So the new border was drawn right around the west of Derry City, in a kind of semicircle, cutting it off from its largely nationalist hinterland in County Donegal, and leaving it face to face with what was often seen by northern unionists as an enemy state. As if this wasn’t enough cause for tension, once the border was drawn, the demographics of the city almost immediately started to shift and Catholic nationalists began to outnumber Protestant unionists — even though they were within Northern Ireland. Let’s hear from Steve again.
Northern Ireland was set up, obviously, in 1921-22 as an avowedly Protestant state. It was described as a “Protestant Parliament for Protestant People.” At that time, Northern Ireland’s population was slightly over two thirds Protestant. And it was deliberately, this is a sort of a fact, Northern Ireland was carved out of the island of Ireland to create an inbuilt Protestant majority, basically from them. But increasingly over time, Derry became a — more and more — a Catholic majority city.
So it’s a hugely symbolic city for unionism historically.
Absolutely. And they were very worried about losing it. So, right about the 60s, it was clear that the city was being lost to them demographically. So they brought in a process called gerrymandering, which some people may have heard of before. It’s basically when you rig elections to get a particular result.
Gerrymandering was just one form of discrimination against Irish identifying nationalists in the new jurisdiction of Northern Ireland. But before we explain how it works, let’s look at some of the motivation behind it. I guess, Tim, that you could say that Catholic nationalists were just sat very awkwardly in the whole project. The whole idea of Northern Ireland.
Yeah, definitely. Just like Steve said that the border of Northern Ireland was specifically drawn to ensure a Protestant unionist majority. But that majority know that majority was only two to one. So you still have a third of the population in Northern Ireland being Catholic nationalists, including, of course, a massive and growing number in the city of Derry. Now, after the partition of Ireland in 1922, Northern Ireland found itself in a bit of a bind with this population divide. It was pretty uncomfortable, you know, because on the one hand, the unionist establishment had to keep control of these Irish identifying areas, because if they lost these areas — like the areas around Derry — to the Free State, then Northern Ireland might actually become too small to survive economically. And the whole Northern Irish project would fail. On the other hand, though, like having all these Catholic nationalists within Northern Ireland threatened the very existence of the jurisdiction anyway. You know, because the allegiance of those people might actually lie with what was seen as a rebel state to the south.
So the unionist establishment in Northern Ireland was insecure. It was reliant on nationalist areas to keep the state going, but it was also threatened by them. And from this insecurity comes the emergence of discriminatory measures against the political and social rights of Catholics.
Okay. Yeah. And it’s important to point out here that this was largely coming from the top down. You know, Catholics and Protestants had their grievances among themselves, but they had also worked together on a lot of occasions in the north. You know, even in like in the 1930s, for instance, you see the working classes of both communities joining together to protest unemployment. And they were rising up against the very same establishment together. So you need to see this really as a set of strategies coming from the top in order to consolidate division and thus reinforce unionist power over the province.
Sounds familiar, Tim.
Sure.
The result was the systematic exclusion of Catholics and Irish identified people from education, employment and political life. And there was also no recognition of their identity as Irish. The state only recognized and represented a British identity. And it was particularly after the two World Wars that economic discrimination began to intensify. Isn’t that right, Tim?
Yeah, right. You know, both wars, of course, had a major impact on Northern Ireland. And there was a lot of rebuilding going on. Just like, you know, in the rest of Britain and Europe at the time. And just like in the rest of Europe, you get new houses built en masse, you know, with running water and electricity. And these were replacing old tenements. But in Northern Ireland, what was happening was that Protestants were being privileged for these houses above Catholics. Similarly, you know, new local authorities, which had a lot of public jobs to give out, were giving employment to Protestants but not giving it to Catholics. So in a few short years, you get this really dramatic social chasm emerging with a very strong Protestant middle class and a growing population of poor, unemployed Catholics.
That kind of discrimination in housing was particularly blatant in Derry, which by the 1960s had a considerable Catholic majority. It was the mayor himself who could allocate housing and the mayor was pretty much always Protestant. Now, the thing is, the issue with housing — who gets it and where — that could deeply influence political power, right?
Exactly. So let’s look at Northern Ireland’s voting system at the time to get a flavor for this. This voting system was based on the old UK voting system, which was scrapped in 1945 in the rest of Britain. But in Northern Ireland, it continued until 1973.
And you can see why, because it was hugely effective way to maintain unionist control. So this is how it works. Firstly, in local elections, you only had a vote if you lived in a house of a certain value. So, like, that excludes a huge portion of the poor off the bat, but especially it excludes Catholics who hadn’t been allocated good council housing in general. On the other hand, then if you had a business with a limited company — and this meant that you were probably a Middle-Class Protestant — you could potentially nominate not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, but six votes in those local elections.
So one man, six votes.
One man, six votes — maximum. The local election elected the mayor. And then the mayor, of course, in turn got to choose. Who got access to housing? So the whole cycle goes round and round and each time Catholics were losing more and more access to political power.
So you had a city which was two thirds Catholic, which returned a majority Protestant set of councillors to the council. And how they did that is they basically assigned councillors to areas not on population, but on area. And they crammed all the Catholic housing into one particular area. So, you guys are doing a tour of the Bogside, I believe, later on. If you look up on to hill, the windswept hill in Creggan, you’ll see a mass of housing that was put there — in what was arguably not the best place to put housing — just to keep all the Catholics in one council constituency. And in that way, they were able to dominate the city politically. And it was linked into unionism, did not want to lose control of the city. And the other examples as well, whereby the Stormont government at the time really clearly tried to hold back the city’s economic development. In 1963, a decision was made by Stormont — so that’s Belfast — that there needed to be a counterbalance in Northern Ireland, both population wise and economically, to Belfast. It’s something we could really do if people recognized it at the moment in Northern Ireland because it is still dominated by Belfast. So they commissioned report, called the Mathew’s report, to look into whether there should be a new town created in Northern Ireland. Despite the remit being looking for a counterbalance to Belfast, they recommended that an area 30 miles from Belfast, a new township be created called Craigavon, named after Lord Craigavon, who one of the key people in the partition of Ireland. So, obviously, a big unionist figure. The person who was in charge of the process of delivering that new town — a Scottish gentleman who’d been involved in creating the new town of Cumbernauld in Scotland — he actually resigned from the whole process. He came out and he said that he believed the decision was flawed, that they should have looked to expand Derry to create the counterbalance both demographically and economically. And he said that he’d been told — he’d been given clear instructions — that what he was to do was to deliver an area which would not upset the voting balance in either that part of Armagh or in Northern Ireland. The year before the Troubles broke out in 1967. There were about 14000 Catholics in Derry and about 9000 Protestants, but Catholic housing was largely crammed into one electoral area — the South Ward, which includes the Bogside district. So, it kept Protestant unionists winning a majority, even though it was a majority Catholic nationalist city.
So, like Steve mentioned, a byproduct of this was also huge overcrowding in these Catholic districts, and a certain kind of ghettoization, and a very intensified unemployment. So remember, this whole thing played into existing anxieties among ordinary Protestants in the North. The prevailing view was that the Catholic community was, of course, a threat to Northern Ireland as a UK territory. So, discriminations like these found a certain justification in many people’s minds for, maybe, the greater good of the province.
And of course, Irish republicans also had their eye on this situation because in their eyes it bolstered their opposition to the existence of Northern Ireland. They hoped to draw on the resentment of the oppressed Catholic populations in places like Derry to fuel a new wave of activism.
You can see this in the resistance at the time, among more extreme unionists, to any real attempts at cooperation at all between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Like, at one point in 1965, the prime minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill, was denounced because he entered into talks with the Irish Taoiseach, Seán Lemass. I mean, one of his supporters, George Forrest, was actually kicked unconscious by members of the Orange Order in 1967.
Massive tensions, then. In 1968 — which, of course, was a time of global activism for civil rights — groups of young people, students along with lots of working people from Catholic districts and old nationalist activists, they all came together to march for Catholic civil rights.
There seems… It probably goes back… I think it was 1948, there was a change to education in Northern Ireland which meant that Catholics could then go to university. That started to create a educated, aspiring middle class within within the Catholic community, who started to grow. And I’m thinking, “hang on, what’s going on here?” You had all the threads happen. You had the civil rights protests in America in the mid 60s. You had all the student stuff going on in the 60s in France. And all those things meant people were starting to question what was happening. Then there was a series of blows which came to Derry. There was the 1963 Matthew’s Report and the fact that Craigavon got all the investment rather than Derry. There was a 1965 Lockwood report which decided that Coleraine should get a university, rather than Derry. That was that really motivated a lot of people in the city. That was the first time that John Hume came to prominence. He was a teacher at the time. He played a leading role in all of that. And then other things happened. Derry was suffering from a massive housing crisis. You were more likely to get a house in the city if you were a single young Protestant male than if you were a Catholic family. And all these things started coming together so that by the time the civil rights protest movement appeared, it was suppressed violently by the state. And then in the autumn of 1968, a civil rights protest in Derry was again beaten off the streets. And then people started to say, “well, no,” and started to fight back physically.
Now, the civil rights demonstrators saw themselves as peaceful freedom fighters. However, many in the unionist establishment saw them as a profound threat to law and order and the survival of Northern Ireland itself.
Let me finish, by appealing with all the sincerity of my command, for the exercise in Londonderry tomorrow of the maximum calm and restraint. A cooling off period is vitally essential to enable us to get back to normality.
How were they viewed by the establishment? They were basically seen as a left wing socialists, communists, republicans who had to be stopped. People who were determined to bring down the state. And that’s actually still the view now. Sammy Wilson wrote an article — Sammy Wilson MP — wrote an article about six months ago in, I think was Belfast Telegraph, where he effectively reiterated the view that these were left-wing republican agitators who were trying to bring down the state.
This is the Democratic Unionists Party…
Yeah, member of parliament. Yeah, Sammy Wilson. Very high profile figure. Now, that was utter nonsense. If you look at the banners that people were carrying at the time and their list of demands, it wasn’t about unification — that was almost put to bed. The IRA had a failed border campaign in the 1960s and they already basically didn’t exist at the time that The Troubles began. People, the Catholic community at the time, just wanted to be treated equally. It was one man, one vote. Equal access to housing. Equal access to employment. Really simple stuff, like the Black community was was agitating for America. There were no signs saying, you know, give us a United Ireland now, you know, get rid of the border, you know, smash this, that, and the other. It was the most basic civil rights that people were demanding. But, the state viewed it as a challenge upon them, and under whole traditional view of a Catholic, you know, should be put in the place. And it was met with basically violence and suppressed by the police.
The first civil rights march was banned by the unionist government at Stormont. When it went ahead anyway, it was brutally attacked by the RUC police force. The response to this, of course, was far reaching. So huge numbers of new marchers turned out for a second demonstration.
A long march for civil rights was organised some month’s later. This was, of course, inspired by the famous Black civil rights marchers from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama. Demonstrators marched all the way from Belfast to Derry and at a huge distance took them about four days. But this time around, the police allowed the march to go ahead, but essentially gave the marchers no police protection.
So when the marchers reached Burntollet Bridge, just outside Derry, hundreds of Protestant opponents were waiting for them with rudimentary weapons, and they charged into the crowd and started attacking the protesters. And they injured about 50 of them. There was outrage that the police had done little to protect the march, and this riled up the protesters even further. Once the demonstration arrived in Derry, some marchers started to riot against the police, and in response, the police stormed the nationalist Bogside area.
Okay, right. So here we start to see things really kicking off. In response to that storming of the Bogside, some of the leaders of the Civil Rights Campaign decided to declare the nationalist Bogside a no-go area for police. The justification was that the police were not guaranteeing law and order in the area — that they were leaving them open to attack. So these people in the Bogside were exercising their right to law and order by taking the whole thing into their own hands. Here’s the voice of two of most high profile campaigners at the time. There’s John Hume, a teacher from Derry, and Bernadette Devlin — now McAliskey — who was a young psychology student at the time.
Because you’ve lost confidence in the forces of law and order, and as a protest against what they have done to the people of this area, you’ve taken the upholding of law and order in this area into your own hands. That means that it’s your job and your responsibility to protect both persons and property in this area. Law and order in this district is the responsibility of the residents of this district. Police are not allowed into this area. This is our form of protest against what they did here last weekend.
Oh what brought it on? Fifty years of unionist misrule in Northern Ireland brought it on. All the people of Derry wanted were factories and homes, whereas the police had been beating the people down since the 5th of October. Apparently this time the people had, had quite enough. Quite understandably. And this time they were stronger and they beat the police back into the barracks. This is a kind of defeat, I suppose, that a paramilitary force cannot take. So the police came out of the barracks and beat people back down in the street. It continued like this until finally the people had been beaten back into the Bogside.
Are you accusing the police of gross brutality?
Well, I didn’t arrive here until half past ten, so I can’t accuse them of anything before that. But the organised invasion of the Bogside, of policemen at least 1000 strong was… Brutality is just not the word. It was sheer massacre, and people could easily have been killed. I saw a police jeep deliberately drive onto the pavement to knock down a man who was running, and four policemen jump out, beat him up, and throw him in the Jeep, drive off again. This was seen by members of the press, as well. We’ve been beating our heads against a unionist wall. We have begged, we have demanded, and short of now taking what is ours, there is very little we can do.
This new zone became known as Free Derry, and this really marked a new phase of escalation. Around August in 1969 — which is a season marked by the loyalist Apprentice Boys parades that we mentioned — the RUC sieged the no-go area of Free Derry, and this led to a three day battle between residents and police that would become known as the Battle of the Bogside.
Right, and if you ever go to Derry, you’ll probably see this lone white gable in the middle of one of the main roads in the Bogside where you can still see “You Are Now Entering Free Derry.” And it was just behind there that all this happened. Now, like, it looks very different at the time because it was mostly high rise flats. And that was one of the main weaknesses for police — kind of ironically, because the reason there are so many high rise buildings were because so many Catholic houses had been all crammed into this one small electoral division. So, the Catholics inside the Bogside actually had the strategic advantage over the police who were coming in because they were above them. They were looking down at them from a high position, and they were able to throw projectiles and petrol bombs down from this height. And the police had to destroy and storm them from below.
And from the 14th of August, the worst fears of the police were realised. Catholic rioting began to spread to Belfast. And in response, Protestant vigilante mobs started forming and burning out Catholic homes and neighborhoods. Catholics felt that the police were allowing this to happen with impunity.
Now, remember, at this stage, all of this was still about civil rights. The IRA was still quite low profile. But what you see now are Catholics crossing the border to the Republic to get arms to protect themselves against the police and against Protestant vigilantes. And as you can imagine, this was a perfect opportunity for republican paramilitaries to re-enter the scene.
And there was another factor that ended up escalating the violence. Immediately after the battle of the Bogside, when it had become clear that the police were not equipped to deal with the situation, British Army troops were sent in to restore law and order in Northern Ireland.
Catholic communities were actually quite relieved at that at first. Remember, they were afraid of the police force called the RUC. That was mostly a Protestant unionist police force, of course. In comparison, the British army seemed like a relatively neutral force really coming in to protect them.
So what happened? Well, the strategies that were used by the British army soon started to alienate Catholic communities as well. They were seen to target Catholics and not Protestants. And their actions were very oppressive. They used a tactic known as cordon and search, where an entire neighborhood could be cordoned off and hemmed in while the army searched every house and every resident for potential weapons.
Lots of anger arose, particularly when the entire nationalist district of the Falls Road in Belfast was placed under a 36 hour curfew while the army searched all the homes. And that actually led to rioting amongst the residents, and then gun battles on the street.
In that context, the IRA began to re-emerge as a real force. Its new incarnation was called the Provisional IRA. And that’s because the old paramilitaries of the old IRA in the south did not support them taking up arms. Their aim was to liberate the Catholics of Northern Ireland by reuniting the whole island under the Republic.
So the Provisional IRA, or PIRA, was a relatively small group to begin with. But events escalated faster really than anyone would have predicted. In response to some IRA shootings, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland at the time, Brian Faulkner, decided to address the growing chaos by introducing internment without trial for suspected republican militants.
To put that simply, it basically means the army could take anyone they suspected of republican involvement and lock them up indefinitely without having to give any explanation or to go through any process or legal trial.
A full 1,981 people were interned. Between 1991 and 1975, a further seven thousand people fled their homes in fear. Lots of them would have found refuge across the border in the Republic. Now, practically all of those interned were Catholic nationalists — I think it’s something like 95 percent. But the large scale of the operation meant that many had nothing to do at all with republican activism.
And exactly what happened to those who were interned has become steeped in controversy. So, the European Court of Human Rights declared that British interrogation techniques constituted torture. Westminster managed to get that decision overturned in 1978. But, it later emerged that torture against internees had been sanctioned at the highest level of the British government.
So, when we say torture, we’re talking here about sensory deprivation, being locked in rooms full of loud noise and bright light for long periods, deprivation of food and water being detained in stress positions like standing up against the wall where all the weight is on your fingers or on your toes for hours on end. Things like that.
There’s a notorious case that you might have heard of, which is called the Hooded Men Case. And in that case, 14 nationalist men were subjected to all of the above. And then hoods were put over their heads and they were flown by helicopter to an unknown location, which later turned out to be a British army base near Derry. And what happened was they were thrown out of the helicopter with their hoods on. They believed that they were really high in the air and they were going to fall to their deaths. But this was actually just another psychological torture technique. The helicopter was hovering just close to the ground.
Yeah. Really awful stuff. And of course, as has often happened repeatedly throughout Irish history, those heavy handed actions, of course, have the exact opposite effect than intended. Rather than controlling the population, the spread of internment caused support for the IRA to explode in these years.
Now the army were faced with street mobs everywhere protesting against internment. All of this in one of Ireland’s saddest days culminated in the terrible tragedy of Bloody Sunday.
In January 1972, a huge civil rights demonstration was organized in Derry to protest internment. It was a peaceful march, but it was illegal because all parades and marches had been banned by Prime Minister Faulkner for the whole year.
So the army placed barricades in the way of the march to prevent its progress, which led to riots, then, at the barricades. So once again, you have the scenario of security forces essentially invading the Bogside. But this time you have a highly armed military up against a civilian population. And more than that, as the paratroopers chase the demonstrators down the streets into the Bogside, crowds of ordinary residents were becoming mixed in with rioters. And this was just chaos everywhere. And rubber bullets and water cannons were being used. And tear gas was being used. But soon enough, these were swapped in for live ammunition. Let’s hear from Paul Doherty. His father was one of the victims in the Bloody Sunday massacre. And today, he gives tours with Bogside History Tours around the area where the events took place.
My name is Paul Doherty. I am a tour guide in Derry City. I own a company called Bogside History Tours which explains, really, the history of Derry. Obviously, the Civil Rights Movement, the struggle for justice and obviously the the discrimination from successive unionist governments for decades, basically. And how the Civil Rights Movement reacted to that and the violence and whatever else. Then, obviously, my dad was killed up around the corner here on Bloody Sunday, as well.
What do you remember of your dad?
I remember my dad. Obviously not a lot of memories of him, but the memories I have are good. Well, my mum and dad were a very handsome couple, as well, with six children and basically were settling into their thirties, basically. A young couple. And obviously it was a happy childhood. How can they sense growing up and the Brandywell area. You know what? You didn’t really realize how hard people had to struggle obviously for… With poverty and whatever else. And they were a couple who cared about their children. My was a very hands on parent as well. For the sixties, that was something… Wasn’t really the norm much it did. He did. He made dinners and changed nappies and whatever else. But the memories are good there. They’re very few, obviously, as well. But they’re good. Then, obviously, I remember him leaving on the march and then coming back, or my mum — my mum coming back and saying he was and stuff. I remember the wake and I remember the coffin and seeing my dad in the coffin, and noticing the nicotine was removed from his hands, as well. And obviously I remember the funeral and thinking I was going to fall into the grave with a push and shove of the crowds and the media, whatever else you know, so. My last abiding memory of that is thinking I was going to fall into the hole on top of his coffin.
Did you understand at the time what the march was about and what had happened?
No, no. We were children. I was only eight, so. We knew there was a march going on. And out area was a hive of activity with the IRA and the British army and whatever else was going on at the time, you know. And we realised that we heard the people talking about this big march and everybody was going on the march. And I think we were trying to get on the march as well. But we were delayed, obviously. I hadn’t a clue. For many, many years. And so then when you grow up and get older and you go to a secondary school and then start sort of thinking about how what happened, how it happened, and why they did it.
The events the Doherty family lived through would change the course of Irish history. Despite orders not to fire, some soldiers went ahead and started picking off civilians. Within 10 minutes, a hundred rounds of ammunition had been fired by the army. The circumstances were just horrific. Many of the demonstrators were chased into dead ends before being shot. Some of them were shot as they tried to help the wounded. Some were just bystanders and others were shot as they tried to run away. Of the 26 gunshot casualties, 14 died and six of the dead were only 17 years old.
Nobody ever would expect to come on a march and not go home. This is broad daylight, so people never expected when they were running away. When a clash happens here, riot, rubber bullets, tear gas, water cannon, stones and bottles. That was it. Ten or fifteen minutes. And everybody started moving to the Bogside. A commander who came with them in the morning gave them an order not to engage. Do not conduct a running battle up Rossville Street. The order was to to delay, to detain marchers going up the street and take them away. And all of a sudden the order was disobeyed. They came right into the Bogside. And the Commander Ford standing over here, shouting, “Go on the paras! Go on the paras!”
So the paras came into the Bogside, folks. And they came up two ways. Now if you look up the streets here, today you’ll see little red homes. Back in ’72, that was a big open of a car park called the Rossville Flats. The Rossville Flats were built in 1961 to accommodate peoples… the allocation of property. Nine hundred homes. So the first person shot was killed up there, in a big car park. Has anybody ever seen the footage? You would have seen it, with a Catholic priest walking up here waving a handkerchief. Carrying, four men were carrying a 17 year old. Six of the people who died on Bloody Sunday were seventeen years of age. Six children were among the dead on Bloody Sunday. All shot at point blank range.
You’ve got to imagine bullets flying all the way around Pilot’s Row here and everybody running in that direction. And again, the paras coming right up, the paras and soldiers… So that was a 10 storey block of flats, apartments right up there, right up to the sky. Up there. Over and back. So a lot of eyewitnesses to this day were looking into flats, looking out of these flats, and looking out of the flats over here. One eyewitness, one woman who witnessed a young boy being murdered, shouted to her sister in the flat over here, “My god, a soldier’s out there shooting a teenager dead. A child down there.” Little did Mrs. Kelly know, that was her own son who was murdered by Soldier F. Right down here, yeah.
The inquiry into what really happened on Bloody Sunday was one of the most significant moments in recent Northern Irish history. For decades, the whole event was covered up by the British state. The army claimed that they had fired in self-defense, and that stance was supported by a tribunal report a few weeks later. And it wasn’t actually until 2010 following a long campaign by the victims families, including Paul himself, that a new report into the events of the day finally vindicated those victims. It concluded that the Army’s actions had been wholly unjustified.
Bloody Sunday cast a very long shadow. In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, the British embassy was burned in Dublin and it was reported that queues of young Catholics from both sides of the border were lining up to join the IRA.
In many ways, I suppose, Bloody Sunday has been seen as the trigger for the decades of violence that swept through Northern Ireland and Ireland and Britain forward the next 30 years.
To give a sense of the scale of what happened, 3,600 people were killed over the course of the conflict. It might not sound like a very big figure, but you need to consider it in proportion to the tiny population of Northern Ireland. That means for every 1,000 people there, more than two were killed. So in Britain, it would be as though 125,000 people were killed. In the United States. It would be more like 600,000 people. And those are only deaths. Almost no family was untouched in some way by bombings, arson, intimidation and this intimate intercommunity violence.
Right. And there’s a trauma there that’s still very much present. You know, a third of those deaths are actually still unsolved killings. And this isn’t a long time ago. Lots of those victims are still living with deep pain. And they feel, often, that the authorities are reluctant to get to the truth because, perhaps, of things like state collusion. But that’s a subject we’ll have to come back to again.
In the case of Bloody Sunday, of course, the families of the victims were ultimately completely vindicated. But Paul Doherty did tell us that while some soldiers faced consequences for their actions, the higher ups, the people who ordered the action in the first place in London were never held accountable.
And all of this took place on these same streets. Just beside that same white house gable that says “You Are Now Entering Free Derry.”
Right. So you might be wondering, how does all of this fit in to the July the 12th celebrations?
Right. And that would be fair enough. But you have to understand this history in order to understand why the 12th is so problematic today. Many unionists don’t see their July marches and bonfires as a big deal. They just see it as celebrating their own culture and remembering old military victories, which is a perfectly fine perspective. But of course, for Catholic nationalists, the whole idea of the marches is seen through the lens of this, history and of this historical discrimination. So, many of them still see those marches as a public reminder of Protestant supremacy in Northern Ireland. Something that is still telling them that they are second class citizens.
It all depends on the perspective that you’re looking at it from. But whatever the case in this place, which is still reeling from the after-effects of war, the marching season is a highly sensitive trigger for all sorts of old community divisions.
And that’s something that the Good Friday agreement actually really succeeded in diffusing. To a large extent, the whole spirit of the agreement was to try and live in that live, despite all this recent pain. And, places like Derry have worked very, very hard to make that happen. So, today it’s dramatic history. You know, it’s made it a magnet for visitors, ironically, from around the world. And there’s definitely a sense, in the background of that, of frustration in this community to see violence emerging on these same streets once again.
Yeah. And I mean, just the fact that Paul Doherty is giving tours to tourists to tell them, you know, about Bloody Sunday, that’s that really encapsulates what’s happened. To put the recent riots in context, though, over the same period as we saw the van on fire and all that, there was a sailing event, called the Clippers, going on in Derry. And that was drawing tourists to the city as part of a big maritime festival. And there were lots of tourists around. They were completely unbothered and in many cases. You know, not even aware of what was going on. They were just enjoying the ancient architecture and the great nightlife.
Sure. Yes. There is one community in Derry, however, that cannot ignore this recent unrest. And that is the British identifying enclave of the Fountain Estate. Inside, their preparations for the July 12th celebrations had been besieged, really, for days by projectiles and petrol bombs that were being hurled from the nearby nationalist neighborhoods.
The Fountain Estate used to be quite a large Protestant neighborhood, but it’s shrunk and shrunk as people self-segregate. Now it’s a small community of a few hundreds that’s pressed up against the huge ramparts of the ancient Derry walls. These separate it from the big Catholic districts on the other side. After speaking to Paul, we decided to pay a visit to the area.
Crossing underneath the walls into this district, suddenly there are a huge Union Jacks flying everywhere. Even the curb stones of the pavement are painted red and white and blue. I suppose to let visitors know that they’ve entered unionist territory. And as we passed onto Hawkin Street, a huge black and white mural was right in front of us reading, “Londonderry West Bank Loyalists Still Under Siege No Surrender.”
Locals we had spoken to had advised us to be careful going into the Fountain Estate because of the tensions that were ongoing and because of our southern accents. But we wanted to check it out for ourselves. So we walked in, and right in front of us with a big bonfire made of wooden pallets, maybe two or three stories high. As is common on these bonfires, it was festooned with what are seen as enemy flags. So it had the Palestinian flag. There was a flag depicting Che Guevara, who has Irish ancestry. There was another Republican flag, called the Starry Plough. And at the very top, pride of place, there was the tricolour of the Irish Republic.
It might be unusual to think of the Palestinian flag of being burnt and one of these bonfires. But there’s a few reasons. The IRA traditionally supported Hamas during the Troubles. That’s one reason. And many unionists also identify somewhat with settler communities in Israel. They they see themselves as under siege in the same way as those settler communities.
These are the flags that fly in nationalist areas to mark them out as Irish identifying areas. All were to be burned that night, July 11th.
Just playing around this bonfire were two young boys. They were 13 and 10 years old and they had been helping to build it. So we asked them about their bonfire and what it meant to them.
Firstly, you need to like put a base. And then, you fill the base up with like scrap wood. And then you do another one. And you do whatever’s left and then you just flat pack.
So, how do you get the very highest bit up? Do you have ropes or something, or just put it up yourself?
We just pull it up ourselves.
How high was that, now? It must be seven, eight meters?
Yeah.
So, we haven’t we haven’t been up for the 11th or the 12th before. Can you tell me what you do, what the festival is about?
Well, we start at the wee one at 9 o’clock, but everyone comes here about half eight. And then whenever it’s lighting everyone just plays tunes and stuff.
Yeah.
And then they just dance around.
Yeah.
And then this one gets lit at 12. And when it’s lit, it just, like, goes up. And then everyone’s like standing around. And then you just… Sometimes it’s a band which walks around.
And is it mostly kids who who build it, or do you get help from adults?
Half of them, or… Most of them are adults, but then the rest of them will help, too.
Yeah.
And can you tell me about the flags that are up there?
Well, the tricolour…
That’s the one flag from Ireland, and the Starry Plough is from the PIRA, and the Palestine one, too.
You might not be able to make that out, listeners. That’s the voice of the younger boy. He says, “That’s the flag from Ireland. And the Starry Plough is from the PIRA. And the Palestinian one, too.”
We don’t know about the other two.
The red one and the…?
Yeah, I know. I forget the name of the red one.
So there’s the Irish flag at the very top.
Yeah.
So, that’s the flag of my country. And then underneath that, there’s the Starry Plough with blue and stars. Then you’ve got Che Guevara, and then you’ve got the Palestine flag.
Yeah.
So, why do you burn the Irish flag?
I actually don’t know. Yeah. The older ones know.
It’s a foreign flag, and it’s in our country.
“It’s a foreign flag, and it’s in our country,” says the younger boy.
So, what’s it like living here? What’s the name of this area?
This is the Fountain, Londonderry.
And I heard there was a bit of trouble the last couple of nights. What’s been happening?
Petrol bombs, paint bombs, gunshots, bricks being thrown over.
Is it scary?
Yeah. Especially whenever they come over and you don’t know where they’re coming from.
I mean, what’s it like? Do you hear them, or do you see them, or what?
You hear them first, and then you see the stuff coming over and you just try and run away.
So, did you have to run away from petrol bombs yourself?
Yeah.
When was that?
About a week ago, up at the top end.
So, what happened? These guys just came running up, and you had to run for it?
There’s a big fence with a wall at the bottom, and they threw the petrol bombs over the top and it landed beside one of my friend’s house. And we were all playing beside it. And then it just scattered. And then we ran.
That sounds quite scary. Hi, how’s it going? And so then how about the 12th? What? What are the plans for that?
Well, they start over on the waterside. And then they walk around, and playing the tunes. And then they come up that way, past the Diamond. And then they walk down here. And then they turn right, and they walk the whole way up and then down Wapping Lane.
What’s the biggest bonfire you’ve ever seen?
Belfast.
Have you been up there?
Yes.
Yeah, about two years ago.
And what was that like?
Freaky, because was just tires over all their buildings.
Cool, alright. Yeah. Thanks for talking to us, guys. I hope you have fun. Alright. Bye.
It was very disturbing to hear that kid talking about running away from petrol bombs. And perhaps, you know, they were thrown by other children on the other side. It just really brought home to me how completely senseless the division is. It was also great to talk to the kids about, you know, what the 11th and the 12th is like for them. Like, big bonfires, exciting parades and music and staying up late. I’m pretty sure that if I was born in the Fountain, I would have loved the 12th as a kid.
And I have to say, by the way, that the friendliness and openness was our experience everywhere we went in Northern Ireland. You know, even in the direct shadow of these really divisive symbols, people are consistently welcoming and candid and happy to talk to us.
Nevertheless, the hard won peace is fragile in this city. Stephen Bradley explained that the city is becoming increasingly vulnerable to outbursts of violence because of several converging strands of instability. There’s the old community divisions combined, with severe economic neglect and, of course, the political chaos that’s brought on by Brexit.
Derry is a statistical outlier, not just in Northern Ireland, but also within the UK and on the island of Ireland. The unemployment rate in the UK as a whole is — at the moment, latest figures — is 4.2 percent. In Northern Ireland, actually, it’s lower than that. Northern Ireland is actually one of the best performing regions in the UK and Ireland for unemployment, bizarrely at only 3.3 percent. However, the figure in Derry is 7.3 percent. So, to cut a long story short, Derry has twice the unemployment that Northern Ireland has. It also has the lowest pay in Northern Ireland by a degree of 20 percent lower in terms of the weekly wages. We have the lowest number of people with higher education qualifications. We have the cheapest housing, but also we have the lowest level of homeownership and the highest amount of social housing. We have a one in three of our of our young people are being brought up in poverty, which is the highest in Northern Ireland.
And I think among children in school, it’s close to half that qualify for free school meals because of their family circumstances.
Yeah, I mean, I could sort of throw out a cloud of figures which are very gloomy and will sort of confuse your listeners. But the bottom line is Derry is undoubtedly, in every key economic indicator — it is bottom of the pile. And I guess the main figure is of every city in the United Kingdom, this city has the highest unemployment. So something has gone wrong. Especially when you look at the rest of Northern Ireland, which is performing very well. So there’s a real post-troubles dividend in Northern Ireland. Belfast, if you’ve been there, is booming. I mean, they’re throwing hotels at a phenomenal rate there. Every week there’s an announcement of a serious investment from companies bringing in good quality financial services, or whatever, jobs into the city. Derry is getting some of this, but certainly not enough. And very little. Now, the dissident republicans who still exist are buoyed by Brexit. In their words, they wanted the hardest Brexit possible, because it will sow confusion, create chaos and make — in their view — a United Ireland more likely. What they’re now doing is they’re taking advantage of Brexit. The sort of the general mood of chaos there is within politics within the UK overall and the fact that is a vacuum in Stormont. Vacuums get filled in life anyway. In the Northern Irish politics, any time there has been a vacuum, it gets filled. And it tends, if there is a political vacuum, it tends to get filled by more extreme elements. So this is prime time for republican dissidents in a city like Derry, because there are disaffected youth who, even those youth themselves may not walk around and think, “Gee, there’s no jobs here, you know, I can’t get a university place. The infrastructure is terrible.” Yadayada. They just know that their city is not getting a fair crack of the whip. And, if they feel they have little to lose — you know, what does it matter if I get picked up by the police? You know, A) I hate the police anyway. And B) You know, sure, what difference does it make? You know, what do I have to go to? The dissidents are dipping their bucket into a heady well in the city, whereby there is a group of people who can easily be felt that they have nothing to lose by taking action and that the state of Stormont shows that the city isn’t getting anything. And the only way things will get better for them and their community is by a United Ireland. And the only way to bring that about is by violence. So that is, I have no doubt, the narrative is that the dissidents are working on. They won’t communicate it in those ways to those young people, because they’ll agitate amongst them in other ways. We just need to be very careful at the moment with all those elements we have, because it is like a perfect storm. And we have Brexit. It’s in utter shambles. You saw it just this week in terms of what’s going on it, you know, in the Conservative Party. We don’t have a government in Stormont, and there’s no sign that we’ll get one back. Certainly not before Brexit is sorted out. And we do have Derry… This is the city where the Troubles began, because the city and its people felt they weren’t getting a fair crack. Fifty years later, some of those ingredients are still there. Now, is the potential trouble similar to what was there 50 years ago? Absolutely not. I really don’t think people want to go back that way. But, it’s this sort of the law of unexpected consequences. All it would take would be for one of those young kids who spent the last few nights, you know, throwing stones and attacking the Fountain Estate in Derry to get hit by a landrover by accident. And then all of a sudden, things move onto a different scale. And people who aren’t involved start to get involved because they’re not happy in the whole thing could just really spiral. So we need to be really, really careful. That, for me, is the lesson of history: unexpected consequences. And, you know, if there’s a lot of tinder lying around, we have to be careful that sparks aren’t flying, because they could catch before we realise.
Remember, there’s a political vacuum in Northern Ireland because the governing assembly is collapsed. The nationalist and unionist parties cannot agree to work together. A hundred years since partition, it still doesn’t have functioning governance as a political unit, meaning that all those problems Stephen Bradley talks about go unaddressed, leaving space for extremists to grow.
As we left the city of Derry, our exploration of July the 12th celebrations was only just beginning. In the next episode, we’ll be travelling to the much larger city of Belfast, where we’ll be watching those great big bonfires go up in flames as the clock strikes midnight, and where we saw grown adults embracing an openly sectarian side to the celebration.
Did you catch what they were saying there? If not, you’ll have to tune in next time to find out.
We’ll be hearing in our next episode about the history of the Orange Order, a huge fraternal organisation whose mission is to promote and protect the Protestant Ascendancy in Northern Ireland and around the world, and whose parades transform the city centre of Belfast around this time of year.
And, we’ll be taking a closer look at the politics of flags during the marching season, and seeing why the gay rights pride flag has been the latest to be adopted into the flag politics of Northern Ireland.
So follow us to Belfast in the next installment of this two part episode to be sure you don’t miss it. Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on whatever platform you use.
Absolutely. And don’t forget to like and share this episode, if you enjoyed it, so more people can find us. We’ll be publishing the full interview with Steve Bradley in our halfpint series. So if you want to get access to that extra content, you can head over to www.patreon.com/theirishpassport and support us for less than a euro a month.
That whole interview was really great. So do check it out if you can.
In the meantime, that’s all for us for now. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll be back shortly with part two. Slán.
Slán.