Rethinking Difficult Pasts: Bloody Sunday (1972) as a Case Study
Brian Conway
Department of Sociology
National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Maynooth, Co. Kildare
Ireland
brian.conway@nuim.ie
14 November, 2007
Word Count (excluding references): 12,988
Key Words: Memory Northern Ireland memorials
Article resubmitted for consideration for publication to Cultural Sociology
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Introduction
About half way down Rossville Street in the Catholic-nationalist Bogside area of Derry,
Northern Ireland, stands a memorial to the thirteen civilians shot dead while peacefully
marching against internment on January 30, 1972. The site of the memorial, known
locally as Speaker’s Corner, was an obvious, logical and highly symbolic one
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, given that
the victims had died on the spot or close by, in Glenfada Park, and had used the already-
existing concrete platform at the corner to take cover on the day of the tragic shootings.
The event commemorated by this memorial, ‘Bloody Sunday’, was a highly contested
event (Spillman and Conway, 2007; Conway, 2007, 2005, 2003). Indeed, it could be
considered a good example of a ‘difficult past’ (Fine, 2001; Teeger and Vinitsky-
Seroussi, 2007; Jordan, 2006; Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz, 1991; Olick and Robbins,
1998) that gave rise to emotionally and politically charged and competing impulses to
remember and to forget among both victims and perpetrators.
Reviewing the sociology of memory literature in their study of post-apartheid
remembrance in South Africa, Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi (2007) argue that two
possible kinds of commemoration can take place as responses to difficult pasts – a
multivocal one in which a shared object gives expression to different meanings of an
event and a fragmented one involving different temporal and spatial commemorations
speaking to divergent publics. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a good example of a
Durkheimian multivocal commemoration of ‘building and enhancing social solidarity
despite disagreement’ (Vinitsky-Seroussi, 2002: 47) and the Yitzhak Rabin memorial
exemplifies the second, anti-Durkheimian kind (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz, 1991;
Vinitsky-Seroussi, 2002). In this and another influential work (Vinitsky-Seroussi, 2002),
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Vinitsky-Seroussi proposes and elaborates a conceptual model that helps explain different
commemorative outcomes focusing on three key factors: the influence of what she calls
‘agents of memory’, the salience of the past in the present, and the prevailing political
climate. Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi go on to put forward, based on an analysis of a
museum in post-apartheid South Africa, an alternative third response of ‘overarching
consensus’, in which the focus is on carefully managing the form and content of
commemorative objects to promote what they call a ‘controlled consensus’.
Like South Africa, Northern Ireland is a society characterised by ongoing and
deep sectarian division and an unsettled
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political culture, heightened during the 1970s,
the 1980s, and early 1990s, and thus offers an interesting point of comparison with other
unsettled societies with controversial pasts such as Israel and South Africa. In this article,
focusing on the Bloody Sunday memorial and to a lesser extent the annual
commemorative march, I attempt to suggest that, in the 1970s through to the early 1990s,
the Bloody Sunday case was an instructive example of the fragmented model and that
from this period on it evolved into a consensual commemoration as the remembering
society underwent political and social change. During this more recent period, I argue
that Bloody Sunday commemoration revealed a convergence in the meanings associated
with the event, one aligned with the earlier, non-hegemonic interpretation of NICRA
(Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association). I also specify the conditions under which
this is likely to develop. Based on this, I propose a model of consensual commemoration
closely resembling Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi’s ‘controlled consensus’ framework but
departing from it by emphasising the core idea of the importance of convergence between
different ‘preferred meanings’ of the past articulated across two key mnemonic sites
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rather than the closing down or omission of potentially disruptive narratives within a
single memory site suggested by their analysis. Because Vinitsky-Seroussi’s analysis
lacks a long-range, historical vantage, the contingent and indeterminate nature of
commemoration is not theorised very well and the Bloody Sunday case allows for a more
extended temporal distance from the original event to help us better understand changing
public representations of difficult or controversial pasts.
The focus of this article is the Bloody Sunday memorial and march although a
multitude of cultural texts including murals, exhibitions, websites, books, posters, songs,
poems and so forth now commemorate this event. Apart from the murals, the memorial is
the only site of memory that is co-opted in the annual commemoration march. During this
march a minute’s silence is observed at the memorial, where floral wreaths are laid and
prayers enacted earlier in the day, one site of memory shaping while at the same time
being shaped by the other. Unlike the march, however, it has a permanent, year-round
presence. It fixes time in space. With the one exception of a stained-glass window in the
entrance porch of the city’s Guildhall
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, which was the product of a motion put before the
city council and reflected ‘state’ memory more than it did local memory
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, all of these
Bloody Sunday memory sites were the result of the active efforts of bottom-up,
grassroots civil society groups and explicitly and directly take issue with the official
British government memory of the event encoded in the report of the Widgery Tribunal
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.
The march that resulted in the shooting dead of thirteen civilians on January 30,
1972, was one march among a myriad number organised across the province during its
civil rights struggle. At this time, protest marches were part of the ‘repertoire of
contention’ (McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, 2001) of disaffected nationalists aggrieved by
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the discriminatory actions of a hegemonic unionist government in housing, voting
practices, and employment that affected their life chances. This event can be understood
on two different though related levels. On the onehand, it is an historical event, the
general contours and details of which are now well-known and not in dispute. A march
against internment organised by the local Derry branch of the Northern Ireland Civil
Rights Association took place in Derry city. It made its way from the Creggan estate to
William Street where a confrontation between some of the marchers and the British army
took place. A barricade was erected across the street to prevent the march going to the
city centre. Following the confrontation, an incursion by the army into the Bogside took
place and thirteen civilians were shot died by the soldiers in the space of a few minutes,
all shot in broad daylight and under the public gaze of the camera (Conway, 2005).
But Bloody Sunday also has currency at the level of myth and specifically as an
anti-British myth. Along with the Hunger Strikes
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of the 1980s (Graham and Whelan,
2007), it became a powerful symbol of that community’s experiences of state violence
and oppression and of a longer history of colonial domination and victimisation. While
Bloody Sunday also has meaning for the other tradition – unionists – and is the focus of
commentary in local newspapers with a primarily Protestant readership, this
articleapproaches the memory of Bloody Sunday from one side of this divided society,
that is to say, from the nationalist side. However, as within Northern Irish nationalism, no
single dominant interpretation of the event prevails among unionists and these meanings
have undergone change over time from a dominant construction of the event as an
example of nationalist civil disobedience to Bloody Sunday as an example of state
injustice against the Other (Conway, 2005). Significantly, there is no Protestant organised
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