I was born on the 28th January, 1972. Two weeks late, and hungry, so Mum tells me. Two days later, while Mum was still in the hospital recovering, the news came in that paratroopers had shot 13 civil rights marchers on the streets of Derry, on what would become known as Bloody Sunday. By the time I was two my family had emigrated, like so many others. I spent my childhood years playing on the beaches of the North Island of New Zealand. But the story remained. I was born two days before Bloody Sunday. A long shadow that stretched 13,000 miles across the planet.
Bloody Sunday was, to the best of my knowledge as a child, THE story of Northern Ireland. All of the violence, hurt, pain, and injustice rolled into one. It was a story that let me learn that the Official Story is always questionable, and, in that case, tragically, maliciously, violently wrong.
Our family returned to Ireland in December, 1980. Growing up in Warrenpoint as a teenager, I got to live in a place with another big story of ‘The Troubles’. The British army suffered their largest loss of life, 18 people, in an IRA ambush attack there in 1979. My journey to school in the morning passed the site of the attack. There was never a single story.
I left Northern Ireland in 1994, after finishing my degree at Queen’s University in Belfast. I can admit that part of me thought of my leaving as an escape - I was becoming less and less Catholic, less and less nationalist, and I couldn’t really work out how I belonged, or what part I could play in all that was going on. By the time I returned to work in Derry four years ago, I had lived outside of Northern Ireland for 12 years.
As I made my way to the Guildhall Square to join my friends and thousands of others in support of the Bloody Sunday Set The Truth Free campaign, it felt like something of a homecoming for me. Walking through the Bogside to get to the Square, passing the site of the Bloody Sunday shootings, I thought, yes, I had left, but I’m here now, and I want to take my place among those who are facing up to the violent histories of Northern Ireland trying to make a helpful difference.
I have at times made mention of the cynical joke about Derry people that “they’re very balanced individuals. They’ve chips on both shoulders”. Part of the joke, I imagine, speaks to the ways that when people are victimised for long enough, they can start to embrace victimhood as an identity that keeps them warm at night. That’s a conversation that interests me greatly. Another part of it, though, is truly cynical, making light of deep violences and injustices that have been inflicted on people in the city, Bloody Sunday being the most notorious of those.
What tears I saw in the Square came quietly. There was always the possibility that there would be another whitewash, another deepening of the wounds. Sometimes, though, the lies dissolve, the shit clears, we can indeed give a thumbs-up to a closer, more intimate telling of what actually happened. I’m not a fan of truth, understood as an exact retelling of our staging of life. Life’s too complex for that. I am a fan of truth, understood as a willingness to be present with honest tellings and retellings of the best and worst we have to offer, so that we might learn from those tellings and retellings. Yesterday was a day for that kind of truth, a time to clear away the wilful distortions, a time to honour the dead and the wounded, a time to wake the dead with joyful applause and declarations of their innocence, a time to sit with the tragedies of what might have been otherwise, a time to celebrate the differences that the dead had made in life within families, within communities, within a city. Tears of relief, tears of joy, tears of loss, tears of remembrance. A time for dignity.
The relatives acknowledged all of the dead of the last forty years. They mentioned the atrocities of Ballymurphy and the Shankill. They looked to Sharpeville, Tiananmen Square, Darfur, Fallujah and Gaza. But it was also a time for hope. There are other stories that we can tell. They also looked to a present which is quite a different place to the Derry of 38 years ago, and to a future that we make ready for those not yet born. I wonder what new stories we will be able to tell about Derry? Maybe one of them will be about how thousands gathered in the Guildhall Square on a sunny day in June to celebrate the families who waited.
