Fifty years since Northern Ireland's Bloody Sunday

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2022

⏱️ 50 minutes

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Summary

In one of the most controversial episodes of 'The Troubles' in Northern Ireland, UK soldiers fired on unarmed Catholic protesters, killing 13 in January 1972. We look at why British troops were there, what happened on that day, and how it further polarised Protestant Unionist and Catholic Republican communities. Successive UK governments insisted the soldiers had returned fire in self defence, until a public inquiry reported in 2010 that the soldiers had in fact fired first - and at fleeing, unarmed, protesters. The then Prime Minister, David Cameron, apologised on behalf of the government. We'll speak to former BBC Northern Ireland Editor, Eimear O'Callaghan, who as a teenager kept a diary of life in sectarian Belfast in the 1970s, later published into a book, and who reported for years on the struggle for peace.

Photo: A British soldier grabs hold of a protester by the hair. (Credit: AFP/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,
0:05.2	first-hand accounts of events that have shaped our world.
0:08.7	This week we're focusing on the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland.
0:12.3	It's 50 years since British troops fired on
0:14.7	protesters in what became known as Bloody Sunday. We'll look at the first deployment of
0:19.5	British troops in 1969. It was just all very cheery and they seemed very happy to see us and that we
0:26.8	would be stopped in the streets and offered cups of tea. I mean literally.
0:30.3	Also Bloody Sunday itself Catholic civilians shot dead.
0:34.0	I remember my grandfather came in and my mother and she just came in and said,
0:40.0	your father had been shot there.
0:43.0	We remember the sectarian violence that followed.
0:45.4	It felt like the church had been lifted up and dropped down again by a huge bomb.
0:51.7	Out of that rubble we dug, two adults and two babies.
0:56.0	And how the Good Friday peace agreement was finally reached.
0:59.0	He then went around the room,
1:01.0	asking each of the participants, the two governments and all the political parties
1:04.8	whether they agreed and one by one they all said yes and I shouldn't think there was a dry eye
1:11.2	in the place, included me.
1:13.0	That's all coming up.
1:14.0	So we're using Bloody Sunday as our jumping off point for our look back at one of the darkest periods of British history.
1:20.0	It was at the end of January 1972 that those British paratroopers opened fire on unarmed, mainly Catholic demonstrators at a civil rights march in Derry or London
1:30.4	Derry Northern Ireland.
	...

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