03.02.2022
Remembering and forgetting
James Harvey surveys the Bloody Sunday commemorations, speeches, articles and the left’s none too glorious record
On the 50th anniversary of the murder of 14 civil rights marchers by British paratroopers, it seems that everyone wants to remember Bloody Sunday. Special articles and programmes remind us not only of what happened on the day, but also the subsequent state cover-up and campaigns to find out the truth about the massacre. New books reveal eyewitness accounts of the killings and show the devastating impact that the events of Bloody Sunday had on the nationalist population of the Six Counties.1 Alongside this media attention, politicians and other members of the great and the good also got in on the act. For example, in Derry itself there were a series of events to commemorate the massacre. Some took the form of official ceremonies, celebrated with due solemnity: taoiseach Micheál Martin laid a wreath at the Bloody Sunday memorial and was joined by other worthies, such as Irish foreign minister Simon Coveney, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald, Social Democratic and Labour Party leader Colum Eastwood, and deputy Alliance leader Stephen Farry, at a memorial service in the city. Here the talk was of “finding agreement and accommodation between communities and traditions” and acknowledging a “dignified, persistent and courageous campaign in the pursuit of justice, truth and accountability”.2
However, other distinctly unofficial and much less accommodating voices could also be heard in Derry last Sunday. Speaking at a large march organised by the Bloody Sunday March Committee, Bernadette McAliskey got to finish the speech that was halted by the bullets of the Parachute Regiment in 1972. She got to the heart of the matter by reminding her audience of how the people of Derry had campaigned over the years against state repression and murder, whilst ‘official’ Ireland had simply looked the other way at what was happening in the Six Counties.
Bloody Sunday was not just about the people who were killed … This was a day on which nobody went berserk. Nobody lost the run of themselves in the British army. This was the day when the change of British government policy … came to fruition on these streets. Internment was introduced to try and break the people. They have responded with more marches and strikes. It was that kind of mass action that the British government was afraid of. It is the same today … They are not afraid of the lone gunman … [or] the secret army …
What they are afraid of is this here. Masses of people who won’t quit.3
Bernadette’s hard-hitting invective was in sharp contrast to the sanitised platitudes offered up at the ‘official’ event. As with Tony Blair’s decision to establish the Saville inquiry in 1998, the findings of that inquiry and the apology offered by David Cameron in 2010, these agreed narratives consciously leave out key elements of the story and safely relegate Bloody Sunday to the tragedies and mistakes of the past. So widely accepted has this authorised version become that it has been successful in neutering and incorporating many of the challengers to the whitewash of the British state. The families of the Bloody Sunday victims played a key role in the choreography of the official release of the Saville Report and David Cameron’s apology: even Boris Johnson was able to pay tribute to the long-running campaign of the victims’ families in the commons on the eve of Bloody Sunday, parroting the necessary nonsense that “we must learn from the past, reconcile and build a shared and prosperous future”.4
Unfortunately, such lying and evasion is not confined to the Tories. It seems that, when it comes to Ireland, amidst all the remembering there is also a great deal of forgetting - amongst the British left as well. The left press covered the anniversary in considerable depth but didn’t always tell the full story. Pride of place goes to the Communist Party of Britain’s Morning Star, which ran several articles, editorials, and a special supplement in conjunction with the Connolly Association. In the 1960s and 1970s, the politics of this ‘official communist’ tendency were quite influential amongst the leadership of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and what would become Official Sinn Féin and the Workers’ Party.5 Throughout the civil rights struggle in the late 1960s these politics had acted to limit the scope of the struggle, with the result the NICRA leadership deliberately refused to link demands for democratic rights to the ending of partition, which had created the Six County statelet in the first place. As the crisis developed from 1968 onwards, this became increasingly untenable. Bloody Sunday exposed both the reality of British rule and the ways in which the struggle had already gone far beyond the limited demands for civil rights within Northern Ireland.
The account given by the Morning Star harks back to that old line. It both ignores and bemoans the fact that, after the events of January 30 1972, the struggle of the nationalist population of the Six Counties took a radically new turn.6 As well as civil rights there was the national question.
After a brief flirtation with an increased level of armed struggle in the months after Bloody Sunday, the Officials drew back and increasingly turned their political fire on the Provisional IRA and the mass mobilisation of sections of the nationalist population around Irish reunification.
In simply ‘commemorating’ Bloody Sunday, the Morning Star not only draws a veil over the political trajectory of its predecessors - who, by standing aside from the struggle against British rule in the Six Counties, essentially joined the pro-imperialists. The ‘official’ CPGB denounced the Provisionals as ‘green fascists’, even cosying up to Loyalist ‘progressives’. Given the political weight that the ‘official communists’ of the old CPGB still had in the 1970s British labour movement, this mattered. What efforts there were, and they were few, consisted of the vain attempt to drag things back to the ‘good old days’ of the civil rights movement, routine trade unionism and pleas for peace.
The same type of criticisms can also be levelled at other sections of the British left, with a few, and somewhat isolated, noble exceptions. Militant Tendency, for example, stuck to the economistic chimera of class unity and the illusion that ‘bread and butter’ politics will transcend ‘sectarianism’ and unite Catholic and Protestant workers against their common enemy, the bosses. In the 1970s Militant furiously denounced the Irish national liberation movement in terms not dissimilar to the ‘official’ CPGB. One of its now many fragments - Socialist Appeal - still, in effect, pursues this line.7
Not surprisingly, come the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the subsequent referendum, what passed for the ‘left’ in Britain lined up behind Tony Blair’s New Labour and William Hague’s Tories to give their full backing for what was, in fact, a US-backed institutionalisation of sectarianism in Northern Ireland. The Morning Star’s CPB, the Labour left, Militant, the Socialist Workers Party, etc, all urged a ‘yes’ vote, in the sad belief that this would result in ‘normal’ class politics in Northern Ireland.
Communitarian politics, peace walls, the rise of Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, border politics over the EU, the hegemony of a thoroughly tamed Sinn Féin over the nationalist population was what actually happened. Class politics, yes, but not the class politics of the working class.
-
Most notably J Campbell On Bloody Sunday: a new history of the day and its aftermath by the people who were there London 2022.↩︎
-
www.bbc.co.uk/news/10322295; www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-60130409.amp.↩︎
-
B Hanley and S Millar The lost revolution: the story of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party London 2010.↩︎
-
morningstaronline.co.uk/article/british-state-accused-covering-role-bloody-sunday-killings.↩︎