© History Workshop Journal 2005
Trauma, Place and the Politics of Memory: Bloody Sunday, Derry, 1972–2004
On 30 January 1972, British soldiers shot dead thirteen unarmed Irish nationalist civilians and seriously wounded fifteen others (one of whom subsequently died), on the occasion of a civil rights demonstration held in the city of Derry. This event, known as ‘Bloody Sunday’, is the most important single case of the abuse of state power perpetrated by the British Army in the course of its long counter-insurgency campaign in Northern Ireland. It is also a ‘contested past’, since the soldiers were exonerated of any wrong-doing at the Public Inquiry led by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, set up by the British Government to investigate the killings in their immediate aftermath. In the years since 1972, Irish nationalists and Republicans developed and sustained an annual Bloody Sunday commemoration in Derry as a public arena from which to challenge this official memory, through the articulation of an oppositional narrative, or counter-memory, that asserts the innocence of the victims and denounces both the violence and injustice inherent in the British military occupation of the north-eastern corner of Ireland. This essay examines the politics of memory established by these competing narratives about Bloody Sunday. It draws on theories of war memory, trauma and cultural landscape to investigate the identities, meanings and memories of Derry nationalists that have become attached to, and invested in, the material sites where fatal and near-fatal shootings ‘took place’, and the related formation of psychic ‘sites of trauma’ within the internal landscape of survivors and the bereaved.
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