Being Protestant and Bloody Sunday

James Nesbitt played Ivan Cooper in 'Bloody Sunday' in 2002

As Paul Bew reminded us, Bloody Sunday in Derry in January 1972 stands as the worst massacre of British citizens by British troops since Peterloo in 1819. Ruth Dudley Edwards said:

"Unionists wanted to believe – until Lord Saville proved otherwise – that innocent protesters in Derry on Bloody Sunday had been carrying weapons."

For a Unionist and Protestant take on the watershed event, read Unionist politician Tom Elliott here, East Londonderry MP Gregory Campbell here and here, Unionist journalist Darwin Templeton here, well known Unionist blogger Turgon here; and in more detail below. Following the publication of the Saville Report, Prime Minister Cameron said:

"The conclusions of this report are absolutely clear. There is no doubt, there is nothing equivocal, there are no ambiguities. What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable… on behalf of our country, I am deeply sorry."

Martin McGuinness said: 

"The men responsible [for the Bloody Sunday shootings] were marched up to Buckingham Palace and they were decorated by the British Queen. How do people think we feel about that?"

Alan Bairner said that many Ulster Unionists suffer from a mindset of "blissful ignorance", thinking that "their “wee country” was an unproblematic place". I wrote before that, in my reading of recent Northern Ireland history I am struck by the injury dealt on the minority Catholic community, and how little this is known by the protestant community. I described the Feile in West Belfast, as close-eared, cosy and cosseted. I can say the same of many loyalists and moderate Protestant-unionists, that they are totally ignorant to the historical shortcomings of their tradition.

Alan Bairner found this blindspot present in Van Morrison, he said:

"Born in 1945, Van Morrison also grew up in East Belfast which he recalled in 1986: "East Belfast was totally Protestant, there was a couple of Catholics. But… There wasn’t any problems, there wasn’t any friction or anything like that.” Again one is struck by the air of blissful ignorance that is perfectly in keeping with the impression still fondly held by many Ulster Unionists that their “wee country” was an unproblematic place until a few republicans and left-wing fellow travellers decided to create problems at the end of the 1960s." 

Ulster protestant Jimmy Nesbitt portrayed protestant nationalist and founder of the SDLP Ivan Cooper in the BBC production, ‘Bloody Sunday’ (2002). He said:

"The school I went to taught a very different history from the Catholic grammar schools, for example. So my memories of it were non-existent in a sense. The problem with the Protestants and the British is that no one ever wanted to own Bloody Sunday, and it’s as much a British tragedy as an Irish tragedy. We’re trying to make sense of it."

Nick Laird, Northern Ireland poet, observed, "Even the words I use betray my upbringing: Derry or Londonderry?" And said, "By dint of accident of birth, I’m stitched into a single-coloured coat I can’t take off." Laird added:

"For a Northern Irish prod, this is how it goes: in England you’re Irish, but not really Irish. In Ireland you’re British, but not really British. In America, where I live at the minute, you’re Irish, but when you qualify that you’re from Northern Ireland, you get the little glimmer of (mis)understanding. Then they say, pleased with themselves: “So are you Protestant or Catholic?” Cathestant or Protholic?… I hate this question, as the interlocutor thinks the answer will explain everything about you, about whether you’re the oppressed or the oppressor."
Jimmy Nesbitt also said:

"I find it really hard to talk about actually. (Bloody Sunday) marked the first time I really began to look at where I came from. What had happened to the country I was so proud of?"

Susan McKay wrote in 'Northern Protestants - An Unsettled People':

Bloody Sunday was a huge and defining event for the Catholic community. It had little immediate impact on Protestants. Ellen in north Down had spoken about this. Another woman told me that when she had said something against the shootings in their immediate aftermath at her Methodist Sunday school, a senior figure in the church had told her coldly that the victims had all been gunmen. My school was about half a mile away from the scene of the massacre. There was no formal reference to the events of that day, no acknowledgement that something terrible had happened. 

Diane Greer, a protestant community worker, was thirteen in 1972. She went to the secondary school beside the high school, with a lot of children from the Fountain estate. She remembered the chant: "we shot one, we shot two, we shot thirteen more than you…” Years later, she told me, she had begun to meet catholic women. Listening to them talking about things like British army raids on their houses, she found herself questioning the things she had been told. “I realised that these women were not bad, that it wasn’t true what we’d grown up hearing, that Catholics who complained or got shot were all in the IRA.” 

She began to look again at the events of Bloody Sunday. “As a matter of fact, I became almost obsessed with it. It was a journey through all kinds of things. I tried to talk to other protestants about it, but it wasn’t acceptable. I wanted to go on the Bloody Sunday Commemorative marches, but I felt I couldn’t. Sinn Fein had really taken them over. But I do try, quietly, to support the Bloody Sunday Trust. I tried to bring the Bloody Sunday exhibition into Protestant areas but there was a lot of resistance.” 

She vividly remembered one woman in a loyalist estate in the Waterside. Diane was recording reminiscences for a project. The woman spoke of Bloody Sunday. “She said there was nobody shot in Derry that day. The bodies were laid out in the morgue that night were taken out of deep freezes. They were IRA men who had been killed in previous gunbattles. I wasn’t supposed to interrupt but I was horrified. I couldn’t stop myself. I asked her what was the evidence for what she was saying. She said she knew someone who knew an ambulance man, and she had told her the bodies were still thawing out. I was just appalled.” Firemen, ambulancemen and other emergency service personnel, always unnamed, were frequently invoked as sources for this type of outlandish tale. 

Eventually Diane went to visit the sister if one of those who was murdered that day. “I said to her, ‘I’ve come twenty-one years too late to your door to say I know that your brother was innocent.’ We talked for hours. I cried and cried. I’ve grieved buckets. I felt it was guilt.” Guilt however would not advance anything. “I think protestants have to recognise that things were done in the past that shouldn’t have been done. Then we have to say, let’s begin to do things differently.” 

In September 1999 Diane’s teenage son had gone for a drink in a pub on Derry’s cityside, the Henry Joy McCracken. It was on the city-centre edge of the bogside. He rarely used the cityside. He was menaced in the bar, then followed by several men. “They called him a Jaffa bastard and attacked him on Shipquay Street, right in the centre of the city. They kicked his head and left him unconscious”."

Nesbitt explained how he approached the Derry killings as a protestant from Northern Ireland. He wrote:

"Bloody Sunday was important for me, not only as an actor but for my understanding of myself as an Ulsterman. It helped me realise that this episode was the watershed, and that the ensuing 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland were in large part due to what happened that day in 1972. For it was on that night that young men all over the country joined up with the IRA in a sense of rage and injustice at what had happened. 

Northern Ireland is a very small place, yet you were able to exist 30 miles away from real hotspots of conflict in relative peace and happiness. I came from a Protestant background but co-existed very easily with Catholics. Growing up, I was aware of atrocities committed on both sides and probably felt more keenly those that I thought had been visited on victims from a Protestant background. That was just the very nature of things in Northern Ireland. 

I was recording Cold Feet in Manchester when the writer and director of Bloody Sunday, Paul Greengrass, and the producer, Mark Redhead, came to see me. I knew Greengrass a little socially. A lot of people of my Ulster Protestant background would have been very suspicious of the notion of a film about Bloody Sunday. Our fear would have been that it would be terribly anti-Britain and anti-soldiers, a piece of nationalist propaganda. 

But I read the script and it was tightly written and balanced. I thought it interesting that Paul had chosen to put my character, the Protestant MP Ivan Cooper, at the centre of the piece. It was controversial but ultimately the right choice to place at the heart of the story a man who came from a Protestant background like my own but who as the MP for Derry had a constituent vote that was almost exclusively Catholic and who was at the forefront of the predominantly nationalist civil rights protest. I felt then that Paul Greengrass wasn’t coming at the story from a particular side. 

Before filming began in 2002, I went to Derry and spent the afternoon with Ivan. I asked him to tell me about the day and his memories and he spoke for hours. Then I persuaded him to do the march, which he hadn’t done since Bloody Sunday because of a terrible sense of culpability. 

I didn’t tell Greengrass I was going over. I was worried about the fact that I, a Protestant from just up the road, was arriving in Derry to tell this nationalist story. I was worried about what the families would think, about what Derry would think, and about what my own community would think. 

That night I booked into the Strand hotel in Derry. As I sat in the bar with a pint of Guinness I got a tap on the shoulder. I looked round and this guy said “Who am I?” I looked at him and said “You’re Bubbles Donaghy, you were the first man shot on Bloody Sunday; you were 15 and shot in the thigh.” It was something imbued in me because of all the research into Bloody Sunday that Greengrass had made me do. Donaghy reached across and said “OK, you’ll do for us.” 

Meeting the families of the victims taught me how much of a limbo these people were in. It wasn’t just that without closure you can’t move on from the sense of loss – they also had a terrible sense of injustice. Widgery’s original Bloody Sunday report is universally accepted as a rewriting of truth in the most terrible way. It was unquestionably a whitewash and the victims were smeared. What the families wanted was to be told that the relatives they lost were innocent and that it was murder. 

I hope Saville will provide another brick in an increasingly strong wall of peace. It will hopefully close one chapter for the Bloody Sunday families and make it incumbent on the authorities to fully investigate all the unsolved killings from the Troubles. And drama has its own small part to play for there are many more stories to be told from both sides. 

I think the character of Northern Ireland is now strong enough to absorb the conflicting rhetoric that will come out of all this."

James Nesbitt said there is tacit agreement by Protestants that Bloody Sunday was a great wrong but I don’t think they’ve ever been able to cope with that. Perhaps we can call this, "Protestant Bloody Sunday Blindness"? Jimmy Nesbitt explained how he absorbed Bloody Sunday as an Ulster protestant. He wrote:

"Northern Ireland is a very small place, yet you were able to exist 30 miles away from real hotspots of conflict in relative peace and happiness. I came from a Protestant background but co-existed very easily with Catholics. Growing up, I was aware of atrocities committed on both sides and probably felt more keenly those that I thought had been visited on victims from a Protestant background. That was just the very nature of things in Northern Ireland."

He continued:

"A lot of people of my Ulster Protestant background would have been very suspicious of the notion of a film about Bloody Sunday. Our fear would have been that it would be terribly anti-Britain and anti-soldiers, a piece of nationalist propaganda."

And said:

"Bloody Sunday was important for me, not only as an actor but for my understanding of myself as an Ulsterman. It helped me realise that this episode was the watershed, and that the ensuing 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland were in large part due to what happened that day in 1972. For it was on that night that young men all over the country joined up with the IRA in a sense of rage and injustice at what had happened."

Ivan Cooper was a protestant nationalist and founder of the SDLP.

Unionist politician Tom Elliott wrote in the News Letter on Bloody Sunday and the Saville Inquiry:

"The publication of Saville will bring us back to a dark year in our history. The bloodiest year of the Troubles was 1972, when 497 people
lost their lives. The Saville report will consider one event in that year – Bloody Sunday. It is important that we recognise the pain and grief of those who lost loved ones on that day. 

It is also important to remember that the events of January 30, 1972 did not take place in a vacuum. On the January 27 1972, two young
RUC officers – one a Roman Catholic, the other a Protestant – were murdered by the IRA in Londonderry. Their families grieved no less than those who lost their lives on Bloody Sunday."

East Londonderry MP Gregory Campbell said on Bloody Sunday:

"There have been attempts since the establishment of Saville to rewrite history and punish the soldiers who, on the day in question, were being sent in to respond to the increase in the area of attacks, widespread damage and murders. This included the murder of two police officers just three days before the march itself."

And more here. Unionist journalist Darwin Templeton said:

"On a human level, many unionists can understand the determination among the families of the Bloody Sunday victims to uncover the full truth... However, they also believe that the events of the day must be placed in the historical context of a murderous IRA campaign against the Army, both in the north west and across the rest of the Northern Ireland at the time."

Well known Unionist blogger Turgon said:

"Unionists must realise that what happened that day was wrong, those who died were innocent and if there are people to be prosecuted then sadly but grimly and determinedly we must support the rule of law and the fair trial and if appropriate punishment of the guilty. That is why we were, are and will always be morally better than the gunmen and bombers. It is when it is difficult and painful to support it that the light of truth and justice needs tended most."