Memory and History in Northern Ireland

Abstract

In a bitterly ironic way, the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’ – 30 January 1972 in Derry city – demonstrate the founding premises of the History Workshop movement. These terrible occurrences were a striking instance of the historical agency of the obscure and ordinarily powerless. A handful of privates and junior NCOs transformed Irish history. Responsibility for the day’s events, of course, goes much wider and higher up, extending to senior politicians and generals. Even so, these few humble men – almost none even a full Corporal, let alone anything grander in the military hierarchy – took an initiative which displayed to the full the relatively autonomous agency of the lowly. These men repeatedly took aim at unarmed, unoffending people and shot them dead, and in doing so they changed the course of British and Irish history. Very few people in recent times can have been more completely anonymous than Lance Corporal F and Private G, who between them killed at least six of the day’s victims. Usually nowadays, when a newspaper tells us ‘a woman has been charged …’ or TV news reports that ‘a well-known public figure is …’, a few minutes’ search among blogs, websites and other arenas of cybergossip will (if one has enough prurient curiosity) reveal the person’s name, or at least the name which some believe it to be. This does not seem to be the case for the initialled soldiers of Bloody Sunday, whose incognitos have been extraordinarily well preserved – for very obvious and understandable reasons, even though one of the main killers is believed now to be dead.