Bloody Sunday

Bloody Sunday is widely considered a moment of no return in Northern Ireland's Troubles. Prior to Bloody Sunday, recruitment efforts into paramilitary groups had slowed, particularly in Derry (Herron and Lynch Reference Herron and Lynch2006). Derry had adopted a stance of non-violent protest to anti-Catholic discrimination, a different tactic than was taken in the neighbouring city of Belfast. After Bloody Sunday, however, this attitude of peace was quelched and recruitment into the Irish Republican Army (IRA) soared, ushering in some of the most violent and turbulent decades in the country's history and effectively ensuring that there would be no ‘going back’ on the Troubles.

Bloody Sunday occurred on January 30, 1972. On this day, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) organised a peaceful march to protest the newly enacted policy of imprisonment without trial in an attempt to prevent paramilitary attacks before they happened. This practice is known as internment (O'Neill Reference O'Neill and Joseph2017). And while Stormont (the Northern Irish government) had outlawed all civil rights demonstrations, the NICRA organisers promised a peaceful afternoon, going so far as to gain assurance from the IRA that they would not get involved in the demonstrations (Herron and Lynch Reference Herron and Lynch2006; Irish Independent 2022). Soon after the march began, however, soldiers from the British Army began to shoot into the parade of peaceful protestors and kill indiscriminately. Thirteen people were killed and an additional 15 were wounded as a result.

Bloody Sunday was met with global outrage and an international demand for an explanation from the British government (Herron and Lynch Reference Herron and Lynch2006). As a result, in 1972, Britain set up an inquiry headed by Lord Widgery which became known as the Widgery Report. The report declared that those who had been killed on Bloody Sunday were armed members of the IRA and that the British Army was shooting in self-defense. However, although the Widgery report was initially touted as proof of protestor guilt and complicity it their own death (Herron and Lynch Reference Herron and Lynch2006), it was eventually condemned a ‘whitewash’ (Sharkey Reference Sharkey2022). The Widgery inquiry accepted only 14 out of 450 available witness statements and of these, almost all accepted witness testimonies were military accounts (Herron and Lynch Reference Herron and Lynch2006). In response to the public outcry in the following decades, along with escalating paramilitary violence and nationalist protest against the methods and results of the Widgery report, Britain eventually launched a second inquiry in 1998 known as the Saville Inquiry (Conway Reference Conway2003; Drohan Reference Drohan2018; Sharkey Reference Sharkey2022). In 2010, the decision from the Saville Inquiry was handed down and exonerated all victims of Bloody Sunday, declaring that ‘the British Army fired first’ rather than in self-defense. Former Prime Minister David Cameron issued a formal and public apology on behalf of Britain, echoing the language of the Saville report, and stated that the actions of the British Army on Bloody Sunday were ‘unjustified and unjustifiable’ (BBC News 2010).

This apology from Cameron was initially met with praise from Bloody Sunday families who had fought for decades to clear the names of their murdered loved ones. However, in 2021, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson proposed a blanket amnesty for all British Soldiers involved in the Troubles, including those implicated in Bloody Sunday (BBC News 2021). Further, while several soldiers were identified and initially charged with murder for acts on Bloody Sunday, all charges have been dropped due to inadmissible evidence presented in court. Families and advocates for Bloody Sunday victims remain in limbo, lobbying for justice on behalf of their loved ones and their city.

Performing contested memory in Northern Ireland

Rolston (Reference Rolston2010) writes that Northern Ireland is ‘cursed with a surfeit of history’ (p. 285). But Northern Ireland has not only a surfeit of history but a surfeit of what Conway (Reference Conway2009) and others have called ‘difficult pasts’ (p. 398). Conway writes that ‘narratives of the past, difficult or not, are mobilised in the construction of identity story-lines at an individual and collective level and find concrete expression in various artefacts and practices of commemoration’ (Conway Reference Conway2009, 400). In a ‘post’-conflict environment like Northern Ireland, history remains contentious, multitudinous, and conflicting.

Because of the legacy of a difficult past combined with the cultural tradition of collective remembering, performing collective memory is common in Northern Ireland, with both Protestant/Unionist and Catholic/Nationalist communities conducting annual parades, commemorations, and memorialisation rituals (Evans and Tonge Reference Evans and Tonge2017). As Conway (Reference Conway2009) notes, commemoration that happens in such difficult landscapes often take one of two forms – ‘a multivocal one in which a shared object gives expression to different meanings of an event and a fragmented one involving different temporal and spatial commemorations speaking to divergent publics’ (p. 398). Bloody Sunday commemoration straddles both of these frameworks.

In this contentious and shifting mnemonic environment, the lines between official and vernacular memory are complicated (Bodnar Reference Bodnar1992). As Bodnar notes, what gets remembered and by whom is ultimately a result of larger power dynamics as well as temporal ones. Time matters in memory (Conway Reference Conway2009). After Bloody Sunday, victims and eyewitnesses were subject to a now condemned smear campaign by the British government (Eastwood Reference Eastwood2022). During this period, official memory belonged to the testimony of the British Army. After the results of the Saville Inquiry were handed down in 2010 however, victims and survivors were cleared of any wrongdoing, flipping the narrative and relinquishing the ownership of official memory to Bloody Sunday victims. Such a flip, however, is not so easily incorporated into the dominant narrative and mnemonic habits are not easily abandoned. Even still, the lines between official and vernacular memory remain blurred in Northern Ireland and a multiplicity of conflicting memories continue to fight it out among the pages of newspapers and popular media (Glassberg Reference Glassberg2001).

Postmemory and prosthetic memory

Of primary concern for scholars studying the legacy and formation of social memory is the extent to which memories are transmitted down to younger generations and out to wider society. Here, Hirsch's concept of postmemory (Reference Hirsch2008) and Landsberg's (Reference Landsberg2004) prosthetic memory are useful. Their conceptualisations of the fluidity of memory redefine memory as something inherently social and transmissible regardless of proximity to firsthand memory.

Hirsch's postmemory refers specifically to the phenomenon experienced by second generation survivors of the Holocaust and their relationship to their parents’ memories. She writes that postmemory is ‘a structure of inter- and trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience. It is a consequence of traumatic recall but (unlike post-traumatic stress disorder) at a generational remove’ (p. 106). Hirsch cites Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus: A Survivor's Tale as the catalyst for the conceptualisation of postmemory. In Maus, Spiegelman inserts himself into the memories of his father – a Holocaust survivor. He does this through creative storytelling where, through drawing his father's memories as if he himself were there to remember, he literally writes himself into Auschwitz, drawing memories of the camps despite having been born after his father's liberation.

Hirsch argues that these ‘memories’ that Spiegelman has are different from his father's firsthand memories but are no less authentic. ‘Of course’, she writes, ‘we do not have literal “memories” of others’ experiences … of course no degree of monumentality can transform one person's lived memories into another's’ (p. 109). However, ‘postmemorial work…strives to reactivate and reembody more distant social/national and archival/cultural memorial structures…which can thus persist even after all participants and even their familial descendants are gone’ (p. 111). Postmemory keeps societal memory alive by acting as the connecting mnemonic tissue between generations.

Landsberg (Reference Landsberg2004) similarly engages with memory transmission. She calls these transferred memories ‘prosthetic memories’ (Reference Landsberg2004). Prosthetic memories are authentic, despite their distance from firsthand memory, because of their experiential nature. Landsberg writes of what she terms ‘transferential spaces’ – spaces ‘in which people are invited to enter into experiential relationships to events through which they themselves did not live’ (Reference Landsberg2004, 113). Like Hirsch's postmemories, prosthetic memories bridge the gap between firsthand experience and history. Through mass mediated spaces, ‘in which people are invited to enter into experiential relationships to events through which they themselves did not live…people may gain access to a range of processual, sensually immersed knowledge that would be difficult to acquire by purely cognitive means’ (Reference Landsberg2004, 113). I will now turn to the primary forms of mass media which act as transferential spaces of Bloody Sunday memory – anniversary journalism.

Communication, memory, and anniversary journalism

George (Reference George2019) writes that ‘a communication perspective on public memory considers our understanding about the past as developed through an exchange between storytellers (or producers of messages) and listeners (or audiences) that happens within a particular historical moment and culture and through particular media’ (p. 14). Storytellers range from the vernacular to the official and convey memory through media (see Bodnar Reference Bodnar1992). An immediate concern for communication scholars is the way that collective memory contributes to narrative formation and sustainability (see Zelizer Reference Zelizer1995). That is, communication scholarship asks why some memories stay, why others fade and how these cyclical processes survive through generations.

Within communication scholarship, the intersection with memory studies has developed substantially around the concept of anniversary journalism – typically newspaper and magazine coverage which acts as a retrospective for a specific past event. Scholars have argued that anniversary coverage is a way for both journalists and readers to make meaning of a past as well as to assign it moral or civic value. This makes sense considering the outsize role that journalism has had in adding stories to the national historic zeitgeist. Leach and McKenney (Reference Leach, McKenney, Barbato and Davis2012) write that ‘anniversary coverage serves as a lens through which to examine the past’ and that it accomplishes this examination in two ways’ (p. 104).

First, anniversary coverage provides a retrospective of an outlet's own coverage. On anniversaries, journalists can evaluate what they did right and what they did wrong in their initial reporting. Second, anniversary coverage allows for the solidification of memory into history. By reprinting certain testimonies, photos, and perspectives, anniversary coverage condenses a collection of memories and packages it as historical fact. Thus, as Leach and McKenney continue, the public remembers the past through the press: ‘for those readers who were not present at the time, [anniversary journalism] grants awareness of the event, helping them feel what it was like; for those who were present, anniversary coverage transports them back to the key date they lived through’ (p. 104, see also Sonnevend Reference Sonnevend2016).

Applying a memory studies lens to the anniversary coverage of Bloody Sunday can reveal how journalists, as public historians, choose which parts of the past to bring to the forefront of the public mind and which parts to shed off. Further, as journalists interview representatives of the community, news coverage reflects, in part, the emotions and memories of the community. This process is not straightforward. Rather, how the community remembers Bloody Sunday varies widely. This process of disagreement is what Zerubavel (Reference Zerubavel1996) calls a ‘mnemonic battle’. He writes that ‘as we develop a collective sense of history, we do not always agree on how a particular historical figure or event ought to be remembered’ (Zerubavel Reference Zerubavel1996, 295). In this way, news coverage not only reveals facts about the past but also the contested details, the battle on the page.

Editorial voices from the grave: British guilt and the fight for justice

It is perhaps obvious that coverage of Bloody Sunday would include ample references to Britain. Throughout the coverage, all outlets acknowledged the role the British Army played in Bloody Sunday. However, in many articles, particularly in the Derry Journal and the Irish Independent, blame for the British Army and Government went beyond biographical facts. In these interviews and included excerpts from speeches at Bloody Sunday commemorations, remembering Bloody Sunday offered an opportunity to remind their audiences of Britain's sins:

This strong language not only implicates the British Army and Government in Bloody Sunday but explicitly claims that the actions taken by the Army were not an accident and were intentionally and consciously facilitated by British officials. This illustrates a key function of invoking memory which is to ‘press the past into the service of present aims’ (West Reference West2002, 212). Rather than remembering Bloody Sunday as a day in the past, where bad actors in an old regiment broke rank, this language implicates a present-day Britain. This was emblematic of coverage in the Derry Journal and in the Irish Independent but not in the BBC. And while the BBC did not always shy away from condemnation of the British Army, the explications that Bloody Sunday was a cool and calculated attack were absent from BBC coverage.

This finding is consistent with past literature which examines the mnemonic effects of Bloody Sunday anniversary coverage. As Herron and Lynch (Reference Herron and Lynch2006) found in their analysis of 1972 coverage of Bloody Sunday, the use of the photos of Bloody Sunday victims ‘are not just acts of commemoration or of mourning, but are in fact critical interventions – acts of persuasion – in the campaign to persuade the British Government to establish a full and proper Inquiry into the circumstances of the killings’ (p. 60, emphasis added). Two things are worthy of note here. First, Lynch is describing the use of photographs used specifically in parades and other place-based commemoration rituals. However, as Lynch notes throughout his analysis, the line between press and public demonstration is often blurred, particularly in Northern Ireland. Photos which originally appeared alongside the names of the dead in newspapers immediately following Bloody Sunday became ways for the public to both uphold the legacy of the victims as well as to campaign for justice and a public reckoning from the British government. Second, the present analysis did not include photographs but instead focused on rhetoric within anniversary coverage. And yet the ways that the past is invoked for present political purposes is similar to those articulated by Herron and Lynch (Reference Herron and Lynch2006). Throughout the years, coverage of Bloody Sunday has always been deployed as a tool for justice against the British government in at least some capacity.

Beyond the language used to rally against the British government, language regarding the actual killing done on Bloody Sunday varied between news sources and, in some cases, within a single source. One of the words most frequently invoked to remember Bloody Sunday was ‘murder’. In one article, the Derry Journal utilised an excerpt from the memoirs of Father Daly, the priest in the iconic Bloody Sunday photo waving a bloody white handkerchief and administering Last Rites to dying protesters:

This testimony is illustrative of the reliance on high-profile survivors as lay experts. Here, the lines between official and vernacular memory blur. While Father Daly could be considered an official because of his role in an influential organised religion (the Catholic Church), the Derry Journal relied on his hybrid identity both as a priest and as a victim, as ‘one of us’. Further, as Father Daly died in 2016, the use of his interviews and firsthand accounts acts as what Herron and Lynch (Reference Herron and Lynch2006) refer to as ‘prosopopeia, in which the absent or dead implore the living into action’ (p. 60). Father Daly's testimony does not diminish in death but rather gains additional rhetorical power as it is deployed, through an editorial decision by the Derry Journal, as a call to make sure his words and his insistence that Bloody Sunday was an act of murder remain relevant to present-day conversations around justice and Bloody Sunday memory.

While the Derry Journal and the Irish Independent invoked language and testimony which highlighted the ongoing fight for justice for Catholic/nationalist/Irish communities, the BBC used different language and testimony. The BBC, for the most part, avoided using ‘murder’ and ‘massacre’, opting instead for more passive language:

However, there were exceptions:

And while the BBC was more likely to use less incriminating verbiage when it came to the acts of the Army on Bloody Sunday, they did occasionally include firsthand memories which highlight instances of cruelty perpetrated by the Army:

I am cautious to suggest that such instances signal a transformation in the mnemonic battle of Bloody Sunday staged in the press. However, the contrast between the passive language of the first two examples of BBC coverage with the two examples highlighted just above is notable and future analysis of BBC coverage of Troubles anniversaries will be enlightening. Rather than illustrating the more traditional split between Catholic/nationalist/Irish and Protestant/loyalist/British coverage, the BBC Bloody Sunday coverage could be seen as displaying a shift in how the British press presents itself to the British public regarding matters of Northern Ireland.

References thus far to British officials from the Derry Journal and the Irish Independent have been almost exclusively negative and, in some cases, particularly unforgiving. One notable exception regards memories of former Prime Minister David Cameron's formal apology in 2010 on behalf of the British Government (BBC News 2010). Here, I identified two interpretations of Cameron's apology highlighted by the press: one as an entirely positive memory and one as a hopeful memory left unfulfilled in the fight for justice. In both instances, past memories are invoked for the purpose of reflecting on and envisioning possible futures between Northern Ireland, Ireland, and Britain.

Mentions of Cameron's apology drew on firsthand memories of watching the live broadcast in 2010. Sturken (Reference Sturken1997) writes that the ‘photographic image [is] a receptacle of memory, the place where memory resides’ (p. 20). When a historical event is encountered through a visual image, such as a live news broadcast, the significance of the memory becomes tied to the image itself. For some interviewed about Cameron's apology, the significance of the memory was tied to the spectacle of the television broadcast:

In this case, Cameron's apology is remembered by an Irish publication as transcending the British-Irish divide altogether. It is also remembered as a ‘flashbulb memory’ – ‘memories of the circumstances in which a person learned about a newsworthy public event’ (Watson and Chen Reference Watson and Chen2016, 1016, citing Hirst and Meksin Reference Hirst, Meksin, Luminet and Curci2009). In this way, the memory of David Cameron's televised apology stood out against the blur of other televised Troubles-era memories. It was something special.

Not all memories of Cameron's apology glowed with fondness, however. Or, rather, the memories of the significance of the apology were overshadowed by the reality of present-day conditions faced by the Bloody Sunday families in Derry:

This example is significant because it creates a bridge between memories of the past and experiences of the present. Here, the first two examples of memories which place Cameron's apology in high esteem are subdued, changing the narrative of the memory in light of the years that followed. While the past 50 years have remembered Cameron's apology fondly, the next 50 might not. If Cameron's words existed as flashbulb memories of hope at one time, their light has now dimmed.

The excerpts used in this section all served to highlight the prevailing sense that Bloody Sunday remains unfinished business. These memories – from Father Daly's memoirs to individuals’ memories of watching Bloody Sunday news on television – are useful in keeping the fight of Bloody Sunday victims and families at the forefront of relations between Northern Ireland, Ireland, and Britain. I will now turn in more detail to the ways in which these memories and others are made more complicated by their contested and conflicting nature.

Contested memories and the three deaths of John Johnston

Some Bloody Sunday coverage differed so dramatically that outlets offered entirely separate versions of historical events. This is significant because, as 50 years have passed since Bloody Sunday, inherited memories in the form of both postmemory and prosthetic memory will become the primary form of memory in the following years. As firsthand witnesses of Bloody Sunday die, it will matter how memory is recorded. This section will highlight examples of contested memory, postmemory, and prosthetic memory in order to understand how the press creates Landsberg's transferential spaces. In these transferential spaces, readers are offered several versions of Bloody Sunday to remember.

Deciding who ‘shot first’ on Bloody Sunday was the key question which preoccupied two independent inquiries and haunted the families of the victims for decades. However, despite the formal absolution of the protesters and an official acknowledgement from David Cameron that the British Army ‘fired first’ (BBC 2022), some of the anniversary coverage would suggest that this question was still on the table. This played out most vividly in the decision on which details of the historical day to highlight. Consider this paragraph from the BBC:

Here, the violence of the British Army is secondary – quite literally in that it appears second in the excerpt – to the phrase ‘prolonged skirmishes between groups of youths and the Army’. This language is a far cry from initial British coverage 50 years ago. However, such language can be interpreted as prolonging the now officially debunked narrative that victims of Bloody Sunday were terrorists or in some way instigated the attacks against them. Herron and Lynch (Reference Herron and Lynch2006) cite a Daily Mail editorial published the day after Bloody Sunday in 1972: ‘those who died were not martyrs to Civil Rights (though last night they were being promoted as such). They were terrorists, or fodder for terrorists’ (p. 70). And so while the tone and tenor has changed in the press, there is still blame placed upon the Bloody Sunday dead from the British press even now.

In contrast to this implication of blame in the BBC, the Derry Journal promoted a starkly different narrative:

Here, we read what feels like a direct response to the type of narrative just seen in the BBC. That is, while the BBC leads up to the shots fired by the British Army with a mention of the ‘prolonged skirmishes’, the Derry Journal seems to ask ‘who cares?’

Perhaps the most contested memory which appeared in the coverage regarded the so-called 14th death of Bloody Sunday. On Bloody Sunday, 13 people were shot and killed. One man, however, John Johnston, was shot and wounded on the day and died several months later. However, accounts of when and from what he later died vary widely in all three outlets:

In these three examples, we find three different versions of John Johnston's death which are incompatible with one another, despite each being invoked by the press as reliable, historical fact. In the BBC, Johnston's death is put at six months after Bloody Sunday and is written about in such as a way as to suggest his death was related to Bloody Sunday. In the Derry Journal, Johnston is not named but his death – the 14th – is framed as having occurred on the day of Bloody Sunday and in the same manner as the 13 other deaths. It is only in the Irish Independent that we see Johnston's death – placed at four months after Bloody Sunday rather than six – as having occurred outside the influence of Bloody Sunday entirely. Here, it is a brain tumour and not a British Soldier who killed Johnston.

If, as Landsberg argues, media creates transferential spaces whereby memory is passed down to younger generations and out towards those who did not experience an event, then conflicting media narratives pose a problem for collective memory. The three deaths of John Johnston are more than an oversight and require more than a simple correction. Each printed account of Johnston's death is a symbolic lynchpin for the collective memory of Bloody Sunday. Depending on the account, he is either a martyr or a survivor who is no longer alive to share his memories. Such inconsistencies ultimately reveal the ground yet to cover in creating a cohesive memory around Bloody Sunday.

Bloody Sunday as globalised narrative

Another hallmark in the anniversary coverage was the way in which Bloody Sunday was placed alongside other instances of global atrocity. These references to other atrocities ranged from connection to other Troubles-era violence to British colonial violence in other countries to human rights atrocities in entirely different geopolitical contexts. Connections to these and other global narratives were printed exclusively in the Derry Journal and the Irish Independent.

The Derry Journal in particular focused on connecting the dots between Bloody Sunday and other Troubles-era tragedies at the hands of the British military. Several instances of more localised comparison focused specifically on the Ballymurphy massacre, a series of killings by the British Army which took place in Belfast in August 1971 (Burke Reference Burke2015):

Here, a chain of solidarity is extended between Bloody Sunday families and Ballymurphy Massacre families. These families are narratively connected by their memories of the past and by their ‘fight for justice’ in the present. This chain of memory and solidarity is extended in the second excerpt. Ballymurphy is evoked alongside not only Bloody Sunday but also the killing of two men on the Shankill Road in Belfast in 1972 (McCann Reference McCann2015). This strategic use of historical memory creates a timeline which advances the cause of justice-seeking families across Northern Ireland. For those holding the memories of lost ones to Bloody Sunday, the Ballymurphy Massacre, and the killings on the Shankhill Road, there can be no justice for one without justice for all.

The Irish Independent also called upon the Ballymurphy Massacre:

Here, memory is invoked to draw a direct line between the paratroopers involved in Bloody Sunday and those involved in Ballymurphy. This is the most explicit connection made between the two events in any of the newspapers. Here, it is not only that there is a symbolic connection between the two families based on persecution by the British Army more broadly. Rather, this quote directly implies that the same men were responsible for both atrocities. It was indeed the same Parachute Regiment involved in both massacres. However, whether or not the same individual paratroopers were involved is irrelevant. Connecting the memories of the two families in this way creates a myth that is useful for the greater project of seeking justice.

In addition to Ballymurphy, other narratives of violence, particularly violence perpetrated by the British in other colonial outposts, were deployed. Such invocations took readers outside of Northern Ireland in order to, again, extend the fight for justice outward and to place it in a globalised context of solidarity. Two excerpts from the Derry Journal were particularly noteworthy:

In these examples from the Derry Journal, the readers’ hands are held in order to link Bloody Sunday with massacres which took place in 1919 and in 1960, years which took place before Bloody Sunday and, in the case of Amritsar, before many of the victims of Bloody Sunday were born. Narratively, the stage was already being set for violence in Northern Ireland way back in 1919. Indian independence supporters in Amritsar are positioned by interviewees in the Derry Journal as symbolic ancestors to the fight against British colonial violence. Similarly, in Transvaal, the fight continues and another dot is added on the timeline eventually leading to Bloody Sunday.

Finally, the significance of Bloody Sunday was not limited to Northern Ireland or to the reach of British colonisation. Rather, Bloody Sunday was thrust by several accounts onto the stage of global significance:

In this example, Bloody Sunday is positioned alongside the atrocity of a country which does not share its colonial roots nor is there a connection with the United Kingdom. Rather, Bloody Sunday and 9/11 exist as two separate but equally traumatic instances of global atrocity. By extension, by saying explicitly ‘this was our 9/11 moment’, it can be argued that this interview labels Bloody Sunday as an act of terrorism perpetrated by the British Army. This interview was not the only reference to 9/11 included in the Derry Journal. Consider this small but noteworthy sentence:

This article promoted the 2022 book by Julieann Campbell entitled ‘On Bloody Sunday’: A New History of the Day and Its Aftermath by the People Who Were There. The inclusion of 9/11 here is particularly interesting, as it was entirely an editorial decision to include The Only Plane in the Sky alongside On Bloody Sunday where it was not necessary to do so.

This explicit linking between Bloody Sunday and other global atrocity is not unique to 50th anniversary coverage. Rather, it is a continuation of a mnemonic narrative tradition that began to emerge two decades earlier during the 30th anniversary commemorations. As Conway (Reference Conway2003) notes, this narrative shift was a distinct departure from the backwards-looking and ‘enemy-making “us” vs “them” motif’ that had come to define Bloody Sunday rhetoric and commemorative activity in the 1970s and 1980s. Further, this shift towards a more global narrative focused on human rights more broadly was an intentional decision by some of Bloody Sunday's more important voices. When dedicating the permanent memorial to Bloody Sunday victims in 2002, Father Daly ushered in the 30th anniversary of Bloody Sunday by remembering ‘all those who have struggled, suffered, and lost their lives in the pursuit of liberty, justice, and civil rights’ (Conway Reference Conway2003, 314). It is no coincidence that the official theme of the 30th anniversary was ‘One World, Many Struggles’ (Conway Reference Conway2003).

By continuing to connect Bloody Sunday with the broader project of human rights across the world, 50th anniversary coverage steps into an ideological stream which ‘adds strength to a group's claims to a certain interpretation of its past…[and] reflects the internationalization of “the Irish question” in recent years and the rejection of the notion that it is an internal problem to be dealt with by the British government alone’ (Conway Reference Conway2003, 315). In other words, positioning Bloody Sunday as a global event both solidifies its position as an internationally significant traumatic event while holding the rest of the world accountable for righting the wrongs of British violence in Northern Ireland in the same way it has been held accountable for allowing other global atrocities to occur.