Our Civil Rights banner was stained bloody red

‘The Day innocence Died - Bloody Sunday and the Fight for Justice’. 

Directed by Hannan Majid & Richard York. Produced by Hannan Majid, Richard York & Adrian Kerr. 

The great feminist and Irish Republican Hannah Sheehy Skeffington once wrote that the worst aspect of British imperialism as experienced in Ireland and worldwide was not the brutality of their forces - which was to be expected - but the lies and deception they deployed to hide the truth about their actions. 

Nowhere was that shown more clearly than on Bloody Sunday in Derry and in its aftermath. The British Army which organised the murders on the streets that day was ready with its lies as soon as the firing ceased. The British government amplified those lies in its Widgery Tribunal whitewash. The people of Derry were left to deal with the trauma of their loss and all the consequences, deeply personal for them, deeply political for their city and country. 

The Bloody Sunday massacre effectively ended the Civil Rights movement as people were shot off the streets. As the song says: “Our Civil Rights banner was stained bloody red.” Many thousands of people, especially the young, concluded that only armed struggle could now achieve justice and freedom.

In this very powerful film the Bloody Sunday families and justice campaigners tell their story. The horror of the day itself is relived, the terrible impact on the families, the sense for years that nothing could be done but to try to bear the grief. Then, nearly 20 years on, people found a renewed determination to demand truth and justice. The Bloody Sunday Justice campaign began. 

The achievement of that campaign was immense. In retrospect it is plain to see. It was not only that they exposed and overturned the lies told by the British state since 1972. They forced the British state to admit that its forces had killed innocent people, to bin the Widgery Report, to apologise to the people of Derry. Of course the culprits, from Prime Minister Ted Heath to the Paras who fired the shots, were not brought to justice, but British rule in Ireland was convicted in the court of world opinion. 

The Bloody Sunday Justice campaigners had to rely on their own resources and to wait a long time before the Irish government in particular was shaken out of its apathy. When the campaigners first came to Dublin in the early ‘90s they received a cold political shoulder and were ‘moved along’ by  the Gardaí. But when Derry ensured that justice was put front and centre in the negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement the British and Irish governments had to act.

The justice campaign became a model for others far and near, including the Stardust families in Dublin and victims of Israeli terror in Palestine. A living legacy of struggle for truth and justice was created and still inspires today. This documentary captures it all so well in the words of those who lived it. Don’t miss this film. 

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The Day Innocence Died