“Slowly, Through a Vector”: the Battle of the Bogside, 1969 Ian Laplante

“Slowly, Through a Vector”: The Battle of the Bogside, 1969

Ian Laplante

Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in History

Nipissing University School of Graduate Studies North Bay, Ontario

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Abstract

In the case of Northern Ireland, and the Bogside in particular, the state understanding of the borderland often ran in opposition to the understanding of those residing in the space; nonetheless, the ways in which those definitions were countered and defended were often quite similar: through violence and storytelling— that is, action and interpretation. The actors in this narrative perceived themselves to be passing slowly through a vector—forceful and deadly, rooted in over a thousand years of history, culminating in the street violence of August 1969. As such, in focusing on public representations and interpretations of the violence, this paper will explore the ways in which the Battle of the Bogside was understood by participants, observers and historians. I thus hope to speak not so much to the violent event itself but to the act of storytelling as a means of crystallizing and protecting group identity in a contested landscape.

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Acknowledgements

This MRP was, in many ways, a collaborative project. As such, I’m deeply indebted to all those who helped shape it into its current form, especially:

Dr. Dean Bavington and Dr. Steve Connor of Nipissing University’s History Department and Dr. Gyllian Phillips of Nipissing’s English Department;

My colleagues in the MA History program;

And Nipissing University staff.

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for N.S. and Z.A.

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Table of Contents

MRP Signature ...... i . Author’s Declaration ...... ii . Abstract ...... iii . Acknowledgements ...... iv .. Introduction ...... 1 . “Out Across the City:” Historiography ...... 6 .. “That Blink Within this Canyon:” Four Perspectives ...... 15 . “Damp with Fog, the Bog:” Four Borderlands ...... 33 . Conclusion ...... 45 . Bibliography ...... 47 .

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INTRODUCTION

The Twelfth. The name rang like an omen. Once a whisper, like a ringing in

the ears, then clear and distinct. That summer in Londonderry, 1969, word of the

coming Twelfth of August was quick to spread.1 It passed between couples, looking

with horror and wonderment upon the country’s excavated bog bodies—lips thin and

dark as vanilla beans, rough-hewn rope tied into nooses around their necks, a near-

perfect evocation of the powerful connection between people, violence and the land.

It passed between families, working class and Catholic, crucifixes mounted above the

doorframes, settling down to dinner in the Rossville High Flats. It passed between

Apprentice Boys, at once proud and apprehensive, polishing their shoes with the

same black grease they had applied to the greying hair at their temples. It passed

between the RUC officers, straightening their ties in the mirror one more time,

somehow imagining that this extra effort would spare them what they heard would

come. And it passed between Bernadette Devlin, Paddy Doherty, Eamonn McCann

and the other community organizers, staring out their windows into the streets of the

Bogside, wondering if this name, this omen, would ring true.

When the twelfth of August finally arrived, the blue-grey sky and an air of trepidation casting pallor over the city, the Derry Citizens Defence Association

(DCDA) barricades were already in place.2 It was the day of the Apprentice Boys

Parade, an annual Protestant celebration of the 1689 Relief of Derry. For the mostly

Catholic residents of the Bogside, this annual display “left behind a legacy of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 The name “Londonderry” is a matter of great dispute. This dispute will be addressed in Chapter 1 of this MRP. 2 Eamonn McCann, War and an Irish Town, New Updated Edition (London: Pluto Press, 1993): 115. ! Laplante 2! bitterness” and in the tense political climate of the summer of 1969, the parade would prove to be the spark that lit the fuse.3

It was not long before the parade arrived at Waterloo Place and it was there that the first stones and bottles were cast. As the parade turned onto William Street, edging closer and closer to the Bogside area, the violence escalated. The Royal Ulster

Constabulary (RUC) force countered the attack by throwing stones back.4 An hour passed before the police forced the rioters up William Street and finally entered the

Bogside. Hundreds of Bogsiders met the RUC on Rossville Street. What followed, and what would continue to unfold over the next two days, became known as the

Battle of the Bogside.

The Battle of the Bogside occurred during a period of escalating tensions in

Northern Ireland. Ten months earlier, on October 5th, 1968, Londonderry Catholics engaged with the growing civil rights movement clashed with police at a banned public protest. The following month, to address the rising concerns and to curb the violence, Unionist Prime Minister Terence O’Neill unveiled a reforms package. It was met with mixed reviews and by January 1969 the civil rights movement was back in full force.5 The Peoples Democracy led a march from Belfast to Londonderry—one that ultimately led to riots in the latter. During this period police were kept out of the

Bogside neighbourhood in an attempt to curb additional local violence.

In February O’Neill called a Stormont general election. His Unionist party was successful, but by a narrower margin than previously. By April, violent riots sprung

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 Joseph MacAnthony, “Derry’s Explosion of Violence,” Irish Independent, August 13, 1969, Page 5. 4 The Battle of the Bogside, Dir. Vinny Cunningham, by John Peto (BBC, 2004). 5 “Government of Northern Ireland: Violence and Civil Disturbances in Northern Ireland in 1969, Report of the Tribunal of Inquiry.” CAIN. http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/hmso/scarman.htm (accessed September 30, 2011). ! Laplante 3!

up again in Londonderry, resulting in the April 28th resignation of O’Neill and the

May 1st succession of James Chichester-Clark. One of the new prime minister’s first

acts was to grant amnesty for all offences connected to the October 5th

demonstrations and on May 8th the Civil Rights Association announced the

suspension of its civil disobedience campaign as a result.6 On July 12th, however,

Protestant marches in Londonderry led to Catholic revolts. As a result, the Derry

Citizens’ Action Committee, associated with NICRA (the Northern Ireland Civil

Rights Association, campaigning for civil rights for the Catholic minority in the city),

was superseded by the more aggressive Derry Citizens’ Defence Association.7 It is

this group that organized the actions of the Bogsiders one month later in the August

15th Battle of the Bogside.

In the case of Northern Ireland, and the Bogside in particular, the state

understanding of the borderland often ran in opposition to the understanding of

those residing in the place; nonetheless, the ways in which those definitions were

countered and defended were often quite similar: through violence and storytelling— that is, action and interpretation. The actors in this narrative perceived themselves to be passing slowly through a vector—forceful and deadly, rooted in over a thousand years of history, culminating in the street violence of August 1969.

But what, exactly, is a vector? There are two principle definitions that are

applicable in this case. First, “a quantity having direction as well as magnitude;” and

second, “a person, animal, or plant which carries a pathogenic agent and acts as a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 6 “Government of Northern Ireland: Violence and Civil Disturbances in Northern Ireland in 1969, Report of the Tribunal of Inquiry,” op. cit. 7 Ibid. ! Laplante 4! potential source of infection for members of another species.”8 These two definitions combined—vector as a force and vector as a disease—speak to the complexity of the

Troubles. Written representations of the Battle of the Bogside classified the violence in one of these two ways, either as a natural action on the path towards civil rights or as proof of the malignancy of the protestors’ actions, and for historians sifting through the narratives, the true nature of this vector is thusly obscured. In focusing on public representations and interpretations of the violence, this paper will explore the ways in which the Battle of the Bogside was understood by participants, observers and historians. I thus hope to speak not so much to the violent event itself but to the act of storytelling as a means of crystallizing and defending group identity in a contested landscape.

Chapter One, “Out Across the City,” is historiographical in nature, exploring current scholarship on modern Irish history, delving into the Derry/Londonderry name debate, determining where my study fits within the existing work on the

Bogside neighbourhood and deciding whether to term the conflict a battle or a riot.

Chapter Two, “That Blink Within this Canyon,” is a discursive analysis of four perspectives on the Battle of the Bogside. The first two perspectives come from opposing newspaper accounts, those of the Times and the Irish Independent. The third perspective comes from War and an Irish Town, a book-length account written by one of the battle’s participants, Eamonn McCann. And the fourth perspective, more about the Troubles in general than the battle in particular, comes from three bog poems compiled in Seamus Heaney’s North collection. Chapter Three, “Damp

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 8 “Vector, n.” Def. 2a. OED Online. August 2011. Oxford University Press. And “Vector, n.” Def. 3a. OED Online. August 2011. Oxford University Press. ! Laplante 5! with Fog, the Bog,” looks at the Bogside during the battle as a borderland refracted through four identities based on religion, class, politics and geography.

Based on primary research obtained in the national newspapers, a contemporary political memoir and a thematic poetry collection, this MRP seeks to accomplish three main goals. First, in examining written representations of the

Battle of the Bogside, it speaks to the contemporary attempt to express the violence of the Irish Troubles in writing. The four narratives demonstrate how in representing violence in writing, group identity is both crystallized and defended. Second, this

MRP situates my work within the field of borderland studies and studies the Bogside in a way in a unique way—as a complex borderland like Kate Brown’s kresy or James

C. Scott’s Zomia. And third, this MRP acknowledges how, “in the process of writing history, we join in both creating and disassembling places, cultures, and biographies,” understanding the past and history as distinct but deeply intertwined entities.9

History is not the past reincarnate, but a careful and constructed dialogue about evidence guided by meaningful questions. It is not a search for an indisputable

“truth,” but an exploration of the various narratives and identities that can be drawn from traces of the past. It is this philosophy of history that I intend to apply to my study of the Battle of the Bogside.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 9 Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004): 16. ! Laplante 6!

OUT ACROSS THE CITY: Historiography

This first chapter will serve as a historiographic study before I launch into the

analysis of the event in question. This study will be organized into four sections:

Modern Ireland, Londonderry, the Bogside and the Battle. The first section on

modern Ireland will focus on the scholarly debate surrounding the region,

identifying myself as a post-revisionist historian of the Troubles. The section on

Londonderry will focus on the contentious name debate. Here I will defend my

decision to use the name Londonderry throughout my paper. The section on the

Bogside looks at existing scholarship on the neighbourhood, seeking to shed light on

an area often left in the dark by scholars. And the section on the battle explains why I

will use the term “battle” to refer to the conflict rather than “riot.” In each section I

will thus situate myself within the existing historiography and detail what my

analysis of the Battle of the Bogside will contribute to the discipline.

Modern Ireland

T.W. Moody, one of the founding figures of modern Irish historiography,

ambitiously sought to create a pan-Irish historical framework, one within which

“historians of divergent political backgrounds could work”—emphasizing “the

importance of impartial scrutiny of empirical evidence and the need to avoid political

bias.”10 J.R. Hill’s A New History of Ireland, VII: Ireland, 1921-1984, an enormous

collection of scholarly articles on this troubled period in Irish history, works within

Moody’s framework. The main problem with this school of historical thought,

however, is that it seeks to avoid what is most characteristic of this era of Irish

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 10 Fearghal McGarry, “Twentieth-Century Ireland Revisited,” Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 1 (January 2007): 139. ! Laplante 7!

history: conflict. It seems inauthentic to form a deliberately inoffensive scholarly

consensus around a period in history so fraught with religious, class-based, political and geographic conflict.

What followed was a revisionist school in Irish history. Arguing that Moody’s historical method is “naïve” and “arrogant,” revisionists frame their work around questions about the legitimacy and necessity of the republican violence in this period.11 These revisionist historians actively engage with the politics of the time,

rather than shying away for the sake of inclusiveness. But by engaging in rather than

analyzing the conflict, this school of thought misses the opportunity to take

advantage of one of the historian’s greatest tools: the temporal distance between the

past and the historical account. By jumping into the conflict with a clear political

agenda in mind, these histories are more political treatises than analyses of the past.

The most recent trend in Irish historical studies is the post-revisionist school.

Elmer Kennedy-Andrews’ Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles Since 1969:

Deconstructing the North, Ian McBride’s History and Memory in Modern Ireland,

Conor McCarthy’s Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969-1992 and

Graham Dawson’s Making Peace with the Past? Memories, Trauma and the Irish

Troubles are recent examples of scholarly work in this field. For post-revisionists, the

revisionist debate, by absolutely and unapologetically tackling the conflict of the

period head-on, is seen as necessary but in some respects unrewarding. In

Deconstructing the North, Kennedy-Andrews moves beyond the binaries of

Protestant and Catholic, Nationalist and Unionist, and explores how modern and

postmodern Irish fiction operates to challenge identities and borders. McBride’s

History and Memory examines how the past can be distorted and appropriated !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 11 McGarry, op. cit., 140. ! Laplante 8!

through the process of writing history and how ideologies and identities have

benefited from such appropriations. In Modernisation, Crisis and Culture, McCarthy examines how the conceptualization and processes of modernity and modernisation have evolved throughout and contributed to the Troubles in Ireland. And in

Dawson’s Making Peace with the Past? the focus is not on what really happened

during the Troubles, but how it was remembered by those most affected by the

violence. These post-revisionist works all seek to explore the complexities and

conflicts in the modern Irish system, often seeking to deconstruct the systems of

thought that have dominated this period.

Recent works also seek to deconstruct the identities explored in this work—

those imposed monolithic identities (“British,” “Bogsider,” “Loyalist”) that stand tall

in the newspaper articles and in accounts such as McCann’s. This has been done in

two main ways. First, by demonstrating how variations within these identified

groups were legion. Henry Patterson’s Class Conflict and Sectarianism: The

Protestant Working Class and the Belfast Labour Movement, 1868-1920 is an

example of this sort of study, seeking to explore why, in the economically most highly

developed part of Ireland, the local working class espoused not only anti-socialist but

also apparently anti-democratic politics. Here, Patterson argues that the

interpretations of Connolly, Farrell, and the British and Irish Communists suffer

from certain common defects. Each fails to recognize the heterogeneity of Protestant

working-class politics and ideology, fails to examine the acquisition of divisions in

Protestant bourgeois and proletarian polities and tends to assume that the

acquisition of national/communal/ethnic political identities implied a displacement

of class ones. The second major way traditional group identities in Northern Ireland ! Laplante 9!

have been deconstructed by contemporary historians can be found in Peter Hart’s

The IRA and Its Enemies, which focuses on ethnicity over political divisions.

My take on the Battle of the Bogside could be seen as post-revisionist.

Operating outside of any pan-Irish framework and unconcerned with advancing any political agenda, my history of the Battle of the Bogside seeks to understand how discourses about violence defend and crystallize identity in contested landscapes. As such, rather than studying the violent act itself, I will study contemporary representations and interpretations of the violence, looking at it as a religious, class- based, political and geographic dispute. As opposed to speaking to the “why” of the

Battle of the Bogside, I will instead ask, “What can contemporary interpretations of the violence tell us about the nature of group identity in contested landscapes?”

My primary sources will ultimately reveal that the Battle of the Bogside was

not written as a solely religious, class-based or geographic conflict. Rather, a variety of conflicting identities were crystallized and defended in this contested borderland through these contemporary representations. The Battle of the Bogside, as such, was not an inherently meaningful action; instead, meaning was provided by those who wrote about it in the days, weeks and years to follow. Thus the contemporary interpretations I am studying do not just inform the violent event, they create it.

Londonderry

The dispute over the name of the city of Londonderry reveals the region to be

a linguistic, as well as geographic, political, class-based and religious, borderland.

Indeed, by simply speaking the name of the city, one is throwing oneself into a

heated debate on the nature of the region. In “Trauma, Place and the Politics of

Memory, Blood Sunday, Derry, 1972-2004,” Graham Dawson argues that it is often ! Laplante 10! through the process of naming that landscapes gain their meanings, with naming

“acting as a focal point for the ‘contestation of landscape.’”12 The modern name,

Londonderry, Dawson contends, originated in 1613. The city was built over the 1400- year-old Irish settlement known as Doire. The change in name from the Irish Doire to the English Londonderry was meant to reflect the changed nature of the settlement: henceforth, it was intended to be a Protestant city “financed and directed by the City of London Corporation.”13 While the district is officially known as

“Derry,” the county and city have retained the name “Londonderry” to this day.

This has become the subject of much dispute. Loyalists and unionists support the city’s official name of Londonderry; Nationalists and Republicans, however, refer to the city as simply “Derry.” The name Londonderry is viewed by this latter group as petty and offensive bragging about Britain’s control of the region—a sort of slave name given to an Irish city under British control. Thus, appropriating the history of the Irish settlement prior to 1600, they argue that the traditional Doire, or the anglicized Derry, is the true name of the city. Scholars have come down on various sides of the dispute. Some have chosen to use the name “Derry/Londonderry” for the city. Like the Moody method of modern Irish history, it attempts to avoid conflict.

For this reason, the city has been nicknamed “Stroke City.” But the stroke itself stands as a metaphor for the “internal borders” of the city of Londonderry—the religious, class-based, political and geographic borders that time and again thrust the region into conflict.14 Others have chosen to use the names “Derry” or “Londonderry”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 12 Graham Dawson, “Trauma, Place and the Politics of Memory: Bloody Sunday, Derry, 1972-2004,” History Workshop Journal 1, no. 59 (Spring 2005): 157. 13 Ibid., 157-158. 14 Ibid., 159. ! Laplante 11! unapologetically. Like the revisionist school, it engages in the politics of the period, linguistically siding with one of the opposing camps.

I situate myself, however, in a third camp. I have chosen to use the legal names—Derry for the district and Londonderry for the county and city (though Derry for the city and county if in quotation marks). My reasoning is simple: it is beyond the scope of this paper to support or deny the legitimacy of the legal name of the city.

To call the city Derry in spite of its official status as Londonderry would be an overtly political move. The same could be said for the supposedly neutral

“Derry/Londonderry”—the stroke is putting a question mark next to the legal name.

However, in calling the city Londonderry I am also acknowledging the underlying contentions.

There is no doubt that in choosing to refer to the city as Londonderry I will displease as many scholars as I will assuage, but more is gained than lost in making this choice. The name Londonderry makes clear the unionist control of the city—a fact that predicated the violence of August 1969. Indeed, I am calling the city by its official name of Londonderry not simply because I wish to avoid any overtly political moves, but also because the official name exemplifies the point of contention between both sides. The name bears with it an identity that the Bogsiders wished to fight back against in this borderland; without Londonderry, the Bogsiders would have had little reason to take up arms against the police on August 12th.

The Bogside

In contemporary historical studies of the Bogside, the region is never the focus; instead, it is quickly defined without being further explored. In Graham

Dawson’s “Trama, Place and the Politics of Memory,” the area is primarily defined by ! Laplante 12!

its Catholic affiliation, as he claims that Londonderry was “a fortified city whose

famous Walls [were] designed to defend the lives and property of the settlers within

from the colonized Catholic Irish without.”15 The Catholics, as such, resided in the

Bogside beyond the walls. In The Dynamics of Conflict in Northern Ireland, Joseph

Ruane also is quick to identify the Bogside as a Catholic region within Londonderry,

simply and controversially declaring that in 1969, “loyalists and police attacked the

Catholic Bogside district [while] Catholics were forced into explicit communal

defence.”16 Vivian Mercier in A New History of Ireland and J. Bower Bell, Jr. in “The

Esclation of Insurgency” follow suit, plainly identifying the Bogside as Catholic

without digging much deeper.17 Megan Sullivan is different, instead describing the

Bogside as a “working class area,” but again this identity is not fully explored.18

Politically, the Bogside is afforded two identities by contemporary scholars: it is

referred to as a “Republican community” by Dan Baron Cohen and a “Nationalist

area” by Robert H. White.19 The final picture, thus, is of a small, troubled

neighbourhood—Catholic, working class and either Republican or Nationalist in its

leanings.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 15 Dawson, op. cit., 159. 16 Joseph Ruanne and Jennifer Todd, The Dynamics of Conflict in Northern Ireland: Power, Conflict and Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 128. 17 Vivian Mercier, “Literature in English, 1921-84,” A New History of Ireland, VII: Ireland 1921-1984, J.R. Hill, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004): 531. And J. Bower Bell, Jr. “The Escalation of Insurgency: The Provisional Irish Republican Army’s Experience, 1969-1971.” The Review of Politics 35, no. 3 (July 1973): 402. 18 Megan Sullivan, Women in Northern Ireland: Cultural Studies and Material (Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 1999): 101. 19 Dan Baron Cohen, “Listening to the Silences: Defining the Language and the Place of a New Ireland,” Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space, Scott Brewster, Virginia Crossman, Fiona Becket and David Alderson, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1999): 185. ! Laplante 13!

It is the intent of this paper to explore the Bogside neighbourhood in-depth, thus filling a void in the existing historiography. Furthermore, I hope to explore the

Bogside and its identities from a new perspective: within the context of borderland studies. Recognizing the Bogside as a contested landscape where identities harden to survive, I will look at how written representations of the Battle of the Bogside have served to crystallize and defend the identities of those living in the space.

The Battle

The Oxford English Dictionary describes a riot as a “violent disturbance of the peace by a crowd; an outbreak of violent civil disorder or lawlessness.”20 The term

“riot” thus implies that one side in the conflict instigated the violence and that the other side is trying to defend the peace. Because the Bogside violence was initially unorganized and unplanned, and because the violence disturbed a nonviolent parade, the conflict could be deemed a riot. Though this only seems to describe the initial outburst of stone throwing.

Conversely, a battle is defined as a “hostile engagement or encounter between opposing forces on land or sea; a combat, a fight.”21 The implication here is that the conflict is decidedly two-sided, where both groups are equally hostile. Because the

Bogside conflict was between two opposing, armed sides (the Republicans/

Nationalists, represented by the armed Bogside residents, and the Loyalists/

Unionists, represented principally by the RUC forces), “battle” seems an apt term.

Furthermore, those who initially wrote about it, participants and observers alike from all sides of the dispute, described the Bogside violence as a battle. Calling the three days of violence in the Bogside a battle could be viewed as a political choice, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 20 “Riot, n.” Def. 4a. OED Online. March 2011. Oxford University Press. 21 “Battle, n.” Def. 1a. OED Online. March 2011. Oxford University Press. ! Laplante 14! legitimizing the actions of the Bogside residents; but the same could be said of using the term riot, which would imply that the RUC was acting as a peacekeeping force within the city. For these reasons, battle is the term I will use in describing the conflict, unless I am referring specifically to the initial stone-throwing during the parade.

Thus four historiographic conclusions have been reached. First, in studying

Northern Ireland, I will use a post-revisionist approach, delving into the conflicts and complexities of the time while acknowledging that it is not my place to engage with contemporary Irish politics—to acknowledge the variety of perspectives without turning my work into an active platform for any one. Second, I will refer to the city as

“Londonderry,” while openly acknowledging the contentions underlying this decision. Third, I will study the Bogside in a way that has not previously been done— in depth, on its own accord and within the context of borderland studies. And fourth,

I will refer to the conflict as a battle rather than a riot.

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THAT BLINK WITHIN THIS CANYON: Four Perspectives

It is through the words of reporters, participants and poets that I view the

Battle of the Bogside from four different perspectives. Here, the past will be refracted through storytelling into four distinct narratives and interpretations. The first comes from the Times in London. As a unionist paper, the Times favoured the authority of the RUC and British troops over the Bogside residents. To its reporters, the dichotomy here was between order and chaos. Second is the Irish Independent.

Nationalist and Catholic, this paper’s reporters were generally sympathetic to the

Bogside population—a sentiment that comes out clearly in their representations of the violence.

The third perspective, the first that does not come from a newspaper, is from

Eamonn McCann’s 1972 book War and an Irish Town. McCann was an organizer and participant during the Battle of the Bogside. His claim here is that the battle itself was reactive and defensive; the narrative, however, is overtly activist. Finally, I will look to three of Seamus Heaney’s bog poems from his 1975 collection, North.

These poems—“Punishment,” “The Bog Queen” and “Strange Fruit”—are not about the Bogside directly but the Troubles generally. Nonetheless, the three poems in question, juxtaposed with the reports from the Times and Irish Independent as well as the writings of Eamonn McCann, speak powerfully to the attempt to express the violence of the Irish Troubles in writing.

“I have always listened for poems,” Seamus Heaney once wrote, “they come sometimes like bodies out of a bog, almost complete, seeming to have been laid down ! Laplante 16! a long time ago, surfacing with a touch of mystery.”22 Heaney’s bog poems speak to the liminality between past and present—the way the past, the stain of violence on the land, is reverberated in the present. They are often ambiguous and difficult, where the text’s true meaning is obscured, in this way echoing the difficulties encountered by borderland scholars. Literary critics such as Brian Robinson have, as such, argued that “Heaney [has been] accused of indirectness, while from the other he is taken as a spokesman!”23 Ultimately, Heaney’s poems provide an artistic interpretation of the violence in Ireland, serving as a poetic commentary on the context in which the nonfiction accounts were written. This is not to say, however, that they are necessarily nationalist works. While the bog bodies can be read as

“symbols of a diminished nation state,” critics have been careful to note that Heaney has resisted the notion of putting poetry to the service of political engagement.”24

Within the context of postcolonial studies, Heaney’s moment has been defined as

“one that has watered down the radical oppositional nationalism of the Irish

Revival… [I]t has the unfortunate potential to be both an aestheticization of politics and a poetics of identity.”25 Heaney’s place in the nationalist and postcolonial movements in Ireland is thus as tenuous as the bog bodies’ places in time.

My discursive analysis in this chapter works towards three goals. First, it seeks to understand how people report on violence, showing how writing is an active, deliberate process. Second, it demonstrates that representation is interpretation.

And third, it reveals how violence is made meaningful through storytelling. Like the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 22 John Haffenden, “Seamus Heaney and the Feminine Sensibility,” The Yearbook of English Studies 17 (1987): 96. 23 Brian Robinson, “Negotiations: Religion, Landscape, and the Postcolonial Moment in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney,” Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literatures, Paul Simpson-Housley, ed. (Rodopi: Atlanta, 2001): 7. 24 Haffenden, op. cit., 92-93. 25 Robinson, op. cit., 12. ! Laplante 17! glow of a star many lightyears away, these accounts can be seen long after the event itself has passed. The past is inaccessible to the modern historian, so it is the light, not the star, which is the subject of this analysis.

The Twelfth

In the Times, the first day’s focus is on the casualties—more specifically, the police casualties. They claim that by 2am 109 people were injured, 90 of who were police.26 Rather than focusing on the damage done by the fires set by the Bogsiders, the Times emphasizes that “showers of bricks and other missiles” hampered fire services.27 And here another telling aspect of the Times’ reporting can be seen: rather than “firebombs” or “petrol bombs,” they use the word “missile”—a less specific term that highlights the weapons’ purpose over their ersatz design, serving to show the

Bogsiders as a highly dangerous militarized group.

The Times refers to the Bogside combatants as “a mob.”28 Rather than defending their neighbourhood from a police offensive, this mob is described as attacking firemen, who the police were seeking to defend. And in an attempt to provide context for the mob’s actions, the paper notes that the Bogside was a problematic area long before August 12th. The rioting, they argue, “was not between the Catholics and the Orangemen but was the usual Londonderry tale of Bogsiders versus police.”29 In the pages of the Times, the twelfth did not see an ideological clash turned violent, but rather an unruly neighbourhood combating the police whose duty it was to keep the peace.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 26 “90 policemen hurt, tear gas used in Derry rioting,” The Times, August 13, 1969, Front Page. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. ! Laplante 18!

In the Times’ portrayal of the police, the focus is on the injuries. The front- page headline as such reads, “90 policemen hurt, tear gas used in Derry rioting.”30

They describe in detail ambulances running police out of the area—one officer even

“carried away on a stretcher”—and note the exhaustion of those left behind to continue the fight.31 After having been injured earlier in the fighting, they write, many RUC officers could be seen “squatting on the pavement drinking tea and eating sandwiches,” recharging before entering back into the fray.32

In the Irish Independent, the events of August 12th are described as both important and inevitable—“the final death throes of the old Northern Ireland.”33 The writing here is charged with emotion, as the violent outbreak in the Bogside is understood to be an expression of the feeling that “the City’s agony cannot go on for much longer.”34 In explaining the nature of the conflict, the Irish Independent makes no attempt to hide its ideological stance—a stance that firmly places it alongside the

Bogsiders.

The Independent defines the Bogsiders as Catholics and notes how the instigators of the conflict were youths—“rough and opinionated children” and

“youngsters, with long hair and jeans.”35 The Catholicism of the Bogsiders is emphasized to a great degree, as the paper notes how the Apprentice Boys Parade

“left behind a legacy of bitterness which has now deepened the rift between the

Protestant and Catholic.”36 The action of the Catholic crowd is explained by the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 30 “90 policemen hurt, tear gas used in Derry rioting,” op. cit. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 “Derry’s explosion of violence,” op. cit. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. ! Laplante 19! assertion that “Catholics in the Bogside might have to resist in order to survive.”37

The residents, thus, are a decidedly defensive force in this narrative.

The “Protestant” police force, conversely, is here characterized by its cruelty.38

Their response to the Catholic stone throwing is called “savage,” subjecting the neighbourhood to “a night of terror.”39 And as the Times accuses the Bogsiders of obstructing the fire services, the Independent accuses the police of obstructing the

“first-aid men.”40 The Bogsiders are here understood to have been pushed to violence by “police brutality in Derry”—brutality that “converted more moderates to extremism than was previously thought possible.”41

On August 12th, the Bogside was a “battle zone,” McCann’s War and an Irish

Town claims.42 Written by a participant as opposed to a reporter, one would expect this narrative to have a firm stance and a clear ideological position—and it does— though, fascinatingly, it is no clearer here than in the two newspaper accounts. In

War and an Irish Town, the Bogsiders are said to be in control of the conflict on day one. The tear gas fired at them by police only “nonplussed us momentarily” and their tactical strategies are described as “brilliant.”43 Unlike in the Independent, the

Bogsiders in McCann’s account are not victims; rather, they are unorganized though powerful agents of change in the city.

The police on the other hand are nearly invisible actors here. They do not appear as a brutal force as in the Irish Independent nor are they characterized as victims of an unruly mob as in the Times; rather, they are simply the unseen !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 37 “Derry’s explosion of violence,” op. cit. 38 “Gogarty condemns police,” Irish Independent, August 13, 1969, Page 5. 39 Ibid. 40 “Rioting Racks Derry,” Irish Independent, August 13, 1969, Page 12. 41 “Derry’s explosion of violence,” op. cit. 42 McCann, op. cit., 115. 43 Ibid. ! Laplante 20! opponents of the Bogsiders—denied here both voice and power. Written in the years following the Battle of the Bogside rather than during the action and composed by a participant rather than a reporter, War and an Irish Town is decidedly less mournful and far more empowering.

Before delving into Seamus Heaney’s use of the bog body motif to express the violence of the Irish Troubles in writing, background on these bodies is of great importance. On the biological and geographic origins of the bog bodies of Europe, A.

Bowdoin Van Riper writes:

The soft tissues of the human body decay soon after burial, leaving only bones and teeth behind. Exceptions to this pattern—ancient bodies with well-preserved soft tissues—are a treasure beyond price for archaeologists. Preserved tissues form under conditions (extreme cold, extreme dryness, and especially extreme acidity) that inhibit the growth of the microorganisms that would normally consume it. The peat bogs of Northwest Europe, where sphagnum moss and water form an acidic bath that preserves human flesh in a process similar to the tanning of leather, are a particularly rich source of preserved bodies. Roughly two thousand ‘bog bodies’ have been uncovered in Britain, Ireland, Denmark, and northern Germany.44

More than just biological landmarks, though, these excavated bodies are tangible traces of the region’s longue durée. And beyond their function as historical artefacts, these bodies hold great symbolic power. Preserved in the acidic bogs, the bog people—many of them tortured before being killed and tossed in the bog—emerge like a violent moment suspended in time. Indeed, drawn from the earth, the bodies act as a vessel through which the past echoes into the present—these unearthed ghosts of the past serving as a reminder that these sites of terrible violence in the 20th century in Europe have a long, violent history.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 44 A. Bowdoin Van Riper, “The Perfect Corpse,” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 38, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 66. ! Laplante 21!

The bog bodies and the Seamus Heaney poems they inspired are of

importance to this project not just because of the geographic overlap. They are a

near-perfect evocation of the themes at play in the narratives I am analyzing.

Additionally, through the work of Seamus Heaney, the bog bodies serve as a unique

prism through which the violence of the Troubles has been written about,

represented and read. Thus by analyzing Seamus Heaney’s poetry alongside the

contemporary newspaper reports and the writings of Eamonn McCann, I intend to

further exemplify how people, violence and the land are connected and how the past,

viewed through traces in the present, is represented and interpreted through writing.

As in the Irish Independent and War and an Irish Town, a perceived history of oppression weighs heavily on the speaker of Seamus Heaney’s “Punishment.” The subject of the poem, a “drowned / body in the bog,”45 is described as having a

“shaved head,” a “blindfold” and a “noose” around her neck.46 As a metaphor for the

oppressed Irish in the North, the imagery is powerful and striking. But oppression is

not all Heaney is conveying here. In spite of her suffering, the subject has been able

to preserve her identity—indeed, her noose is said to have become “a ring / to store /

the memories of love.”47 This resilience and attachment to identity recalls the goals of

those community organizers who led the charge on August 12th.

Finally, Heaney turns a critical (and self-reflective) eye on those who simply

observe during times of conflict and violence. Looking at the punished bog body, the

speaker admits he “would have cast, I know, / the stones of silence.”48 Here,

something is explored which is never explored in the newspaper accounts: the guilt !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 45 Seamus Heaney, “Punishment,” North, Kindle Edition (Faber and Faber, 2010): 9-10. 46 Ibid., 17, 19, 20. 47 Ibid., 20-22. 48 Ibid., 30-31. ! Laplante 22! of the “artful voyeur.”49 Silence, watching and recording are here equal with the very act of violence and oppression the speaker is condemning. As such, more than just a response to the Troubles and a commentary on the oppression and resilience of the

Irish people, “Punishment” is a call to action.

The Thirteenth

The Times’ reporting of August 13th is characterized by long, descriptive passages about the damage done. “A heavy, acrid cloud of smoke hangs over the streets,” the reports state, “which are ankle deep in stones, shattered glass and spent smoke cartridges.”50 The heavy description here serves to emphasize the destruction caused by the previous day’s events. Nevertheless, the Times notes that on the morning of the 13th, life went on in the Bogside, as “lorries and commercial travellers’ cars formed a traffic jam.”51 As for the day’s violence, there is only brief mention that shots were fired, resulting in “three casualties with gunshot wounds in hospital.”52

The Bogsiders are absent from the Times’ narrative here, except for the paper’s colourful depiction of Bernadette Devlin. Standing before the Bogside crowd with goggles and a lemon juice-soaked gauze mask, she “doubled up, coughing and crying” as “tear smoke swirled around” her.53 The image, thus, is of a woman angry and defiant; but she is clearly not taken seriously. The careful notation of her amenities and struggle to maintain her composure, coupled with the extraneous

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 49 Heaney, “Punishment,” op. cit., 32. 50 “Bogside refugees cross into Eire,” The Times. August 15, 1969, Page 6. 51 John Clare, “Loyalists go on streets to join Derry battle,” The Times. August 15, 1969, Page 6. 52 Ibid. 53 Tim Jones, “Miss Devlin sends a message to Wilson: ‘Call and Irish conference,’” The Times. August 15, 1969. Page 6. ! Laplante 23! comment that she was “wearing dirty jeans,” serves to feminize and criticize the angry “Miss Devlin.”54

The police, exhausted, are meanwhile praised for their resilience. It is stated here that some had been “on duty continuously for 30 hours with a two-hour break at 4am today and others have had eight hours off in the past 52.”55 This serves to excuse the RUC of responsibility with regards to the “loyalists.”56 The Times argues it was loyalists—“gangs with dust-bin lid shields, bricks and petrol bombs”—as opposed to the police who “were running the city.”57

As in the Times, the reporters for the Irish Independent woke up on the morning of the 13th to the “faint acrid smell of tear gas.”58 Stepping into the streets of the Bogside, it is noted how “part of the sky still glowed red from the destruction that swept the city the day before.”59 But the story in the Independent is not just one of destruction. Underscoring the seriousness of the battle, it is reported that field hospitals were being set up “all along the Border by the Army.”60 The “Border” here is the North-South divide and the “Army” is that of the Republic.

The Bogsiders themselves are absent from the Independent’s reporting of the

13th. Instead, the focus is on the Bogsiders’ opponents—a dangerous and expanding assembly. Though the police are here also described as “deadly tired,” “drinking tea, brought to them by friendly Protestants,” the Independent argues that they had

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 54 Jones, op. cit. 55 “Bogside refugees cross into Eire,” op. cit. 56 “Loyalists go on streets to join Derry battle,” op. cit. 57 Ibid. 58 Joseph MacAnthony, “On the barricades,” Irish Independent, August 14, 1969, Page 5. 59 Ibid. 60 “Newsmen besieged in hotel,” Irish Independent, August 14, 1969, Page 2. ! Laplante 24! found an ally in the “Paisleyites.”61 Much unlike the Times, the Independent uses their narrative of the day’s events to shed light on the apparent collusion between the

RUC and the “rampaging mob” of loyalists.62 In the Irish Independent, the 13th was a day characterized not just by the establishment of Irish field hospitals on the border, but also by the “wild and ugly charge of civilians and police down Rossville Street” against the residents of the Bogside.63

In McCann’s War and an Irish Town, it is neither the destruction of property nor the supposed collusion between loyalist and RUC forces that dominates the narrative of August 13th. Rather, it is Jack Lynch’s television address. McCann quotes

Lynch as saying he could “not stand idly by,” a comment McCann claims was widely interpreted as meaning that Irish troops were “to be moved to the border,” coming to the aid of the Bogside residents.64 The narrative of the conflict on day two, thus, is here one of home, as the promise of assistance “put new heart into the fight.”65

Additionally, McCann argues that the Bogsiders on the 13th were becoming more and more organized. Not only did they have radio transmitters and first-aid stations operating in the Bogisde now, but “phone-calls were made to contacts in other areas begging them to get people on to the streets and draw off some of the police from Derry.”66 And contrary to the Times’ assessment of Bernadette Devlin,

McCann here characterizes her as the ideal leader in the fight against the RUC, as she

“seemingly developed an immunity to tear gas and kept telling people, implausibly,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 61 “Newsmen besieged in hotel,” op. cit. 62 Ibid. 63 MacAnthony, “On the barricades,” op. cit. 64 McCann, op. cit., 116. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. ! Laplante 25!

that ‘it’s OK once you get a taste of it.’”67 Rather than humiliating, McCann’s

portrayal of Devlin is empowering.

Furthermore, contrary to the two newspapers, McCann chooses not to discuss

the police or loyalists’ actions on the 13th. As such, the focus is entirely on the

Bogsiders’ actions and the promise of aid from the South. Once again, McCann uses

his narrative not to mourn for what is lost but to rally for what may come.

In Heaney’s “The Bog Queen,” emphasis is made on the connection between

the land and its people. Realizing how the land holds sway over those who make their

living upon it, the bog body claims, “[m]y body was braille / for the creeping

influences: / dawn suns groped over my head / and cooled at my feet.”68 Thus the

physical division between land and body is here eliminated to signify the “creeping

influence” of Ireland on its citizens. When taken in the context of the residents of the

Bogside battling in the streets against the now-armed Loyalists, this metaphor seems

particularly apt. But more than just about connection, “The Bog Queen” is also about

decay. The sway of this powerful, natural vector over human actions is here stripping

the body of life and culture—“the seeps of winter,” the Bog Queen laments, “digested

me.”69

In spite of this decay, however, Heaney’s poem opens up the possibility of re-

birth. For one, the long-silenced Bog Queen is the speaker, opening the poem with

the declaration: “I lay waiting.”70 And furthermore, she describes herself as possessor of “a jar of spawn / fermenting underground,” suggesting that in spite (or because) of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 67 McCann, op. cit., 116. 68 Seamus Heaney, “The Bog Queen,” North, Kindle Edition (Faber and Faber, 2010): 5-8. 69 Ibid., 10-11. 70 Ibid., 1. ! Laplante 26! all this death and decay, something new will emerge.71 This realization is met with anger, as the bog body declares, “I was robbed. / I was barbered / and stripped.”72

Thus the poem changes direction and the waiting body rises up from the decaying earth, bringing new light to the violence: “I rose from the dark / hacked bone, skull- ware,” she declares, echoing the defiance of the Bogsiders throwing petrol bombs from the roofs of the Rossville High Flats.73

The Fourteenth

The Times met the 14th of August with a sigh of relief. Just that morning, the

Bogsiders, they wrote, were at risk of “breaking into the city centre”—the once- localized conflict threatening to spread throughout Londonderry like bacteria on the body.74 By day’s end, however, the violence had ceased. Though a “great cloud of smoke hung over the Rossville Street area,” tear gas canisters, petrol bombs and other debris were no longer being volleyed between police, loyalists and Bogsiders.75

It was, the Times concluded, “a peaceful, if devastated scene.”76

Looking to the Bogsiders on this last day of the Battle, the Times noted the presence of two clear leaders: Paddy Doherty and Bernadette Devlin. Nonetheless, the Bogsiders are here characterized as a very undecided if passionate bunch. The crowd, it is noted, was “clearly divided,” some “triumphantly singing ‘We have overcome,’” while others booed and shouted “Back to the barricades.”77

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 71 Heaney, “The Bog Queen,” op. cit., 19-20. 72 Ibid., 41-43. 73 Ibid., 53-56. 74 “400 troops bring peace to devastated Bogside,” The Times, August 15, 1969, Front Page. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. ! Laplante 27!

The B Specials, initially called in to aid the RUC forces, are hardly given a mention, other than to note that they numbered approximately 200 and that they carried rifles. Instead, the focus is on the British troops. Portrayed as a neutral, effective peacekeeping force—the front-page headline thusly reading “400 troops bring peace to devastated Bogside”—their presence in Londonderry is unequivocally presented as a solution to the city’s troubles. Despite the passionate, undecided nature of the Bogsiders, the Times notes that “the young Yorkshire soldiers were cheerfully chatting to residents over the barricades and in the streets, their apparently neutral attitude helping to reduce tension.”78 By showing the Bogside residents as undecided and prone to violence, and the British troops as effective peacekeepers, the Times’ reporting serves to make a case for the continued British control of Londonderry.

In their coverage of the fourteenth, the Irish Independent claims that the city was in “a state of Civil War.”79 As the morning wore on, “riot police, Paiselyites in their rear,” stormed the Bogsiders’ barricades.80 The last gasps of the conflict, thus, were desperate, violent ones. What is unique to the Independent here is that rather than focusing on the Bogsiders’ advances out of the Bogside and into Londonderry’s city centre, the focus is on the threat still posed by the RUC to the neighbourhood.

Thus to the very end, the RUC, not the Bogsiders, were the threat. Nonetheless, at

5:15pm, the Independent notes, the British army moved into Londonderry. Shortly

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 78 “400 troops bring peace to devastated Bogside,” op. cit. 79 “Irish Army Field Hospitals set up; Patrols on Border,” Irish Independent, August 15, 1969, Front Page. 80 Ibid. ! Laplante 28!

thereafter, “fighting had ceased.”81 The three-day battle ended nearly as suddenly as it had begun.

Unlike the Times, which highlights the indecisiveness of the Bogsiders in the battle’s wake, the Independent focuses on the crowd’s cautious optimism. The crowd reportedly broke out into passionate renditions of “We Shall Overcome” and “For We are Saved.”82 Mingled with the music were shouts of “The war’s over.”83 The general

consensus, it is here claimed, was that “as long as the police stay out we have a

chance of peace,” with the dissenting voices heard in the pages of the Times notably

absent.

As in the Times, the Independent mentions the B Specials only in passing,

saying they were called up “for full police duty.”84 They are, nonetheless,

characterized as a dangerous force, having been “fully armed and carrying axe-

handles.”85 The British troops, on the other hand, were “cheered by the Bogsiders” as

they entered the town, a clear sign that the RUC had lost the conflict.86 The

Independent ends its coverage of the fourteenth on a note of caution, arguing that

“troops, British, Irish or UN, [are] not the answer.”87 Rather, “stability and proper

respect for law and order would return if the people could trust the Government.”88

Finding peace in Londonderry, thus, must be a cooperative, mutually respectful

process.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 81 “Irish Army Field Hospitals set up; Patrols on Border,” op. cit. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid. 87 “Troops are ‘not the answer,’” Irish Independent, August 15, 1969, Page 13. 88 Ibid. ! Laplante 29!

As in the Irish Independent, McCann’s War and an Irish Town characterizes the final day of the battle as one of escalated violence. On Great James St., two people were shot and wounded by RUC officers; meanwhile, by 3pm the police were being pushed out of the Bogside and towards the commercial sector of the city.89

When the British troops arrived to break up the violence, McCann states, the

Bogsiders were left in a state of confusion.90 The increasingly violent and destructive conflict was over, the RUC were no longer in the Bogside neighbourhood, but “it was not in our history to make British soldiers welcome.”91 As such, though the Bogsiders viewed the battle as a victory, it was a small victory—one with an unclear and indistinct conclusion.

Unlike the two newspaper narratives, McCann is very clear about the perceived threat posed by the B Specials. “Undoubtedly,” he states, “they would use guns.”92 Their very presence on the scene, in fact, came with the “possibility that there was going to be a massacre.”93 The British troops’ arrival, thus, was more than just “clear proof that we had won the battle, that the RUC was beaten;”94 rather, in spite of all the caution and apprehension, the arrival of the British meant that a temporary nonviolent solution had been found. Thus the last moments of the Battle of the Bogside in McCann’s narrative are of cautious relief.

In Heaney’s “Strange Fruit,” the bog poems also seem to reach a conclusion, but like the end to the Battle of the Bogside itself, the end is seemingly unsatisfying and indistinct. This is reflected in the fact that its structure is radically different than

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 89 McCann, op. cit., 116. 90 Ibid., 117. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid. ! Laplante 30!

those that came before: it is a sonnet with lines of widely varying length and lacking a

consistent rhyming pattern. Rather than trying to say something powerful about

liberation, art or the connection between people and the land, “Strange Fruit” acts as

simply a horrifying description of what is left in the wake of violence. Like the Times

and War and an Irish Town, the poem seems unsure what to make of the strange fruit of this violent outbreak.

Furthermore, “Strange Fruit” serves to question whether an end to suffering

is really “peace,” as the Times’ headline declared. The beheaded girl, her head “like

an exhumed gourd,” can serve as a metaphor for the devastated Bogside and its

people.95 Unlike the girl in “Punishment” who inspired self-reflection and action in

the speaker and the woman in “The Bog Queen” who rose up in spite of her

oppression, the subject of “Strange Fruit” is just “Murdered, forgotten, nameless,

terrible.”96 Once the tear gas (here the art of language) has cleared, the attempt to

elevate the violence to something mythic fails. All that is left is devastation and

broken aspiration. The thought that violence could mean anything more than just

violence is shown as folly, as the poem’s grotesque subject is left “outstaring axe /

And beatification, outstaring / What had begun to feel like reverence.”97

Thus we are left with four varying representations of the three-day Battle of

the Bogside—demonstrating how people write about violence, showing the act of

writing as an active, deliberate process; establishing that representation is

interpretation; and revealing how violence is not inherently meaningful but is

provided with meaning through storytelling. In the beginning, the Times focused on

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 95 Seamus Heaney, “Strange Fruit,” North, Kindle Edition (Faber and Faber, 2010): 1. 96 Heaney, “Strange Fruit,” op. cit., 11. 97 Ibid., 12-14. ! Laplante 31! the police casualties enacted by the Bogsiders while the Independent argued that the conflict was inevitable and the police actions were brutal to such a degree that they spurred further response. McCann, on the other hand, highlighted how the unorganized Bogsiders were quick to gain control of the situation. And in Heaney’s

“Punishment” suffering was transformed into a defiant call to action.

As the 13th of August dawned, the Times reported how the damage escalated, the police were exhausted and rogue bands of loyalist began cropping up to combat the Bogsiders. For the Independent, the day was characterized by the acrid smell of tear gas and the dangerous collusion between police and violent loyalists. In

McCann’s War and an Irish Town, however, the focus was squarely on the promise of aid from the Republic while the Bogside defences grew more and more organized.

Finally, in Heaney’s “Bog Queen” the connection between the land and its people led to a cycle of decay and rebirth through self-awareness.

On the last day of the battle, the Times presented the British troops as bringing peace to a devastated neighbourhood, highlighting the importance of

British control in the troublesome region while the Independent noted that though the British troops were a welcome relief from the escalating violence, peace could only be achieved through good government. Similarly, War and an Irish Town focused on the escalating violence on the final day, viewing the short-term resolution with cautious relief. And in “Strange Fruit” the attempt to elevate violence to something mythic fails, as violence without artful interpretation in its wake is shown to be meaningless.

Ultimately, the Battle of the Bogside was refracted through storytelling into four distinct narratives and interpretations, each speaking powerfully to the attempt to express the violence of the Irish Troubles in writing. Together, these four ! Laplante 32! narratives demonstrate how in representing violence in writing, group identity is both crystallized and defended. Going beyond their stated purpose to recount the day’s events, these four narratives coloured their reporting of the Troubles with calculated judgements. Any true past was obscured, but something just as powerful emerges: a history of meaning—not what objectively happened on the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth, but what it meant and how it appeared to those who were present and who were charged with delivering their account to the public.

! Laplante 33!

DAMP WITH FOG, THE BOG: Four Borderlands

Borderlands are to nation-states what fog is to the Earth’s troposphere: an obscuring and confounding force acting upon a space that one wishes (and expects) to be quite clear. Definitions of insiders, outsiders, victims and perpetrators are blurred and understandings of the land—that most concrete entity—are fundamentally in dispute. The border landscape, more than just a passive stage upon which events occur, is an actor in and of itself. Further, the land is intimately connected to the people who inhabit it—actively engaging in their ideologies, their actions and their histories—in the words of Hastings Donnan, “the past is literally rooted in and grows out of [the] border landscape.”98 In borderlands, where two or more groups often hold equal claims for the land—and where a state seeks to organize and modernize a space fundamentally opposed to these organizing principles—this connection between populations and the land is simultaneously crystallized and made more tenuous.

In navigating these complexities, borderland studies can often get lost in the fog; but in the cases where they do succeed, histories of borderlands often can provide piercing insight into how individuals confront and understand violence, ideology and the land. This third chapter seeks to accomplish three goals. First, it examines the Bogside during the battle as a borderland refracted through four identities based on religion, class, politics and geography. Second, it situates my work within the field of borderland studies and studies the Bogside in a way it has not yet been studied—as a complex borderland like Kate Brown’s kresy or James C.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 98 Hastings Donnan, “Material Identities: Fixed Ethnicity in the Irish Borderlands,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power (2005): 96. ! Laplante 34!

Scott’s Zomia. And third, it acknowledges how, “in the process of writing history, we

join in both creating and disassembling places, cultures, and biographies.”99

Religious Borderland

Generally speaking, a borderland is a disputed territory. The topics of contention within that territory, however, broadly vary. One such topic is that of religion. Religious borderlands are hardly a novel concept. Indeed, the Middle East has seen centuries of conflict between Muslims, Christians and Jews—each group seeking to claim dominion over the contested landscape. Ireland is a far more intimate religious borderland. Here, two disparate Christian groups, the Catholics and the Protestants, seek to claim dominion over the other. In the late 1960s, in

Northern Ireland under British rule, this conflict was certainly acute.

In 1969, though demographically a minority, Protestants were perceived to have held control of the city of Londonderry. According to scholars such as Graham

Dawson, the Protestant dominance over the city’s Catholics was written into the very infrastructure of the city, as Londonderry was built as “a fortified city whose famous

Walls [were] designed to defend the lives and property of the settlers within from the colonized Catholic Irish without.”100 Thus the Londonderry Catholics found

themselves to be a “powerless majority” trapped “within a state run by their enemies”

and “hemmed into a ghetto outside the centre of their own city.”101 This Catholic

ghetto, existing over a “marshy area immediately outside” the walled city, was known

as the Bogside. Thus the Bogside, though far from perfect, was a Catholic home in the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 99 Brown, op. cit., 16. 100 Dawson, op. cit., 158. 101 Ibid., 159. ! Laplante 35!

Protestant-controlled Londonderry—the closest the Catholics would come to security in this religious borderland.

This conception of the Bogside as a religious borderland led to violence on the day of the Apprentice Boys Parade. For the city’s Protestants, the parade was a mark of religious and cultural pride. But for the Catholics the parade was seen much differently. As a celebration of the 1869 Relief of Derry, the “ritual parading” was perceived as an annual reminder that despite the Catholic majority established since

1891, Londonderry was a decidedly Protestant city.102 Suggesting the Bogside

Catholics to be second-class citizens and “overlooking the Bogside from their commanding position on the impregnable Walls,” the Apprentice Boys Parade

“exuded provocation and threat.”103 Thus within this religious borderland, the parade was a highly contentious event. It is no surprise, then, that the violence of the Battle of the Bogside first erupted as the Protestant parade neared the Catholic ghetto.

The importance of the religious dimension in the Battle of the Bogside has been highlighted by both historians and contemporary newspaper accounts. In The

Dynamics of Conflict in Northern Ireland, Joseph Ruane highlights the religious aspect of the violence, arguing that “loyalists and police attacked the Catholic

Bogside district and Catholics were forced into explicit communal defence.”104 In the

Irish Independent, the identity of the Bogsiders as a defensive Catholic force is crystallized and defended, as the RUC are said to be a “Protestant force,” pushing the

Catholic Bogsiders into the Bogside.105 The Independent also makes deliberate note of “the priest, white-faced with anger, as he faced policemen on an ugly street

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 102 Dawson, op. cit., 158. 103 Ibid. 104 Ruanne, op. cit., 128. 105 “Gogarty condemns police” ! Laplante 36! carpeted with abandoned stones and accused them of partiality,” further stressing the religious dimension of the battle.106 A priest also makes a notable appearance

McCann’s War and an Irish Town. McCann writes:

In William Street a group breaking into Harrison’s garage to steal petrol was stopped by a priest who told them it was wrong. “But Father, we need the petrol.” “Well,” said the priest dubiously, “as long as you don’t take any more than you really need.” And thus absolved in advance, they went at it with a will.107

It can therefore be seen how the Bogside was understood in many circles as a religious Borderland, where the Catholic identity of the Bogsiders was crystallized and defended through the representations of the violence that emerged in its wake.

Class Borderland

The Bogside was a working-class neighbourhood within the city of

Londonderry. To the detriment of the area’s workers, however, “an elaborate and comprehensive system of discrimination in housing and jobs” left the Bogside residents in a position of “permanent and hopeless inferiority.”108 The new houses that were built in the increasingly population-dense area were said to have been poorly constructed and unfairly allocated by the Londonderry Corporation.109 The result was what Eamonn McCann described as a “teeming, crumbling area of ugly, tiny, terrace houses, mean streets where men stood in sullen groups at the corner while their wives went out to work.”110 In response to the housing situation in the

Bogside, the Derry Housing Action Committee was formed. Its official mandate was

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 106 “Derry’s explosion of violence” 107 McCann, op. cit., 117. 108 Dawson, op. cit., 159. 109 McCann, op. cit., 81. 110 Ibid. ! Laplante 37!

to disrupt “public life in the city to draw attention to the housing problem.”111 Their

first action was their breaking up of the March 1968 meeting of the Londonderry

Corporation.112 From there, a string of protests followed.

This period of working-class protest, beginning with the Londonderry

Corporation meeting and culminating in the Battle of the Bogside, reached a

powerful moment of clarity with the June 1968 Wilson caravan protest. According to

McCann, Mr. Wilson lived with his wife and two children, one of whom suffered from

tuberculosis, in a small caravan—“an oven in the summer, an icebox in the winter”—

“parked up a mucky lane in the Brandywell district”113 He attempted to get a house

with the Corporation Housing Department, but was informed that there was “no

chance” that his request would be granted.114 As such, on Saturday, June 22nd, the

DHAC parked the Wilson caravan in the middle of Lecky Road, “the main artery

through the Bogside.”115 They continued to do so throughout the following week and in the end the Wilsons were given a house. The success of the DHAC’s protest made it very clear “that outrageous tactics worked, that blocking roads worked better than an MP’s intervention—if the latter worked at all.”116 As such, and through subsequent

DHAC protests, residents of the Bogside realized that protest, not politics, could

bring successful resolutions to their problems. Leading from the DHAC example, and

as residents of a notoriously neglected working-class neighbourhood, Bogsiders

learned to channel their anger through open resistance.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 111 McCann, op. cit., 83. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid., 89. 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid., 90. ! Laplante 38!

McCann’s narrative, as such, paints a very telling story about the role class identity played during the Battle of the Bogside. When August 12, 1969, arrived, the pomp and circumstance of the Apprentice Boys parade would have been viewed as excessive and offensive to the working-class (second-class) Bogside residents. After the first stones were thrown and the RUC entered the Bogside, the offense would have taken on even greater heft. This ugly ersatz neighbourhood was all they were afforded by the corrupt city officials and now it was being invaded. During the battle, the residents went to work with efficiency learned in the workforce. Men gathered bricks and other remnants of construction sites in the Bogside.117 Women formed assembly lines, preparing petrol bombs from milk bottles, petrol, household flour, sugar and cloth wicks.118 The neighbourhood’s working-class identity, as such, was both crystallized and defended throughout the battle and the narratives that followed.

Political Borderland

In Londonderry, “electoral boundaries [were] gerrymandered to secure the permanent political dominance of the Unionist electorate.”119 But loyalists were concerned: Unionism was taking a more moderate tone and nationalist groups were threatening local power bases.120 The implication of these internal divisions was that the Stormont government was looking for room to “manoeuvre in response to the civil rights movement.”121 Taking advantage of this opportunity were three main anti-

Unionist groups in Londonderry: the Nationalist Party, the Republican Club and the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 117 The Battle of the Bogside. 118 Ibid. 119 Dawson, op. cit., 159. 120 Ruanne, op. cit., 126. 121 Ibid. ! Laplante 39!

Labour Party. Working parallel to these groups were a number of “civil rights

radicals,” including the student-based People’s Democracy, who led a nationalist march across Northern Ireland in January 1969.122

Seeking to restore political order in the North, the Unionist government

called an election in February 1969, but it backfired. The election results “showed the

Unionist Party to be deeply divided,” but (more damaging for the Unionists still) also

“decimated the now relatively accomodationist Nationalist Party[, bringing] civil

rights radicals into mainstream politics.”123 In the Bogside, these political

machinations were felt acutely. Dan Baron Cohen, after living for a time in that

section of Londonderry, wrote that he “came to understand the complexly mediating

neo-colonial voices of Irish nationalism [and] viscerally experienced the editorial

power of the British media, backed up as it was by a ruthlessly sectarian police force

and an army of occupation.”124

The political identity of the Bogside was, in part, defended through the August

1969 Battle of the Bogside. Indeed, the Derry Citizens Defence Association organized

the resistance to the RUC forces. The DCDA was initially formed by the Republican

Club at the end of July “to protect the area against attack on the Twelfth.”125 Its

stated purpose was to “try to preserve the peace and, as soon as this failed, to

organize the defence of the area.”126 To support this cause, the Republican club

invited all the political organizations in the area to nominate two representatives to

sit on the DCDA.127 It was this group that, when the RUC entered the Bogside on

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 122 Ruanne, op. cit., 128. 123 Ibid. 124 Baron Cohen, op. cit., 178. 125 McCann, op. cit., 114. 126 Ibid. 127 Ibid. ! Laplante 40!

August 12th, set up headquarters in the house of Paddy Doherty and co-ordinated the

battle’s four walkie-talkie sets.128

Following the battle, this region’s political identity was further crystallized

and defended through the newspaper reports and Eamonn McCann’s narrative. The

Irish Independent’s assessment of the battle was clear: “Stability and proper respect

for law and order would return if the people could trust the Government.”129 They

continued to suggest that since the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was

still open to dealing with Westminster, “a political solution—the suspension of

Stormont and direct control from Westminster” was the best answer to the region’s troubles.130 McCann’s War and an Irish Town, more than just a narrative of the

Troubles in Northern Ireland, is a political treatise. Here, the suggested solution was

equally political in nature: “I intend this publication of the book as a contribution to

the discussion of how best to build a revolutionary social party in Ireland.”131 Thus

the Bogside region’s political identity was crystallized and defended both through the

actions of those in the Battle of the Bogside and the writings of those in the days and

years that followed.

Geographic Borderland

Londonderry is a fortified city. Its walls were first designed to defend the lives and property of the English settlers within from the Irish without.132 Today they

stand as a reminder of the city’s oft-violent dichotomies: Protestant vs. Catholic,

white collar vs. blue collar, Unionist/Loyalist vs. Nationalist/Republican and Derry

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 128 McCann, op. cit., 116. 129 “Troops ‘not the answer,’” Irish Independent. August 15, 1969. Page 13. 130 Ibid. 131 McCann, op. cit., i. 132 Dawson, op. cit., 158. ! Laplante 41! vs. Londonderry. Immediately beyond these walls lies the Bogside: an unkempt, ugly neighbourhood laid atop a once-marshy tract of land.133 In 1969 the Bogside was neither beautiful nor practical in its design, but for the working-class Catholic

Nationalists/Republicans who lived there, it was home.

Besides being a home to those beyond the old city walls, the Bogside could be read as a geographic borderland. Radding argues that the “environment does not merely provide the scenic backdrop to the human drama but that it is, rather, integral to the historical narrative.”134 In contested landscapes, this is especially so.

As “zones of ambivalence, ambiguity, displacement and hybridity,” borderlands render easy categories like minority and majority or victim and perpetrator moot; as such, they are sites of “transformation, transgression, and cultural experimentation.”135 An area such as the Bogside, thus, is both difficult and rewarding for scholars.

The term “hybridity” here is an important one. For Homi Bhabha, hybridity is the process “by which the colonial governing authority undertakes to translate the identity of the colonised (the Other) within a singular universal framework but then fails[,] producing something familiar but new.”136 This new hybrid identity that emerges challenges the validity and authenticity of the “essential cultural identity” imposed by the colonizer. In the Bogside, this explains the Bogsiders’ rejection of the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 133 Dawson, op. cit., 158. 134 Cynthia Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): xix. 135 Donnan, op. cit, 74. 136 Paul Meredith, “Hybridity in the Third Space: Rethinking Bi-cultural Politics in Aotearoa/New Zealand,” Paper presented to Te Oru Rangahau Maori Research and Development Conference, Massey University (July 7-9, 1998): 2. ! Laplante 42! state definition of Londonderry and reveals the cracks in the monolithic identities presented by the national newspaper reports.

Though mystifying to scholars and states, geographic borderlands like the

Bogside were of enormous importance to their inhabitants. The landscape, holding almost mythic power over the people, served as an “aide memoir[,] recalling the sights, sounds, and smells of former times,” suggesting and framing the inhabitants’ actions in the present and future.137 Looking at Donnan’s work on Northern Irish

Protestants, for example, it is noted how Protestant historical narratives, deeply rooted in the highly contested landscape, identify the Protestants as “frontier custodians of what they see as a threatened Protestant ‘nation.’”138 History and geography merge and what is ultimately articulated is an impassioned claim to the contested borderland.

For the residents of a borderland such as the Bogside, this would have translated into a search for a free homeland. In the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In

Search of Lost Time, he meditates on what American urban planner Kevin Lynch would later refer to as “the feeling and value of an imageable environment.”139 Proust evocatively describes how the church steeple in Combray, the site of his childhood summers, became a powerful apparition in his mind later in life: “it was always to the steeple that we had to return, always the steeple that dominated everything, summing up the houses with an unexpected pinnacle, raised before me like the finger of God.”140 Such was the dream of a free homeland to those living in the Bogside.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 137 Ibid., 75. 138 Donnan, op. cit., 69-70. 139 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1960): 128. 140 Marcel Proust, The Way By Swann’s (London: Penguin Classics, 2003): 69. ! Laplante 43!

While it is true that “the Catholics and Protestants are internally rather

heterogeneous groups,”141 in 1969 a significant gulf lay between them. Indeed, the

Bogside was a place

where walls and barricades, borders and boundaries—both material and symbolic—have defined political and social life throughout its 400- year modern history. They have also structured the ways in which the past is felt to ‘live on’ in the present, in popular memories grounded in the sense of this city as a contested place.142

These “numerous borders and boundaries” served to harden the inhabitants’

identities during this period of conflict.143 As Kuusisto-Arponen argues, “competing

cultural, social and economic goals exist in borderlands, and thus communities

reinforce their distinct identities, institutions and bounded localities in order to

survive.”144 From this point of hardened identities in a contested landscape, it was

not long before violence erupted. In a borderland conflict, both sides equate

“territory with ethnicity and [fight] to drive out traces of the other from what they

[consider] their national territory.”145 Thus when the RUC forces entered the Bogside

on August 12th, it was with the goal of preserving their identities, intimately tied to

the geography of the space (and thus synonymous with the goal of defending the

homeland), that mobilized the residents in violent action.

In this third chapter I have sought to answer the question I first asked on

page 6: “What can contemporary interpretations of the Bogside violence tell us about

the nature of group identity in contested landscapes?” Most borderland histories

“focus on border communities and the ways they were affected by the imposition of a !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 141 Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto-Arponen, “The End of Violence and Introduction of ‘Real’ Politics: Tensions in Peaceful Northern Ireland,” Geografiska Annaler 83, no. 3 (2001): 121. 142 Dawson, op. cit., 157. 143 Kuusisto-Arponen, op. cit., 121. 144 Ibid. 145 Brown, op. cit., 10. ! Laplante 44!

border;” thus, in addition to geographic perspectives, such histories almost always

include social, cultural and epistemological concerns.146 In this work, the borderland

conflicts at play in Londonderry have been revealed and examined through texts.

These texts have shown that the battle was not purely a religious conflict, nor was it

solely class-based, political or geographic; instead, a variety of conflicting identities

were crystallized and defended in this contested borderland. Those who sought to

advance political goals, for example, used storytelling to portray the conflict as a political one, massaging the traces of the past to fit their activist goals. The same can be said for those working with religious and class-based intentions. The violence of the Battle of the Bogside, thus, was not inherently meaningful, but was given its

meaning by those who continued the fight on the page long after the weapons were

retired.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 146 Robin Jarvis Brownlie, Review of “Lines Drawn upon the Water: First Nations and the Great Lakes Borders and Borderlands,” Canadian Historical Review 91, no. 3 (September 2010): 572. ! Laplante 45!

CONCLUSION

Group identity is crystallized and defended in contested landscapes not through action, but through interpretation. The brief, imprecise Battle of the

Bogside, for better or for worse, did not speak for itself. The battle was not given meaning by the petrol bombs thrown from the High Flats, nor from the tear gas canisters rolling down Rossville Street. It was given meaning by the reporters, the speech-writers and the poets—the men and women who looked at what this supposed vector had wrought and set their thoughts down in writing.

In Chapter One, “Out Across the City,” four conclusions were reached. First, in studying Northern Ireland, I chose to use a post-revisionist approach, delving into the conflicts and complexities of the time while acknowledging that it is not my place to engage with the politics—to acknowledge the variety of perspectives without turning my work into an active platform for one. Second, I made the decision to refer to the city as “Londonderry,” while openly acknowledging the contentions underlying this decision. Third, I decided to explore the Bogside in a way that has not previously been done—in depth, on its own and within the context of borderland studies. And fourth, I chose to refer to the conflict as a battle rather than a riot.

In Chapter Two, “That Blink Within this Canyon,” the events of the Battle of the Bogside were told from three different perspectives—that of the Times in

London, the Irish Independent and Eamonn McCann’s War and an Irish Town— with Seamus Heaney’s bog poems providing contemporary commentary on the relationship between people, violence, the land and art. In exploring how these narratives often widely diverged, it became clear that the process of storytelling was an active medium through which identity was crystallized and defended. ! Laplante 46!

In Chapter Three, “Damp with Fog, the Bog,” the Bogside was understood as a

religious, class-based, political and geographic borderland. Its identity as a Catholic,

working-class, republican/nationalist homeland within Londonderry was defended

in August 1969 first through the violence of the Battle of the Bogside and then

through the narratives that cropped up in its wake. What here becomes evident is

that the past can be thematically understood in a number of ways. The conflict in

Northern Ireland is neither strictly geographic, nor is it strictly religious, class-based or political; rather, it is a complex interplay of a variety of factors, some rooted in reality and others rooted in a long historical tradition.

Bernadette Devlin and Paddy Doherty looking out their windows into the streets of the Bogside, the RUC officers straightening their ties in the mirror, the

Apprentice Boys polishing their shoes, the families settling down to dinner and the couples looking into the faces of the excavated bog bodies would all create their own narratives and meanings from the events that began on the Twelfth. For the historian sitting at his desk surrounded by conflicting traces of an inaccessible past, these narratives and meanings themselves would become the story. History here becomes not the Battle of the Bogside, but what it meant to those who saw it happen—not the chemical make-up of that long-dead star, but what the light looks like from the ground.

! Laplante 47!

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The main title and subsequent chapter titles of this work are drawn from “Slowly, Through a Vector,” from Say Anything’s …Is a Real Boy album.