In one of the cafes in Sarajevo, I heard that desperate and angry voice for the first time: "How long, how long do we have to sing this song". Everyone called the singer Bono, the band of young Irish people named themselves after the spy plane U2, and the thing was "Sunday Bloody Sunday".
In Sarajevo, people were entertained by the upcoming Winter Olympics. Bono then whispered something to me that James Joyce could not in his Dubliners - in the north of the Irish island, in the middle of the Anglo-Saxon world, there is a bloody, dirty war in which innocent people are dying. I began to follow the news from that part of the world more closely. I learned something about the conflict between Irish Republicans and British Royalists. About the ideological collision fueled by Catholic-Protestant historical rivalry.
The song referred to the massacre committed by British soldiers in Northern Ireland on Sunday 30 January 1972. In the city of Derry, they opened fire on unarmed protesters. 13 of them were killed.
"I can't believe today's news" - thus begins the thing that will make U2 famous. Bono was not even 30 years old on January 1972, 12 - obviously those deaths were etched in the soul of the Dublin teenager. "Broken bottles under the children's feet/ Dead bodies strewn across the cul-de-sac," Bono sang in the XNUMXs.
The city I loved so much
Unlike Bono, who grew up in a "mixed" Protestant-Catholic family in Dublin, and experienced the events of 1972 at the threshold of puberty, so it took him ten years to find a way to a song, a thirty-year-old musician, born in Derry, sang wrote his song "The City I Loved So Much" already in 1973. It was about turning the hometown into a war zone. Phil Colter, the man who sang that song, was no stranger. For example, he was the co-author of the song that Sandy Shaw sang at the Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna in 1967 and won.
The song dedicated to Deri describes the happy childhood and pride of ordinary people, workers. This is best evidenced by the verses:
"In the air of Derry lay music/ Like a language we could all understand".
And then all those childhood places disfigured by violence:
"And the damned barbed wire is higher and higher/ with tanks and cannons, oh my God, what have they done to the city I love so much".
The way Phil Colter sang about his city was such that the song was sung by people on both sides of the conflict.
This musician from Northern Ireland is not the only one who sang "Bloody Sunday".
"Give Ireland back to the Irish"
Paul McCartney had just recovered from the breakup of the Beatles and formed the band Wings when "Bloody Sunday" happened in Derry. He was related to the Irish on his mother's side. Paul McCartney, unlike John Lennon, was not peculiar to protest songs. But, as he later stated, he felt he had to react in his own way. The result was the song "Give Ireland Back to the Irish", which was written just two days after the shootings of unarmed protesters, and appeared extremely quickly, already in February. In Great Britain, the single reached the 16th place in the chart, and in America it was in the 21st position. In the Republic of Ireland, according to the logic of things, the song took first place. The British media accused McCartney of supporting the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and its violence. Eventually, the BBC banned the song. McCartney's brother was beaten in a London pub where Irish Protestants gathered.
"Give Ireland back to the Irish, don't make them take it themselves". A simple message, with some pathos and an appeal to the British to put themselves in the position of the Irish.
"The Luck of the Irish"
John Lennon had a political awakening long before Britain's elite paratroopers fired into the crowd in Derry. In New York, he participated in peace and protest marches of organizations that defended the human rights of Irish republicans. The Northern Ireland government supported by London implemented a policy of internment without trial - filling prisons and camps with hundreds of opponents of British rule. John Lennon and Yoko Ono made a protest song "The Luck of the Irish" for a rally. The story was written at the end of 1971 and seems to foreshadow the bloody events in Derry.
In the song, John Lennon calls Ireland "a land full of beauty and wonder" that was "raped by British bandits". In one place, Lennon asks the question: "Why are the English here at all?", and a few verses later he says what many English people have not forgiven him: "when those bastards committed genocide".
This is how Lennon was already expected to react to "Bloody Sunday". He did so in June 1972 by writing and singing the song "Sunday Bloody Sunday". For me, it's the best song born out of anger over the British killings in Northern Ireland:
It was Sunday, bloody Sunday/ when they killed people there/ the cries of the thirteen martyrs/ filled the free air of Derry.
All proceeds from two songs - The Happiness of the Irish and Sunday, Bloody Sunday - were donated by John Lennon and Yoko Ono to Irish civil rights movements in Ireland and New York. It goes without saying that Lennon incurred the wrath of British royalists.
Bogside - a place of trauma
The city of Derry itself - in Irish it means oak grove - with almost 90.000 inhabitants, protestant unionists, loyal to London call Londoners. When journalists on television had to decide and say the name of the city, it would bring them trouble: whoever says Derry, he is on the side of the Irish republicans. And whoever says Londoners, he is for unionist loyalists and London government. One journalist got the idea and said Derry-dash-Londonderry in a television report. Soon the derisive name "Stroke City" was born.
Few city districts in the world can claim to be perhaps more famous than the city in which it is located. Bogside, where mostly Catholics live, is such an area. Irish nationalists and British soldiers clashed there so many times that the place took on a mythical character in the minds of the Irish community. The mural that says it all was created in January 1969. At the entrance to the neighborhood on the side of a house, someone wrote in letters visible from afar: "You are now entering Free Derry" - You are now entering Free Derry. Along Rossville Street, there are murals that, like comics, preserve the memory of the traumatic points of the bloody conflict in Northern Ireland.
Bloody Sunday, the fiftieth time
By the quirk of the calendar in the past 50 years, January 30 has been a Sunday only five times. But here is the sixth time on the fiftieth anniversary of that event. He etched himself indelibly into the Irish collective consciousness, but also left a deep mark on the protest music culture of the seventies and eighties.
The Belfast Agreement of 1998 put an end to mutual killing, all parties agreed to disarm their paramilitaries, Northern Ireland received broad autonomy and the right to special ties with Dublin, whoever wanted could take Irish citizenship in addition to British citizenship. Brexit has struck at the very foundation of this peace agreement. If a "hard border" is re-established between Ireland remaining in the EU and Great Britain, some Irish people on both sides of the border will not like it.
The names of the victims are written on the monument in Deri. Six of them were only 17 years old.
However, Northern Ireland's Protestant majority and Catholic minority must be smart to avoid the danger looming over them once again: London's dream of a post-Brexit Great Britain could come crashing down on the heads of people who are born, live and die in Belfast or To Deria.
Bonus video:
