Ten Days that Changed the World
We have always been told that history unfolds in slow, inevitable cycles. But, as the recent Bloody Sunday inquiry demonstrates, sometimes a single event can change the world utterly.
Valerie Flynn, 06 Jul 2010
How much can change in a single day?
Some events change the political landscape so dramatically that when we look back, it's impossible to imagine where we'd be now if they hadn't happened.
The shooting dead of 13 unarmed civil rights demonstrators by the British Army Parachute Regiment on January 30, 1972 – Bloody Sunday – was one such event. Its significance has been cast into the spotlight again by the publication of the long-awaited report from the Saville Inquiry.
Writing in this magazine in the weeks leading up to the report's publication, Eamon McCann argued that Bloody Sunday, more than any other event, is the "pivotal plot-point in the narrative of the Troubles", an event which had a "dramatic effect on the trajectory of political events".
In the year following Bloody Sunday, nearly 500 lives were lost, making 1972 the most lethal year of the Troubles.
For moderate Catholics, Bloody Sunday shattered the illusion that the British Army was a neutral presence that could or would protect them from sectarian violence. The Provisional IRA was the obvious outlet for many radicalised and disaffected young Catholics, and membership soared. SDLP leader Gerry Fitt predicted as much in the House of Commons in the days following the Civil Rights march that turned into a massacre.
"Whether we like it or not, the British Army is no longer acceptable in Belfast, Derry or anywhere else in Northern Ireland. It is seen as acting in support of a discredited and corrupt Unionist government," he said.
"From massacres of innocent civilians grow dragon's teeth," is the reaction in a History Ireland editorial to be published next month. Historian and editor of the magazine, Tommy Graham, points out the startling parallels between Bloody Sunday and the British Army's massacre of Indian civilians at Amritsar in 1919. Both events had a radicalising effect. And in both cases, it was the immediate commander of the troops who took the rap, rather than the higher echelons of the army – who were of course responsible at the very least for the culture and the attitudes which gave rise to the bloody events
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