The Catholic Bogside area was the tinderbox of the modern Troubles in Northern Ireland. Bloody Sunday, a terrible confrontation during a march that occurred nearly 50 years ago, sparked a sectarian inferno, and the ashes have not yet fully cooled.
Today, the murals of the Bogside give visitors an accessible glimpse of this community’s passionate perception of those events.
The murals are done by two brothers, Tom and William Kelly, and their childhood friend Kevin Hasson are known as the Bogside Artists. They grew up in the Bogside and witnessed the tragic events that took place there, which led them to begin the murals in 1994.
One of the brothers, Tom, gained a reputation as a “heritage mural” painter, specializing in scenes of life in the old days. In a surprising and hopeful development, Tom was later invited into Derry’s Protestant Fountain neighborhood to work with a youth club there on three proud heritage murals that were painted over paramilitary graffiti.
The Murals – The first mural we walked past is the colorful Peace, showing the silhouette of a dove in flight and an oak leaf, both created from a single ribbon. A peace campaign asked Derry city schoolchildren to write suggestions for positive peacetime images; their words inspired this artwork.
The dove is a traditional symbol of peace, and the oak tree is a traditional symbol of Derry – recognized by both communities. The dove flies from the sad blue of the past toward the warm yellow of the future.
The Hunger Strikers, repainted during the summer of 2015, features two Derry-both participants of the 1981 Maze Prison hunger strike, as well as their mothers, who sacrificed and supported them in their fatal decision (10 strikers died). The prison was closed after the release of all prisioners (both Unionist and Nationalist) in 2000.
Smaller and easy to miss (above a ramp with banisters) is John Hume. It’s actually a collection of four faces – Nationalist leader John Hume, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Mother Teresa. The Brooklyn Bridge in the middle symbolizes the long-term bridges of understand that the work of these four Nobel Prize-winning activists created. Born in the Bogside, Hume still maintains a home here.
The Saturday Matinee depicts an outgunned but undaunted local youth behind a screen shield. He holds a stone, ready to throw, while a British armored vehicle approaches (echoing the famous Tiananmen Square photo of the lone Chinese man facing the tank.) Why Saturday Matinee? It’s because the weekend was the best time for locals to engage in a little “recreational rioting” and “have a got at” the army; people were off work and youths were out of school. The “MOFD” at the bottom of the mural stands for the nearby Museum of Free Derry.
The Civil Rights mural shows a marching Derry crowd carrying an anti-sectarian banner. It dates from the days when Martin Luther King, Jr.’s successful nonviolent marches were being seen worldwide on TV, creating a dramatic, global ripple effect. Civil rights marches, inspired by King and using the same methods to combat a similar set of grievances, gave this long-suffering community a powerful new voice.
All along this walk you’ll notice lots of flags, including the red, black, white, and green Palestinian flag. Palestinians and Catholic residents of Northern Ireland have a special empathy for each other – both are indigenous people dealing with the persistent realities of sharing what they consider their rightful homeland with more powerful settlers planted there for political reasons.
Across from the Museum of Free Derry (which we did not go to for time reasons) is the Bloody Sunday Monument. This small, fenced-off stone obelisk lists the names of those who died that day, most within 50 yards of this spot. The map pedestal by the monument shows how a rubble barricade was erected to block the street. A 10-story housing project called Rossville Flats stood here in those days. After peaceful protests failed (with Bloody Sunday being the watershed event), Nationalist youths became more aggressive. British troops were wary of being hit by Molotov cocktails thrown from the rooftop of the housing project.
The granite letter H in the middle of Rossville street is inscribed with the names of the IRA hunger strikers who died (and how many days they starved in the H-block of Maze Prison.
In The Runners, four rioting youths flee tear gas from canisters used by the British Army to disperse hostile crowds. More than 1,000 canisters were used during the Battle of the Bogside; “nonlethal” rubber bullets killed 17 people over the course of the troubles.
In Operation Motorman, a soldier wields a sledgehammer to break through a house door, depicting the massive push by the British Army to open up the Bogside’s barricaded “no-go” areas that the IRA had controlled for three years. (1969-1972).
Free Derry Corner announces “You are now entering Free Derry” (imitating a similarly defiant slogan of the time in once-isolated West Berlin). This was the gabled end of a string of houses that stood here almost 50 years ago. During the Troubles, it became the traditional meeting place for speakers to address crowds. A portion of this mural changes from time to time, calling attention to injustice by kindred spirits around the world (the plight of Palestinians and Basques are common themes.)
Bloody Sunday is a mural in which a small group of men carry a body from that ill-fated march. It’s based on a famous photo of Father Edward Daly that was taken that day. Hunched over, he waves a white handkerchief to request safe passage in order to evacuate a mortally wounded protester. The bloodstained civil rights banner was inserted under the soldier’s feet for extra emphasis. After Bloody Sunday, the previously marginal IRA suddenly found itself swamped with bitterly determined young recruits.
In the Mural Bernadette, the woman with the megaphone is Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, an outspoken civil rights leader, who, at age 21, became the youngest elected member of British Parliament. Behind her kneels a female supporter, banging a trash-can lid against the street in a traditional expression of protest in Nationalist neighborhoods. Trash-can lids were used to warn neighbors of the approach of British patrols.
Petrol Bomber, showing a teen wearing an army-surplus gas mask, captures the Battle of the Bogside, when locals barricaded their community, effectively shutting out British rule. Though the main figure’s face is obscured by the mask, his body clearly communicates the resolve of an oppressed people. In the background, the long-gone Rossville Flats housing project still looms, with an Irish tricolor flag flying from its top.
In Death of Innocence, a young girl stands in front of bomb wreckage. She is Annette McGavigan, a 4-year-old who was killed on this corner by crossfire in 1971. She was the 100th fatality of the Troubles, which eventually took more than 3,000 lives (and she was also a cousin of one of the artists). The broken gun beside her points to the ground, signifying that it’s no longer being wielded. The large butterfly above her shoulder symbolizes the hope for peace. For years, the artists left the butterfly an empty silhouette until they felt confident that the peace process had succeeded. They finally filled in the butterfly with optimistic colors in the summer of 2006.
This final mural, painted in 1997 to observe the 25th anniversary of the tragedy, is called Bloody Sunday Commemoration and shows the 14 victims. They are surrounded by a ring of 14 oak leaves – the symbol of Derry. When relatives of the dead learned that the three Bogside Artists were beginning to paint this mural, many came forward to loan the artists precious photos of their loved ones, so they could be more accurately depicted.
While these murals preserve the struggle of the late 20th century, today sectarian violence has given way to negotiations and a settlement that seems to be working in fits and starts. The British apology for the Bloody Sunday shootings was a huge step forward. Former Nationalist leader John Hume (who shared the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize with then-Unionist leader David Trimble) once borrowed a quote from Gandhi to explain his nonviolent approach to the peace process: “An eye for eye leaves everyone blind.”