Bloody Sunday 50th Anniversary - Get To Derry If You Can!
Breandán Mac Cionnaith has encouraged people from across Ireland to make their way to Derry on January 30th, 2022, to join with the people of that city to mark the 50th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday Massacre. Speaking from Portadown, the Éirígí spokesperson said,
“The Bloody Sunday Massacre marked a critical turning point in modern Irish history. It exposed to the world how far the British state was willing to go to suppress a community that was demanding basic civil rights after centuries of discrimination and oppression.
The imagery that emerged from Derry on Bloody Sunday sent shock waves around the world
It also hastened the end of the civil rights movement and convinced huge numbers of people in Ireland and beyond that armed resistance to British rule was not only justified, but necessary. After Bloody Sunday there was no going back to an orange state that treated Catholics, nationalists and republicans as second-class citizens.
In 2010, after almost four decades of campaigning by the injured and the families of the dead, the British government eventually conceded that the Parachute Regiment had wrongly shot twenty-six unarmed civilians in Derry on Bloody Sunday - resulting in the deaths of eight men and six boys.
But since then the British state has dragged its heels in relation to prosecuting the soldiers that carried out the massacre. This is all part of a long-term British strategy to run down the clock to the point that all of the Bloody Sunday soldiers will either have died or be deemed too old to stand trial.
This strategy of running down the clock doesn’t just apply to Bloody Sunday. It is also evident in relation to numerous other incidents involving murders by both Britain’s official forces and Britain’s unofficial death squads.
The Dublin-Monaghan bombings. The British state has long withheld critical information relating to this murderous attack by a British-controlled death squad
There are still close to 100 inquests relating to conflict-era deaths that have not been completed. And up to 1,000 conflict-related civil cases are making their way through the courts. These figures are testament to the British state’s efforts to slow everything down by delaying inquests, undermining investigations, withholding information and destroying evidence. Britain fully understands that justice delayed is justice denied.
The current proposal by the British government to introduce a general amnesty for all British personnel s a blatant attempt to close down all of the investigations into the dirty war that Britain waged in Ireland for over a quarter of a century.
Éirígí activists attend the 35th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday massacre in 2007
Éirígí is encouraging people from across Ireland to make their way to Derry on Sunday, January 30th, to not only remember the dead of Bloody Sunday, but also to stand in solidarity with the thousands of people who lost loved ones at the hands of the RUC. the British Army and British-controlled unionist death squads.
Together we need to keep the pressure on the British government and the British state, to bring all of the secrets of their dirty war into the bright light of day, to deliver truth and justice for their victims and to ensure that the British state will never wage such a war in Ireland again.”
The 50th anniversary Bloody Sunday march will assemble at the Creggan shops, Central Drive in Derry City at 2.30pm on Sunday, January 30th, 2022.