Sorry guys! Doing a post this week totally slipped my mind. But never fear; I have much to talk about. This week, while I have been working on my outline and first few pages of the paper, I've taken another look at my primary sources that deal with the events preceding Bloody Sunday, particularly the civil rights movement. So for this post, I decided to tell you guys about Ivan Cooper's testimony in the "Saville Inquiry."
The Rt. Hon. Lord Saville of Newdigate, "Ivan Cooper's Testimony," The Report of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry (London: The Stationary Office, 2010), http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20101103103930/http://report.bloody-sunday-inquiry.org/.
Ivan Cooper was a civil rights activist in Ireland during the 1960s and seventies. His role in Bloody Sunday lies in the fact that he was one of the leading marchers in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) march that took place on January 30th, 1972. According to Cooper, "The late 1960's and early 1970's were a time of people for civil rights in debate on civil rights and marches by the Northern Ireland, and Particularly in Derry...I was a staunch supporter...and strongly committed to the cause" (Saville "Cooper" 1). While knowing that civil rights movements were occurring during the sixties and seventies is important, what is more important is the fact that these movements were non-violent, something completely opposite from the approach the IRA was taking. Cooper and others like him struggled for civil rights through non-violent approaches, taking "inspiration from the great civil rights leaders such as Ghandi and Martin Luther King" (Saville "Cooper" 1). Even other civil rights organizations separate from NICRA commended and based their own protests off of Cooper's. They were, as Cooper commented, an "advocate of civil rights which were to be achieved through the use of non-violent means only" (Saville "Cooper" 1).
While my paper is not focused on the civil rights movements that occurred in the sixties and seventies, Cooper's testimony reveals that the IRA's violent and hostile attacks against the repressing forces was not the preferred method for a majority of the Catholic and nationalist people. This thought process, however, began to change when the non-violent approach used on Bloody Sunday led to the death of several people. This failure on NICRA's part left the people seeking more radical methods to gain their rights. Thus, the IRA became dramatically more popular after January 30th, 1972.
McKenzie, great post! I noticed at the very end you mentioned the need to move toward more radical actions instead of the non-violent protests. Obviously the radicals sought to use Bloody Sunday to validate their violent responses. My question, although unrelated to your topic is did the non-violent movement also see a resurgence after Bloody Sunday, or did those actions cause the non-violent movement to die out completely?
ReplyDeleteJenn, there wasn't a complete die-out of the non-violent movement; I know that they had peaceful marches up until at least the eighties. But, especially in 1972, the non-violent approach had lost a tremendous amount of support. Like I said, it never died out completely; violent IRA attacks kind of fluctuate throughout the whole troubles; so, while I haven't done much research into peaceful movements post 1972, it stands to reason that if the IRA's forceful presence fluctuated, then most likely the support for non-violent approaches did too. I'm betting that when the IRA had less support, groups like NICRA had a lot, and vice verse.
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