February 4 2024 Sinn Féin Victorious in Seizing the Government of Northern Ireland; Hope For a United Ireland Free from British Colonial Rule is Rekindled

Two years of political deadlock and uselessness of the government ends this Saturday in Northern Ireland, when Sinn Fein’s new leader Michelle O’Neill takes control of the state. I find it curious that no one is commenting in the news on the fact she is a descendent of Niall of the Nine Hostages, High King of Tara in Ireland over 1600 years ago, and arguably the legitimate Queen of Ireland.

Sometimes we ignore the important things, like who are we really, and become lost in the trivia of the mundane and the ephemeral.

Regardless of how bemused I am by this prodigy of history and its significance for our future, I keep returning to a comparison of a Northern Ireland governed by Sinn Fein with South Africa governed by the ANC, and wonder now how long it will be before Hamas ceases to be demonized by her colonialist-imperialist occupiers as a terrorist group as was the ANC and Sinn Fein, and is recognized as the legitimate government of a sovereign and independent Palestinian state.

I dream of a United Humankind, wherein we are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and we abandon the social use of force; that day is now nearer and more certain with the triumph of Sinn Fein.

When Michelle O’Neill takes command of the state I will be singing a song of my childhood taught to me by my mother, whose allegiance to liberation struggle in Ireland and elsewhere may be gauged by the fact that she named my sister Erin, and become a family tradition when situations seem hopeless, the Broad Black Brimmer.

There is always a way forward, so long as we refuse to submit and stand in solidarity with our comrades.

The Broad Black Brimmer Lyrics

There’s a uniform that’s hanging in what’s known as father’s room

A uniform so simple in its style

It has no braid of gold or silk, no hat with feathered plume

Yet me mother has preserved it all the while

One day she made me try it on, a wish of mine for years

“Just in memory of your father dear”, she said

And when I put the Sam Browne on

She was smiling through her tears

As she placed the broad black brimmer on me head

[Chorus]

It’s just a broad black brimmer

With its ribbons frayed and torn

By the careless whisk of many’s a mountain breeze

An old trench coat that’s all battle-stained and worn

And breeches almost threadbare at the knees

A Sam Browne belt with the buckle big and strong

And a holster that’s been empty many’s a day

But when men claim Ireland’s freedom

The one should choose to lead them

Will wear the broad black brimmer of the I.R.A

It was the uniform being worn by me father long ago

When he reached me mother’s homestead on the run

It was the uniform me father wore in that little church below

When oul’ Father Mac, he blessed the pair as one

And after truce and treaty and the parting of the ways

He wore it when he marched out with the rest

And when they bore his body down that rugged heather braes

They placed the broad black brimmer on his breast

As I wrote in my post of February 8 2020, Hope for the Union of Ireland: Sinn Fein Wins a Place at the Table; Today we celebrate with triumphant joy the electoral victory of Sinn Fein, the Irish party of liberation and social justice, which puts Union back on the table, the glorious dream of freedom from the colonial imperialist tyranny of England, which squats like a toad of foulness on the shores of Northern Ireland.

What if all the former colonies of the British Empire sent troops to aid the people of Ireland in their struggle for liberty? How then can tyranny survive?

Imagine with me a united free humanity and army of liberation comprised of former colonial subjects of the British Empire with a historic mandate to export the revolution and bring justice to all humankind, India and America, South Africa and Malaysia, Australia and Eqypt, and so many others. Such a force would be unstoppable, would sweep across hierarchies of authoritarian force and control like the Black soldiers of the Union Army who liberated Richmond and brought the Confederacy to submission or the Allied victory over fascism in the Second World War.

Liberty is a dream resonant with historic momentum and power; we need only harness it to ride to victory on its tides.

So I wrote four years ago, and with electoral victory today we move a step nearer to our goal of reunification. Here in Ireland we play what in chess is called a Long Game, in which the sacrifices we make along the way become our stepping stones to victory. And with the issue of trade as leverage, and all of the intractable issues signified by the term Brexit, as our civilization begins to collapse from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions amid a changing world order, we now have unique opportunities for revolutionary struggle and for independence.

As I wrote of the lines of fracture in my post of April 10 2021, A Bad Breakup: the Irish Unionists of Northern Ireland and the European Union Versus Britain and her Loyalists of Northern Ireland; During the past week of violence in Northern Ireland, Brexit has taken a monkeywrench to a fragile peace in a land riven by the legacies of nine centuries of colonial occupation and resistance.

The week of rage and violence just endured by Northern Ireland, in which pro-British Loyalists have attacked their own police in a stunning volte-face, is a parallel with America’s January 6 Insurrection in terms of the motives of the mob and the origins of their grievances; a sense of betrayal by the government above all else, but also fear of losing power in a rapidly changing political and social context driven by population shift and the collapse of capitalism under globalization, both of which combine to create a whirlpool of marginalization, fear, rage, and enabled by weaponized faith and a divided national identity based on sectarian allegiance and reinforced by exclusionary differences of race and language and identitarian narratives of historical victimization.

History oppresses everyone in Ireland; this is why it remains the classic example of the problem of the Double Minority. But until now the British Loyalists could count on a voting majority which has kept Northern Ireland under the British flag. No one gives up power willingly, and the Loyalists have historically displayed no limits in the actions they will take to defend their privilege. Brexit just dropped a match on an already explosive situation.

What remains to be seen is whether the Catholic Unionists will be drawn into the conflict, which would signal a return of the Troubles and civil war but with the European Union challenging Britain in a proxy Great Powers War not seen since Bonnie Prince Charlie and France championed the causes of independence and Catholicism as European unity which supersedes nationalism, and echoing the sectarian conflicts of history, a scenario which would favor the Unionists in the long run and threaten the stability of Britain itself, or if the Protestant Loyalists will step back from the brink.

For Loyalist forces, as for all those whose arts of negotiation include mass action as riot, arson, looting, and destabilization, there is a calculus of fear beyond which such provocations win nothing, for ones partners must also be able to win, and what you are asking must be within their power to grant. At this point they must be wondering if Britain can trade Brexit for Northern Ireland, and considering de-escalation, especially when the short term gains cannot offset the long term losses of damage to critical relationships with British police in the enforcement of elite hegemonic wealth, power, and privilege and the fracture of defining relationships with British sponsorship.

If I were the director of Sinn Féin’s strategic intelligence and policy service, I would be urging simultaneous diplomatic actions to secure European and American alliances and direct actions to render it impossible for the Loyalists and Britain to salvage their united front and to escape the closing jaws of this trap. And I would win freedom for Northern Ireland; but at a terrible cost.

There is nothing more terrible in the history of human atrocities than wars of religion, waged by those whose faith weaponized in the service of authority and power absolves any crime. Gott mitt uns; it is an ancient terror.

We know too well the costs of losing such a conflict. What are the costs of victory?

Liberation struggles, especially anticolonial revolutions, which were victorious but sowed the seeds of their own destruction as tyrannies bear a common fatal flaw; they won because they forged a national identity of blood, faith, and soil, focused on charismatic leaders and the valorization of force and violence, and energized by myths of sacrifice and victimization. Here are all the necessary conditions for the emergence of fascism; fear shaped by submission to authority in service to power.

This has nothing to do with political ideology or the particulars of faith, ethnicity, race, language, or nationality, and everything to do with the nature of power as a dynamism of fear, force, and violence.

There is an escape from the Ring of Power, and it is both simple and fiendishly difficult to achieve; renounce the use of social force and abandon the seduction of power. Lay down your arms and join hands. Love and solidarity triumph over hate and division.

But as the line in the film The Devil’s Own goes; “Don’t look for a happy ending. It’s not an American story. It’s an Irish one.”

Who is the new leader of Northern Ireland? As written by Rory Carroll in The Guardian, in an article entitled Michelle O’Neill: Sinn Féin leader from IRA family who has vowed to respect royals: She’s pledged to be first minister ‘for all’ and her ability to navigate political tensions will shape her Stormont tenure; “When Michelle O’Neill is sworn in as Northern Ireland’s first minister, it will be a moment of personal triumph steeped in irony.

As a teenage mother, she was treated as if she had the “plague”, and wept, yet went on to ascend the ranks of Sinn Féin and is now poised to make history as the first nationalist to lead Northern Ireland – a state that, in theory, she wishes to eradicate.

There is little expectation of republican thunder when O’Neill takes her post in the gilded chamber of Stormont on Saturday. She has pledged to be a first minister “for all”, unionists as well as nationalists, and to show respect to the royal family.

Yet the 47-year-old comes from an IRA family, defends the legitimacy of IRA violence, and honours IRA members who died during the Troubles. How she navigates the tension between these positions will shape her tenure at the helm of an executive that faces immense challenges after two years of political paralysis.

O’Neill should have become first minister in May 2022 after Sinn Féin overtook the Democratic Unionist party in an assembly election. But the DUP boycotted power-sharing in protest at post-Brexit trading arrangements, leaving Stormont mothballed until a deal with the government coaxed it back this week.

The Sinn Féin deputy leader will head an executive with a DUP deputy first minister who has equal power but less prestige. The two parties, in coalition with Alliance and the Ulster Unionist party, inherit a fiscal crisis, crumbling public services, creaking infrastructure and widespread cynicism about Stormont’s capacity to fix things. Republicans will want progress towards unification, while unionists will want to anchor themselves in the UK.

Solomon and Machiavelli might have passed up such a job as impossible, but O’Neill has professed optimism and keenness to “work together with all parties to deliver on the needs and aspirations of workers, families and businesses”.

Sexist jibes will not help. Since entering the public eye as a minister and deputy first minister, O’Neill has had to field comments on her appearance. “The beauty from a family drenched in blood,” the Daily Mail declared in 2017. “Glossy blonde hair. Bright lipstick. Curled eyelashes. Painted nails. Figure-hugging outfits. Michelle O’Neill certainly isn’t what we expected.”

When Arlene Foster was a DUP first minister, she was pressed in an interview to sum up her Sinn Féin colleague in a word. “Blonde,” she replied.

If wounded, O’Neill did not show it. Her public persona is of an open, affable, down-to-earth politician who gets on with her work. Officials at Stormont say she is the same when cameras are not rolling. “No airs, easy to get on with,” said one.

O’Neill’s background did not hint at a future hobnobbing in Washington, London and Brussels. She was born Michelle Doris into a working-class family in Clonoe, a village in County Tyrone. Her father, Brendan Doris, was an IRA prisoner and an uncle, Paul Doris, raised funds for the group. Two cousins, IRA members, were shot by security forces, one fatally.

Aged 15, she became pregnant and recalled being treated at school “like I was a plague”. At home she collapsed and sobbed. “I’ll never forget that experience and I thought, ‘Nobody will ever treat me like this again,’” she told the Irish Times in 2021.

O’Neill’s family helped care for her baby daughter while she completed her A-levels and trained as a welfare rights adviser. In 2005 she won a seat on Dungannon borough council that had previously been held by her father and went on to become a protege of Francie Molloy, a Sinn Féin assembly member, and Martin McGuinness, the party’s dominant figure alongside Gerry Adams.

After she was elected to Stormont in 2007, the party hopscotched her over more senior colleagues by appointing her agriculture minister in 2011, health minister in 2015 and deputy first minister in 2017 after McGuinness’s death.

“Initially she was seen as a puppet for Adams and the boys,” said Shane Ross, a former Irish government minister and author of a biography of McDonald, using a euphemism for IRA veterans suspected of behind-the-scenes influence. “But she has grown in stature. Her authority is growing. She’s certainly able enough.”

O’Neill, now a grandmother, has reached out to unionists by attending King Charles’s coronation and occasionally referring to “Northern Ireland” rather than the “north of Ireland”. She has also accepted Police Service of Northern Ireland protection, a break with the Sinn Féin tradition of using republican bodyguards.

But she defends the IRA’s armed campaign up to the 1998 Good Friday agreement, saying there was “no alternative”, and attends memorials for former members, including a large funeral in 2020 during Covid restrictions.

“It’s hypocritical to go and shake hands with various dignitaries but not condemn the killing of innocent people who were just doing an honest day’s work,” said Roy Crawford, an Ulster Unionist councillor for Fermanagh and Omagh district council. An IRA bomb killed his father, Ivan Crawford, a part-time Royal Ulster Constabulary officer, in 1987. “Justice has not been got. The killers are running free,” he said. “I’m only one of many.”

Still, the unionist expressed hope about Stormont’s restoration. “We are entering a new phase of history. We don’t know what the future holds for us. We hope it’s something tangible and positive.”

For background in Irish history, there is one film you must see, Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley, and some excellent books to read; Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, Tim Pat Coogan’s 1916: One Hundred Years of Irish Independence, The Troubles: Irelands Ordeal 1966-1996, and Wherever Green is Worn: the Story of the Irish Diaspora, and Fintan O’Toole’s The Irish Times Book of the Century and The History of Ireland in 100 Objects.

On the literary side, A Treasury of Irish Folklore by Padraic Colum, Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 by Seamus Heaney, Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane, TransAtlantic by Colum McCann, Breakfast on Pluto and The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe, The Blackwater Lightship, The Heather Blazing, and the nonfiction Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border and Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce by Colm Tóibín, At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman by O’Brien, Finnegans Wake and Ulysses by James Joyce, Oscar Wilde’s subversive political allegories Salome and The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Táin: From the Irish Epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, Thomas Kinsella translator and his Selected Poems and Prose Occasions 1951-2006, the Malone Trilogy by Samuel Beckett, and Iris Murdoch’s novel of the Easter Rebellion, The Red and the Green.

The Guardian has a precis of the developing situation; “The divisions in Northern Ireland have long been along political lines about how it should be governed, and by whom, and also along religious faultlines.

Unionists, also called loyalists, are loyal to the union between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Historically they have mostly been Protestants, and often refer to the area of Northern Ireland as Ulster – one of Ireland’s traditional provinces whose territory it partially covers.

Republicans, also called nationalists, believe in a united and independent Ireland. Historically they have mostly been Catholic. They sometimes refer to Northern Ireland as the “six counties”, a reference to the fact that the territory covers six of the nine counties of Ulster.

The two communities tend to vote along separate lines, with parties such as the Democratic Unionist party and the Ulster Unionist party attracting the support of loyalists, while nationalists usually voting for the SDLP (Social Democratic and Labour Party) or for Sinn Féin. The Alliance party and the Green party attract some cross-community support.

Prior to the relative peace and stability brought about by the Good Friday agreement in 1998, there were decades of conflict centred around Northern Ireland known colloquially as “the Troubles”, fuelled by paramilitary wings on both sides of the divide.

Organisations including the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) fought for the nationalist cause, and on the opposite side groups such as the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) between them perpetuated conflict that included terrorist attacks and murders in the Republic of Ireland and on mainland Britain as well as in Northern Ireland itself. About 3,500 people were killed during this period.

The roots of the conflict, however, ultimately go back as far back as the 12th century to invasions of Ireland by forces from the mainland. Echoes of that long history are seen in the symbols used and events celebrated by either side. Loyalists celebrate with their Orange Order marches the 1690 victory of Protestant Prince William of Orange over Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne, while republicans celebrate events such as the 1916 Easter Rising, which paved the way for the formation of the modern independent Republic of Ireland.

Brexit has recently exacerbated divisions, making the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland a land border between the EU and the UK, and a source of tension between the two trading blocs over their future relationship. The DUP and other unionists campaigned for and supported Brexit, while Sinn Féin and other republicans campaigned against. Northern Ireland voted overall to remain in the EU, by 55.8% to 44.2%.”

When we speak of conflict in Northern Ireland as imperial dominion versus revolutionary struggle, what does this mean to the people who lived it?

As I wrote in my post of January 30 2022, Fifty Year Anniversary of Bloody Sunday; Fifty years ago the massacre of Irish citizens by the British Army, an atrocity of state terror known throughout the world as Bloody Sunday, shifted American and global public and official support to the cause of Irish nationalism and reunification and like the brutal repression of Gandhi’s Salt Tax Protest delegitimized the British Empire. We have not yet fully emerged from the shadows of our imperial and colonial histories, but in the last century since the collapse of civilization from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions in World War One and the revolutions and liberation movements which swept the world the tides have begun to turn.

Such is the terror and ruin of the age in which we live, and of its hope and glories as a liminal time of the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.

The people of a nation are living echoes, reflections, consequences, and bearers of its histories, and the people of Ireland are no different in this from any other, our songs of survival, resistance, and triumph over those who would enslave us acting like forces of nature, like the winds and the tides, to shape us as informing and motivating sources. So national identities are formed from the legacies of our stories, both as epigenetic and multigenerational trauma and harms and as freedom and the ownership of ourselves.

History, memory, identity; we are prochronisms, histories expressed in our form of how we have solved problems of adaptation over vast epochs of time, truths written in our flesh like the shells of fantastic sea creatures.

What has been written in our lives has all too often been a tale of tyranny and repression, imperial conquest and colonialism, the theft of the soul by carceral states of force and control, and the consequences of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by the state as organized violence and enslavement by elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and divisions of exclusionary otherness by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.

And this we must resist, by any means necessary. To tyranny and fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again.

When those who would enslave us and steal our souls come for us, let them find not a humankind subjugated by police terror and learned helplessness, but united in solidarity and refusal to submit.

Whosoever refuses to submit becomes Unconquered and free, and this power of self ownership cannot be taken from us. Here also is the moment of decision wherein the tide turns and tyrannies of force and control break; for the social use of force is hollow and brittle, and fails at the point of disobedience. This great truth is the keystone of my art of revolution, and why liberation movements will eventually be victorious when applied as disruptive forces to systems of unequal power which will inevitably fail from their internal contradictions.

Always there remains the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those others tell about us. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.

Tyrants may own the monstrous shadows of the past, but the future is ours.

As written by Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times; “Bloody Sunday, the 10-minute massacre that lasted decades.

The first time, on January 30th, 1972, it was a real event: a massacre in Derry of 13 unarmed civilians by the first battalion of the British army’s Parachute Regiment.

The second time, three months later, it was a toxic fiction: an official British government report in plain blue covers by “The Rt Hon Lord Widgery OBE TD”. The “TD” stood for Territorial Decoration, a military medal awarded for long service as an officer in the British army reserve.

Widgery pontificated that while some of the firing by the Paras may have “bordered on the reckless”, the soldiers were returning fire in a gun battle. He was, evidently to his chagrin, unable to show that any of the 13 people killed and at least 15 wounded (one of them mortally) was engaged in attacking the Paras, but expressed a “strong suspicion that some… had been firing weapons or handling bombs in the course of the afternoon and that yet others had been closely supporting them”. All of this was pure fabrication.

The first Bloody Sunday, the real one, was a moral and human disaster. The second one, the British Establishment’s fictionalised and slanderous version, was a political disaster.

It destroyed for a long time any hope that the British government could be seen by Irish nationalists as an honest broker. It deepened the abyss into which Northern Ireland was tumbling and made the task of climbing out of it much more difficult. Far more people died because of Bloody Sunday than those who were murdered on the day.

The British army had been on the streets of Derry since August 1969. It was initially welcomed as a line of defence for Catholic communities against Protestant mobs, a force likely to be more neutral than the local Protestant-dominated Royal Ulster Constabulary and especially its notoriously sectarian B-Specials. “We cheered the soldiers and jeered the cops,” remembered the brilliant journalist and activist in the Bogside, heartland of Catholic Derry, Nell McCafferty.

But by the beginning of 1972, the Bogside had long ceased cheering the soldiers. As part of what McCafferty called a “scorched earth policy” on the part of militant nationalists, much of the city west of the Foyle lay in ruins.

The Provisional IRA’s campaign of destruction left it looking, as Eamonn McCann put it, as though it had been bombed from the air. Most of this pockmarked terrain had become a no-go area for the RUC, and even the army entered it only in large units.

In August 1971, the unionist administration at Stormont had introduced internment without trial (used exclusively at first against Catholics, most of them not involved in the IRA) and, at the same time, a ban on marches and demonstrations. Both of these issues were at play on Bloody Sunday: the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association decided to defy the ban in order to stage a protest against internment.

The most senior police officer in Derry, Chief Superintendent Frank Lagan, recommended that the march be allowed to proceed. The authorities decided to allow it pass through the nationalist areas of the city, but to stop it from reaching its intended destination, the Guildhall. This would be done by erecting barriers manned by armed troops.

At the beginning of the month, Maj Gen Robert Ford, then commander of Land Forces in Northern Ireland, had expressed internally the view that the only way to stop further destruction of the city was, “after clear warnings, to shoot selected ringleaders”. This was not a mandate for what was to happen on January 30th, but it does suggest a drift within the highest echelons of the army towards a trigger-happy attitude.

What Ford did want to do in Derry on Bloody Sunday, though, was to respond with force to the riots he expected to follow the blocking of the march. He saw this as an opportunity to move in and arrest what he regarded as “ringleaders” of those the army referred to as the Derry Young Hooligans.

He had a very specific strike force in mind. Ford moved the gung-ho first battalion of the Parachute Regiment (1 Para) from its base outside Belfast into Derry. It arrived on the morning of Bloody Sunday, under the command of Lieut Col Derek Wilford.

This unit already had innocent civilian blood on its hands. In August 1971, over a period of 36 hours in Ballymurphy, a small Catholic housing estate in west Belfast, 10 innocent civilians were shot dead. Nine of them were almost certainly killed by members of 1 Para.

As would happen after Bloody Sunday, these victims were traduced as terrorists who were attacking the soldiers. This unit had not only developed a taste for atrocity, it had very recent experience of total impunity.

The organisers of the Derry march decided to avoid a possible confrontation with the army and rerouted the march so that the rally would be at Free Derry Corner in the Bogside rather than at the Guildhall.

But a large number of marchers decided in fact to continue along the original route towards one of the main army barriers. Some of them began to throw stones at the soldiers. Rioting also broke out at two other barriers.

There was, by this stage in the city’s Troubles, nothing especially remarkable in these confrontations. The army had well-established ways of responding – with CS gas, baton rounds and water cannon – and these were indeed deployed by one of the regiments involved, the Green Jackets.

There was no reason whatsoever for the Paras to open fire with live rounds. But at approximately four o’clock, two of them fired five shots at a 15-year-old boy, Damien Donaghy, wounding him in the thigh. This was the first blood of Bloody Sunday.

Wilford then took the decision, apparently off his own bat, to send a platoon of his Paras out beyond the barriers into the Bogside, where the peaceful marchers had gone. This meant that the whole supposed justification of the operation – the arrest of rioters – evaporated.

The Paras opened fire indiscriminately on people in the area of Rossville Flats car park. This was where the first mortal casualty, 17 year-old Jackie Duddy, was killed. Another seven people were wounded.

Another platoon arrived in the Bogside and started firing, killing another 17 year old, Michael Kelly. While he was being carried away, they shot and killed five others: Hugh Gilmour (17), William Nash (19), John Young (17), Michael McDaid (20) and Kevin McElhinney (17).

The Paras moved on into Glenfada Park and mowed down six more people, killing two of them. One of them, Jim Wray (22), was finished off with a second shot as he lay on the ground. The murderous intent could not be clearer.

A lone soldier, presumably on his own initiative, then moved into Abbey Park and managed to kill two men, Gerard McKinney (35) and Gerald Donaghy (17), with a single shot. Others began firing across Rossville Street, killing Bernard McGuigan (41) and mortally wounding Paddy Doherty (32).

This killing spree in the Bogside took barely more than 10 minutes. Over that time, the Paras fired more than 100 bullets at defenceless people. They could in principle have killed 100 civilians.

Conversely, no soldier was hurt, let alone killed, by gunfire or by nail bombs or other explosives. Two of them were slightly injured by some corrosive substance that somebody threw at them from a balcony of the Rossville Flats. That was the height of the threat they faced. As the report of the exhaustive Saville inquiry report put it in 2010: “none of the casualties was posing a threat of causing death or serious injury, or indeed was doing anything else that could in any view justify their shooting”.

It is worth noting that almost half of the fatalities were, technically and legally, children. Deliberately or otherwise, the soldiers targeted boys who would never get to become men.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why, even in a place that had already experienced a great deal of violence, the sight of those bodies was unbearable. Many of those present were later haunted by the fact that, in a deeply Catholic culture, they did not stop to pray for and be with the dead and dying. They moved numbly away, unable to process the horror.

Yet, the British authorities knew very well how to process it. There was an established narrative they could tap into: soldiers in fear of their lives protecting themselves against snipers and nail bombers.

But even more than that, there was an instinct of ruling class solidarity. It is interesting to think about the Widgery report in relation, for example, to the way the Establishment dealt with the victims of the Hillsborough football ground disaster in England in 1989.

The events were radically different, except in the fact that a lot of working class people died as a result of the recklessness of the authorities. But the basic response was the same: blame the victims, blacken their names, exonerate the guilty, close ranks.

In England, that way of dealing with a deadly disaster created by the authorities themselves was devastating. But in the context of the Troubles it was what the Saville inquiry, breaking with the conventions of legalistic language, rightly called “a catastrophe”.

Bloody Sunday discredited the British state, but it also cut the ground from under the large majority of Irish Catholics and nationalists who believed in forcing change through protest and civil disobedience.

The truth is that those methods were in fact successful; by the end of 1972, the Orange State was gone. The unionist monolith would never return to power.

But the combination of atrocity and cover-up, of crude savagery and suave cynicism in the Bloody Sunday story, gave credence to a counter-narrative of war to the death. It was all too easy to lose patience with the unavoidable political complexities of Northern Ireland and to revert to an atavistic logic: kill them before they kill us.

In this warped logic, the answer to the murders of innocent civilians was the murder of innocent civilians. The Official IRA’s retaliation for Bloody Sunday was to place a bomb in the Parachute Regiment’s barracks at Aldershot that killed five female cleaners, a gardener and the Catholic chaplain.

The Provisional IRA’s reply was Bloody Friday, when it detonated 19 bombs in the centre of Belfast. About 130 people were injured, many of them maimed for life, and nine died. Two of them – William Crothers and Stephen Parker – were children.

A pattern of answering outrage with outrage, atrocity with atrocity, was established and it would hold its shape for more than 20 years. Not the least of the obscenities was that within this deadening repetition, Bloody Sunday would acquire the prefix that became a warrant for inhumanity: what about.

“What about Bloody Sunday?” should never have been a way of evading the truth of what happens when armies, public or private, feel free to turn their nihilistic power on defenceless people. It should always be a reminder that this truth must be faced as much by self-righteous democracies as by those they purport to despise.”

Such a litany woes, for Ireland is a song of monstrous histories which reach out to claim us from the darkness, horror, grief, pain, and despair of a people divided against itself by systemic forces of oppression and the legacies of colonialism and imperial dominion, of hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness.

But Ireland is also a song of survival and resistance, of freedom in refusal to submit, the claiming of oneself as ownership of identity, and seizure of power as autonomy.

The lesson of an Ireland led and guided by a victorious Sinn Féin which seizes power within the heart of the enemy and its carceral occupation state is that we can all emerge from the shadows of our history and forge a new nation and a new identity united in solidarity against systems of unequal power.

History has something to teach us here as well, for each human being is both a figure of all the ancestors that came before as embodied history, their hopes and dreams as well as their fears and nightmares, and a gate of future possibilities of becoming human.

As I wrote in my post of March 17 2022, A Heritage of Resistance: the Unconquered Irish, on St Patrick’s Day; An ancient length of iron rests hidden among my tools, pitted and scarred from many battles and acts of sabotage, artifact of a heritage of resistance which reaches back into antiquity and connects us with the lives of others who refused to submit to authority; in this case the unconquered Irish.

A workingman’s tool that can be used as a weapon, this is a traditional iron crow, a term whose first written use was in a poem in 1386 which describes the wicked triangular punch like a crow’s beak at the terminus of its curved handle, now called a crowbar or wrecking bar and normally now with wedged clawfoot prybars at both ends instead of just the foot, originally a pirate’s boarding weapon and breaching tool which by the early 1400’s had developed into the bec de corbin; Joan of Arc’s helmet has a strike imprint from one along the cheekplate.

I will tell you two stories of the origins of this fragment of our history, one American and the other of the Old World. Both are true, if in different ways.

Probably forged by my partner Theresa’s grandfather, the great socialist politician and labor organizer John F. McKay, blacksmith by trade though he published and edited several newspapers, and carried by him as a walking stick for some thirty years, this particular crowbar struck fear into company thugs and strikebreakers and brought hope to workingmen and their families.

He began life as do many Americans, bearer of a historical legacy of survival and resistance; his father Hugh McKay had been a schoolteacher kidnapped into service in the British Navy at Inverness, who had killed or grievously wounded a British officer in a sword duel aboard ship, and was released by a sympathetic jailer before he was to be hanged. He jumped ship and swam the St Lawrence River to freedom in America.

As an Industrial Workers of the World unionist and with his friend Eugene V. Debs, John F. McKay defied and challenged authority throughout the world to forge a better future in which no worker can be used against another. He began this life work as a Montana state senator of the Socialist Party in 1918-1922; for union organizing among the miners and loggers he was excommunicated by the Church, and defeated an assassin sent against him.

An infamous event from this period was the Centralia Massacre of November 11 1919, in which a local Washington State headquarters of the IWW was attacked by members of the American Legion who had been called on by the town council to restore order during a strike; they surrounded and fired on the building, and a young IWW man who happened to be a World War One veteran fired back, killing several of them. The remaining strikebreakers stormed the building, killed several of the office staff, and castrated, dragged behind cars, and lynched others. Their mutilated bodies were hung about town; captured survivors were convicted on trumped up charges and given sentences of 25 years. John F. McKay fought his way out with this wrecking bar which I now hold. From this abattoir emerged a champion of the people; I believe this event began John F. McKay’s shift from political to direct action. At the end of his term in the senate he became a full time IWW organizer.

In 1930 he moved to Spokane and founded the All Worker’s Party, and with the hundreds of men he organized kept thousands of people alive during the Great Depression, by raiding trains for food to distribute while his teams turned the power and water back on for families who had no cash to pay the utilities with, among other things.

And with this wrecking bar in his fist he fought for liberty, equality, truth, and justice for the rest of his life.

As we move further in time from our point of reference, possibilities multiply, meanings change, and futures become ambiguous; so it is with the past as well. So we turn from history to myth, and an origin story from which the Clan McKay constructs its identity.

Possibly this crowbar is the haft of the ax of Sigurd the Mighty, Norse King of Orkney, who in 892 became the only man in history to have been bitten to death by a decapitated head. It happened this way; that in a great battle he struck off the head of Maelbrighte the Poisonous, Irish King of Moray, whose line were the last independent Irish rulers of Scotland, the original ancestor anointed king by St Patrick himself of a realm which embraced northern areas of both islands including what is now Belfast in Ireland and Inverness in Scotland, of direct descent from Niall of the Nine Hostages, High King of Tara, and a direct ancestor of all persons McKay, MacKay, McKee, and other variants thereof, last royalty of the Riven Kingdom of the Isles. Sigurd the Mighty tied the head of Maelbrighte the Poisonous to his saddle, and the head bit his leg which became infected and killed him.

After this battle and generations of war the grandchildren of these two kings who had killed each other in battle united in marriage, becoming like many Scots a blend of Irish and Viking, figures of the origins of Scotland. The great ax was a wedding present, and a peace treaty.

The malefic ax, consecrated to the Viking trickster god of battle, magic, and poetry, Odin, whose name means Master of Ecstasy and Fury, referring to the twin arts of poetic vision and war, odh or inspiration and berserkergangr or going forth as a bear in Old Norse, and on the other side to the Irish Crow of Battle, death, time, magic, rebirth, and transformation, the goddess Morrigan, Queen of Death and Nightmares, in equal part, as a peace offering at a wedding which unified the two peoples in the historic struggle for dominion, and signaled the birth of a new nation.

And so this battered thing of dual origins and secret history waits among the other tools of my trade, that of resistance, chaos, anarchy, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses.

Of these it whispers secrets, awakens lost histories, restores forbidden senses of awareness and vision, opens doors of possibilities, and sends beautiful, terrible dreams of things which may have been or yet may be.

Such is the legacy of humankind, which belongs to all of us. Seize and use it without fear, and build a better humanity and a better future for us all.

Happy Victory For Sein Finn Day from Dolly and I. May you find beauty to balance the brokenness of the world, hope in struggle with the legacies of our history and the terror of our nothingness, vision with which to perform the reimagination and transformation of the world and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, and love to heal the flaws of our humanity.

The Broad Black Brimmer, by the Wolfe Tones