For one week in June 1920, Derry was “like a town on the Western front.” So wrote the eyewitness, Charlie McGuinness, in his memoirs; reports in this newspaper painted graphic pictures of troops deployed on narrow streets, pools of blood lying on the ground, and bodies left for days before they could be recovered. He had followed John Redmond’s call and fought in the First World War; when the fighting broke out in Derry, he was one of the “old Redmondites” who took up their guns again to defend nationalist areas. “You had First World War veterans, nationalist and unionist, who had been in the same army just two years before, fighting against each other, probably using their service rifles,” says Grant. Derry would not see deaths on this scale until the Troubles, in stark contrast to Belfast, where 500 people would die between July 1920 and July 1922. Why could we not even go to the war memorial and lay a wreath in memory of those people?

Source: The Irish Times June 30, 2020 11:07 UTC