Qualla: Bloody Sunday (1972)

Bloody Sunday (1972): Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian S, CC BY-SA 2.0. Father Edward Daly walked at the front of the small group carrying Jackie Duddy through the Rossville Flats car park. Duddy was seventeen years old and had been shot in the chest. Daly waved a white handkerchief stained with the boy's blood so the soldiers would not shoot the men trying to carry him to safety. The photograph of that moment, taken by Stanley Matchett, became one of the most reproduced images of the late twentieth century. It is, on a single black-and-white frame, the entire shape of Bloody Sunday: a priest's white cloth raised against guns that had no reason to be firing, a child's body being taken across a Derry car park toward a hospital that could not save him, and a city about to lose its faith that the institutions which were meant to protect it could be made to do so.

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Image: Ian S | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bloody Sunday (1972): The March

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit FDW777, CC BY-SA 4.0. Sunday, 30 January 1972, was meant to be a civil rights march, organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association against internment without trial. Around fifteen thousand people walked from the Creggan estate down through the Bogside, in the dry cold of a Derry winter af...

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Image: FDW777 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bloody Sunday (1972): The Names

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Simon Burchell, CC BY-SA 4.0. It matters, with this story more than almost any other, to say the names. Jackie Duddy, seventeen, shot while running. Patrick Doherty, thirty-one, shot crawling away. Bernard McGuigan, forty-one, shot in the back of the head as he went to help Doherty, waving a white handkerchie...

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Image: Simon Burchell | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bloody Sunday (1972): The Whitewash

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SeanMack, CC BY 3.0. The first official account of what happened was the Widgery Tribunal, rushed to a conclusion within eleven weeks. Lord Chief Justice Widgery effectively blamed the dead for their own deaths, suggesting that nearly all had been carrying weapons or had been associating with people ...

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Image: SeanMack | CC BY 3.0

Bloody Sunday (1972): Saville

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Zubro © 2003, derivative work Lämpel, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1998, as part of the Northern Ireland peace process, Tony Blair ordered a new public inquiry, chaired by Lord Saville. It became the longest legal proceeding in British history. Nine hundred and twenty-one witnesses gave evidence at the Guildhall in Derry between 2000 and 2004...

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Bloody Sunday (1972): Soldier F

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SeanMack, CC BY 3.0. Of the soldiers identified by Saville as having killed unarmed civilians, only one was ever brought to trial. He is known publicly only as Soldier F, his anonymity protected by the courts. He was charged in 2019 with the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempte...

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Image: SeanMack | CC BY 3.0

Bloody Sunday (1972): What the Bogside Carries

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit FDW777, CC BY-SA 4.0. It is possible to argue, and historians do, that the Provisional IRA's long campaign of bombings and shootings was given decisive moral fuel by Bloody Sunday. In the weeks afterward, recruitment to the Provisionals in Catholic communities surged. The killings, the Widgery whitewa...

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Image: FDW777 | CC BY-SA 4.0