Qualla: Creggan, Derry

Creggan, Derry: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Creggan means stony place in Irish, and the housing estate that took the name was built on a hill above the Bogside in the late 1940s and 1950s to relieve the slum conditions in the old quarter below. From the air it is a long ridge of pebble-dashed houses with the Donegal hills rising to the west, the River Foyle bending below to the east, and the medieval walls of Derry visible from the higher streets on a clear day. From the ground, for most of the second half of the twentieth century, it was one of the most overcrowded, most surveilled, most poured-into-the-newspapers neighbourhoods in Western Europe. Creggan was where the Bogside's children grew up. It is still where Derry City Cemetery holds the graves of Patsy O'Hara, Michael Devine, and Martin McGuinness.

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Creggan, Derry: Built to Solve a Problem

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Creggan was a planning solution to a political problem. By 1945, Derry's Catholic population was wedged into the Bogside in housing that had not been built for as many people as it now held. Two and three families to a house was not unusual. The city council, which Protestant ger...

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Creggan, Derry: Inside the Free Zone

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When the civil rights movement spread out from the Bogside in the late 1960s, Creggan went with it. After British troops introduced internment without trial in August 1971, the entire neighbourhood, together with the Bogside, became a no-go area where the RUC and the British Army...

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Creggan, Derry: Three Graves in the Cemetery

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Derry City Cemetery, which opened in 1853 on the west edge of the estate, holds Creggan's longest memory. There are 194 Commonwealth War Graves from the two World Wars in one section, marking the Derry men who served in British uniforms in both conflicts. There is a republican pl...

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Creggan, Derry: Lyra McKee

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the night of 18 April 2019, a twenty-nine-year-old journalist named Lyra McKee was standing near a PSNI Land Rover on Fanad Drive in Creggan, watching a riot. A masked gunman of the New IRA, the dissident republican group that did not accept the Good Friday Agreement, opened f...

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Creggan, Derry: Voices That Came Out

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It would be a mistake to read Creggan only through its losses. The estate produced Dana Rosemary Scallon, who won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1970 and later became a member of the European Parliament; Mickey Bradley, bass guitarist with The Undertones; the Olympic boxer Charli...

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