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On 30 January 1972, men of the 1^st Parachute Regiment of the British Army opened fire on civil rights marchers in Derry, Northern Ireland, killing 13 unarmed and innocent civilians. The event was reported worldwide and was to seen in hindsight as a significant turning point in the conflict in Northern Ireland; the moment when a struggle for civil rights gave way to a war between the IRA and the British state. Yet, as the textual analysis in this chapter shows, the official story of Bloody Sunday was based almost entirely on army lies and propaganda and on the flawed Widgery Report of 19 April 1972, which exonerated the paratroopers and their officers and cast doubt on the innocence of the victims. Newspaper coverage at the time showed a determination to recover the image and reputation of the Army in the wake of the killings. Indeed, even after the Saville Report 38 years later, which vindicated the victims and cast blame solely on the British army, sections of the British press were reluctant to let go of the official version. The explanation for this, we argue, has more to do with a deep-seated, cultural and ideological predisposition than with propaganda or the normative routines of commercial journalism.

This chapter examines McGovern’s extremely varied work on both documentary and historical drama for television. His range is best illustrated by the inclusion in such a category of his influential work on the Hillsborough stadium tragedy alongside work focusing on turbulent period of British history around the Gunpowder Plot. A key element in all of the documentary drama works that is examined is McGovern’s emphasis on the relationship that he has with the subjects of the work. From the families who lost people at Hillsborough and on Bloody Sunday to those who’s working lives were ended by the Liverpool Docks dispute McGovern’s work is founded upon an intimate consensual relationship and, in the latter case, a collaborative approach to writing. The decision to include Gunpowder,Treason and Plot in this chapter is not a straightforward one, but provides an important opportunity to examine the ideas and problems behind working with ‘factual’ material and such a radically different kind of source reveals important contrasts that open up questions about the drama documentary form itself.

This chapter dramatically recounts the history of civil rights violations in Northern Ireland and uses this to illustrate the continuing inability of judges to make a significant impact on civil rights outcomes. Recent responses to anti-terrorist laws and the use of torture demonstrate the same pattern of failure to intervene to prevent abuses of human rights. The fact that we are currently dealing with a repetition of the human rights situation in Northern Ireland provides little confidence in the capacity of any branch of government of civil society to avoid similar disappointments.

This chapter addresses how BBC television reported on the outbreak of violence, the arrival of British Troops, the emergence of the Provisional IRA, the introduction of internment, ‘Bloody Sunday’ and the suspension of the Stormont Parliament in 1972. Particular attention is paid to how the unrest was presented to audiences in Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom and how aggressive news and current affairs personnel complicated the efforts of the police, army and government to present the conflict a simple one where the forces of law and order were fighting ruthless terrorists. The chapter addresses the failure of unionists to remain united and save the parliament they had dominated fro fifty years. The chapter concludes by addressing how television (especially the coverage of ‘Bloody Sunday’) helped undermine the British government’s efforts to promote itself as an objective force in the divided province.

The past in Northern Ireland is always present and always contested. This chapter is not a rehashing of the complex history of the north of Ireland nor is it an attempt to place blame for the origin or continuation of the sectarian divide that defines it. A legion of scholars have addressed the former, and the latter—“the conflict about the conflict”—is a daily exercise for most everyone in Northern Ireland. Rather, this chapter offers a broad survey of that scarified history in recognition that understanding the origins of those competing social identities and the ways in which they became cemented over generations, is essential context and a necessary reference point for our coming analysis of risk and resilience in contemporary Northern Ireland.

The reformist agenda that had evolved through the 1960s was being overtaken by the demands of the Catholic masses. The Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) was formed after six months of secretive negotiations, and John Hume was clearly the key factor in bringing it together. The SDLP was more explicit in its appeal to the Protestant community. Bloody Sunday represented the culmination of a process of radicalisation of the minority that began with the first attacks on civil rights marches in 1968. Hume claimed that ‘the achievement of full justice and equality in the North would produce a radical change among those in the North traditionally opposed to the state’. His focus on Westminster's position on the constitutional future of Northern Ireland, and his emphasis of the need for the British government's support for Irish unity would be recurring themes in his political discourse.

Chapter 5 explores how people used photographs to make sense of violence. From the late 1960s, there is a notable increase in the number of people going out onto the streets with newer, faster, lightweight cameras, to record crime and injustice. In so doing, they attempted to provide those without power with a new way of holding authority to account. However, the impact of their photographs was not always as they anticipated. The central focus of this chapter is on the collection and use of images at the Scarman Tribunal, which investigated the disturbances of the summer of 1969, and the Widgery Tribunal, which sought to ascertain the sequence of events surrounding Bloody Sunday. Through close readings of how photographs were used at these two tribunals, the chapter explores how the existence of certain photographs served to anchor discussions of trajectories of violence around certain places and moments, illustrates how photographs taken for publication in newspapers were reread as evidential documents, and indicates the range of plausible truths each photograph was understood to provide. Photographers, who saw themselves and their medium as working to tell stories of injustice, instead found that their images were read to reinforce the actions the state and security forces had already taken.

This chapter examines the SDLP’s policy of civil disobedience and abstention between July 1971 and March 1972. It argues that during this period, the party fought pressure not only from its own supporters, but also those supportive of the Provisional IRA. Consequently, the party became more reactive than proactive, following sentiment in the minority community instead of leading it. This chapter draws on unpublished party papers and private papers to explore the issue of internment and the SDLP’s response to it, which included the setting up of an ‘Alternative Assembly of the Northern Ireland People’ and a Rent and Rates Strike. During this period, the SDLP shifted its position from one of seeking reform in Northern Ireland to abolishing Stormont, making a united Ireland the party’s main aim. The chapter investigates the unpublished policy initiatives that were emerging within the SDLP and analyses the party’s relationship with both the Dublin and London governments, while exploring Dublin and London’s Northern Ireland policy. It concludes with Bloody Sunday, outlining the significance of the event for the SDLP in particular.

A potential espionage threat to Britain from Dublin-based Soviet agents arose as the establishment of Irish-Soviet relations became a probability. This chapter examines perceptions of the communist-influenced Official republican movement as the Troubles escalated in 1971-2, with officials expressing fears for the stability of the Dublin government – the ‘Irish Cuba’. British and American officials used a Cold War prism here. The Russians could be expected to exploit the northern crisis, the American ambassador warned, using the Official movement as their ‘natural vehicle’. Following Bloody Sunday, when British paratroopers killed thirteen unarmed civilians, the British prime minister, Ted Heath, warned Dublin that the Soviets would cause as much trouble as they could, using the Official IRA as a proxy. The Irish revolutionary left too used a Cold War lens when opposing Ireland’s membership of the European Economic Community (EEC): it would lock Ireland into a NATO-dominated bloc.

Split Screen Nation closes with a series of meditations on the continued circulation and contestation of screen maps of the West, the South, and the nation imagined through these. Contemporary and historical examples considered include the following: a 1953 theatrical short, Operation A-Bomb, that attempts to fortify the nation by simultaneously conquering its modern “red” foe from without and healing its racial divide within; news film imagery telecast from Selma, Alabama on Bloody Sunday, 1965; commemorations of Bloody Sunday’s fiftieth anniversary, including Selma (2014); a scientific proposal linking climate change to the (filmic) record of atomic testing; viral cell phone videos of police brutality as screen maps of systemic racism throughout the nation; and the massacre of the Charleston Nine and its aftereffects, including but not limited to the removal the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s statehouse grounds.

This chapter highlights the national outpouring of grief and anger over the death of Heather Heyer. It discloses how Heyer's ashes were buried in a secret location in order to protect the grave from desecration by neo-Nazis. It also mentions the placement of Heather Heyer's name on a memorial wall at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama that honors martyrs of the civil rights movement. The chapter recalls Martin Luther King Jr. and his civil rights organization that staged demonstrations in Alabama and Jimmy Lee Jackson, an African American participant in the protest demonstrations, who was fatally shot by a white Alabama state trooper. It reviews the infamous “Bloody Sunday” on March 7, 1965 that was stimulated by Jackson's shooting.

This chapter explores the conduct of actors in the United States Government during the early years of the violence in Northern Ireland. It considers the reasons for the relatively non-interventionist approach that Richard Nixon adopted during the first year of his administration and places emphasis on the role of Ambassador John Moore, a prominent Irish-American figure. It also provides an analytical narrative of the development of violence in Northern Ireland, placing this alongside an examination of the responses of the US media and officials. It then assesses the relatively minimal impact of Nixon’s resignation and the inauguration of President Gerald Ford on the US role in Northern Ireland. Finally, it looks at the Democratic Primary campaign in 1968 and the British response to the prospects of a Democratic President winning the Presidential Election that year.

The Russo-Japanese War and “Bloody Sunday”— these two towering political developments spelt the end of autocratic rule in Russia. Signs of an incumbent decadence was reflected in contemporary symbolist literature, which eventually came to advocate revolutionary upheaval. The only composer at the time to give voice to a growing sense of unease in Russian society, Pyotr Chaikovsky, posthumously acquired cult status among the Symbolists. This chapter appraises the mingling of Chaikovsky's works with the decadent school. Although Kitsch elements held sway over his works, Chaikovsky was never an exclusively kitsch composer. A critique of his last opera, Iolanthe, went so far as to label Chaikovsky the prodigious herald of “the music of the future.” Despite claiming Chaikovsky's work as less innovative than Wagner's, the critic, N. Suvorovsky, posits that both composers combined opposing creative principles in their compositions.

Chapter Five addresses events that occurred in Thailand between 1973 and 1975. It begins with the student-led movement that suddenly and startlingly toppled the military government on “Bloody Sunday” that wanted to turn the country toward democracy and away from the dictatorship of Thanon Kittikachorn. In 1974, under the interim regime, headed by Prime Minister Sanya, the Thais sought to lay the foundation for a parliamentary democracy. 270 In the last quarter of 1974, the Second Thai Army conducted sustained operations in the Thai communist heartland of the southern Na Kae District of Nakhon Phanom Province, which came to a head with the Mayaguez Incident.

This chapter narrates Natalia Ilyinichna Tcherniak's time in St. Petersburg with her mother, Polina Osipovna and her lover Kolya after spending the summer with her father, Ilya Evseevich Tcherniak. It describes Natalia's stay in an apartment at No. 8 Ulitsa Bolshaya Grebietskaya in an up-and-coming new neighbourhood on the Petrograd Side. It also reviews Polina and Kolya's return to Russia during a time of increased political unrest that was triggered in January 1905 by the Bloody Sunday incident. The chapter recounts Natalia's annual visits to her father in Paris after her Uncle Yasha's association with the Fonarny raid. It also talks about how Ilya rebuilt his life in Paris and acquired a new personal life after marrying Vera Sheremetievskaya.

In The Midnight Verdict (1993), Seamus Heaney combines extracts from two texts taking the poet into the underworld: Ovid’s description in Metamorphoses of Orpheus’ pursuit of Eurydice and subsequent death, and Brian Merriman’s Cúirt an Mheán-Oídhche (The Midnight Court). As a poet of conflict, Heaney was forced to produce his art amid hostile crossfire. Heaney’s fellow Northern Irish poet Derek Mahon draws heavily on ironized self-sacrifice as a response to conflict in his ‘Rage for Order’ (1979). When Thomas Kinsella attempts to tackle the Northern Irish Troubles by apportioning blame to guilty parties, in Butcher’s Dozen (1972), his response to Bloody Sunday, the results are uneven. In a series of readings centred on themes of gender and the self-representation of the poet, this chapter identifies what redress Heaney, Mahon, and Kinsella find for the ‘the atrocities against his sacred poet’ of which Bacchus complains in The Midnight Verdict.

Chapter 10 records the arrival of Teliakovsky as the new director. Championing the new artistic ideas that were flourishing in Moscow, he wanted to bring these to sclerotic St Petersburg where the flop of Petipa’s last big ballet, The Magic Mirror, epitomized just how out of touch Petipa was. Teliakovsky saw Petipa as finished, ‘a squeezed lemon’, and set about pushing him out. The reforms in theatre design, as represented by Konstantin Korovin and Alexander Golovin, meant there was revolution inside the theatres, just as there was revolution outside on the streets, with the march on the Winter Palace in 1905. The political fervour spread to elements in the ballet company, who wanted more control and the return of Petipa. But he was too old; the chapter concludes with his death in 1910 and the many tributes to him.