Bloody Sunday March For Justice January 29 2017

Event Details

 

Bloody Sunday was inflicted on the people of Derry.  But it has resonated around the world.  It is a local issue relevant to people everywhere.

Over the 45 years since British paratroopers erupted into the working-class Bogside area with rifles spitting death at civil rights marchers, representatives of victims of State violence from both sides of the Atlantic, from Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, have travelled to Derry to take part in the annual commemoration and give substance to the idea of 'One World, One Struggle'. 

The British Government still sets its face Iike flint against telling the full truth about the Derry massacre.  A long Inquiry reported in 2010 that all the dead and wounded had been unlawfully shot. Despite this, the Report stopped well short of proposing prosecution of the killers - and pointed no finger of`blame at the senior military officers who had sent the Paras in, or at the politicians who had connived at the assault and then orchestrated a cover-up.

 Lectures, debates and cultural events are highlighted, economic  struggles, women’s rights, gay rights, the rights of the environment, and many other examples of`oppression.  We have commemorated too, the killing of other innocent people by non-State groups - Dublin Monaghan, Birmingham, Shankill, Greysteel, the Ormeau bookies, etc.

We believe that the programme we have produced this year puts Bloody Sunday in its proper context, an extreme example of the fact that, commonly, it’s innocent people who pose no threat to anyone who bear the brunt of conflict.

The trek towards truth and justice has been long and sometimes arduous. But we keep on keeping on because the cause is just and gives good example to the one world in which we all struggle.

This is always the way when it comes to the violence of imperialism.

Only the persistence of family members and their supporters forced a police investigation. We await the outcome. One reason the British authorities fear the facts about Bloody Sunday is that this massacre cannot be ascribed to warring Irish factions. This was an authentically British atrocity.

Past commemorations have featured African Americans, Palestinians, former Guantanamo prisoners, victims of police violence in Britain etc., as well as members of other families bereaved by murder here in the North, in many cases murder inflicted by State agents and then systematically lied about to protect the same undercover agents.

 

 

 

Source: bloodysundaymarch.org/for_justice/

The first Derry Radical Bookfair 2017

We are pleased to announce Derry’s first ever Radical Bookfair will take in Pilots Row Community Centre, Rossville Street, Derry on Saturday 28th January 2017.

The Radical Bookfair will play host to participants from all over Ireland and beyond. The first ever Radical Bookfair will take place during a week of events hosted as part of the Bloody Sunday March for Justice leading up to the annual Bloody Sunday March, with a series discussions and debates, film and theatre centred around a wide range of local, national and international contemporary social justice issues.

All participants are welcome to the Radical Bookfair with different visions, ideas, practices and radical traditions.

This year the Derry Radical Bookfair Collective will host a one day radical book fair as an opening in support of small press publishers and independent book sellers and producers, circulating radical reading materials and information from independent distributers, non-party political campaigns and groups to share their publications and merchandise, most of which are hard or impossible to find at mainstream book shops. Books of local, national and international interests including social and labour history as well as themes covering radical feminism, queer liberation, anarchism, marxism, republicanism and environmentalism.

Derry and its surrounding hinterland has without doubt one of the most remarkable radical heritage which has shaped the world in which we now find ourselves.  A proud tradition of working class radicalism which has created many momentous events throughout the centuries and has at times forcibly changed society around us for the better.

In the docks the men organised, in the factories the women unionised and on the streets the people mobilised tearing down the walls around those who would prefer to see us in divided. It is no surprise that we continue in that spirit to build on that tradition by hosting the city’s very own Radical Bookfair in an effort to allow our class to educate, agitate and organise ourselves with the ideas that continues to create change.

Source: https://derryradicalbookfair.wordpress.com/  
             http://www.wsm.ie/c/radical-bookfair-derry-28th-january-2017

‘A Terrible State of Chassis’ - A Lecture by Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, Field Day Annual Lecture

A Lecture by Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, Introduction by Emer Nolan, Q&A with Michael Farell

It will take place on Friday 30th September in The Playhouse, Derry.  Tea and coffee reception 7pm, lecture starts 8pm.

 

photo: Picssr

Seamus Deane gave the first of the annual lecture series in his honour last year.

His work is not, as he himself has stated, devoted to a rewriting of the Irish past but to a writing of the Irish present.

Founder and editor since 1995 of the Field Day Review, as he had earlier been of the Field Day pamphlets in 1983-88, he has made his poetry, fiction, scholarship and criticism, particularly in latter years in the form of the essay, a meditation on the need, in a debased political system, to follow the dictum: ‘When in Rome, do as the Greeks do.'

Bernadette Devlin McAliskey is from Cookstown, Co. Tyrone. While still a student at Queen's University, she and her colleagues in the newly-formed People's Democracy transformed political resistance in the Northern Irish statelet by spearheading a socialist, anti-sectarian, mass movement for change. Her celebrity began when she was elected to Westminster for Mid Ulster in 1969 - then the youngest woman MP ever - and when she became a leading organizer on the barricades in Derry during the Battle of the Bogside.

In an electrifying maiden speech she declared herself, as the second Irish woman elected to Westminster, to be in the same tradition of feminist republicanism as the first, Constance Markievicz. Later, she was active in the Smash H-Blocks campaign, was seriously wounded in 1981 in an assassination attempt by Loyalists and British paratroopers, yet continued her sustained left-wing critique of many key developments in Ireland since, including the Peace Process.

‘Bernadette' as she is still known, currently works supporting migrants' rights in South Tyrone and remains Ireland's finest political orator, the unforgettable voice of the Troubles.

Source: derryplayhouse.co.uk