'Sure what do they expect?' asked a Belfast teenager visiting Dublin, referring to the fired-upon marchers, writes PETER MURTAGH
IT WAS Sunday evening in a Protestant south Dublin middle-class suburban living room, and the evening news was on.
Knowing my mother, we were probably eating sardine sandwiches and drinking tea. That was our Sunday routine.
But because we had a visitor from the North, a particularly attractive 18-year-old Protestant girl, a sort-of but not really cousin, in whom I had a predictable and probably gauche teenage over- interest, it might have been something better than tinned fish mashed onto bread.
When the television news came on, we Murtaghs sat there in silent disbelief. The RTÉ newsreader was clearly upset.
The scenes were ghastly – a grainy, inner-city urban landscape (our TV then was still black and white) in which something had gone horribly and tragically wrong. I don’t remember anything anyone said, save for the first comment from the good-looking Belfast girl. “Sure what do they expect?” she quipped, referring to the fired-upon marchers.
In one short sentence, there was confirmation that “them up there”, the Northerners, the Northern Ireland Protestants to be precise, the ones many Roman Catholics of my youth equated as essentially the same as us down here, were in fact fundamentally different to us.
In the few generations that had grown up since independence and Partition, the southern Protestants may have lost their place in the scheme of things, or at least seen it altered, but we had not lost our humanity.
We had not carried on living in some sort of cocoon of twisted Britishness (and we never were British in any event) and quietly seething sectarianism.
The next day in school, the atmosphere was electric.
The High School was newly moved to Rathgar from its crumbling original home at No 40 Harcourt Street (now the Garda’s Dublin metropolitan regional headquarters).
It was and is a school like several others in south Dublin: a fee-paying school catering mainly for members of the Church of Ireland community.
On Monday morning, there were fights in the corridors as boys, me among them, debated furiously what had happened the previous day.
They were not serious fights, more pushing and shoving and shouting, but nothing had ever inflamed passions as had the shootings in Derry (it was never Londonderry for us).
Feelings were particularly intense in my class, 6D, the lower of the three streams in the 6th year, the stream of the lower academic performers.
We had a clutch of younger teachers, some of whom put as much store on stimulating debate as exploring Tennyson.
We had fierce rows about Vietnam, the CIA, race relations in the US, the Middle East, consumerism, TV advertising and the morality of the storyline of a TV serial starring Robert Wagner, named It Takes a Thief.
But Bloody Sunday inflamed us like nothing else.
For a few hours, some south Dublin Protestant schoolboys were shoulder to shoulder with Sinn Féin, and we didn’t differentiate between Kevin Street and Gardiner Place.
National anger grew and Wednesday was declared a day of mourning, with schools closed.
My memories of being outside the British Embassy on Merrion Square are much more vivid than those of the rows in school.
About 20,000 people marched through the city centre to the square, the embassy being on Merrion Square East. Some 200 gardaí were on duty, and let through protesters with three coffins and an effigy of a British soldier.
They and a Union Jack flag were set ablaze.
A hardcore of a few thousand people remained as tensions became edgier and edgier. The crowd surged forward, and the gardaí did their best.
Batons were used but they were no match for the hail of stones, bottles and petrol bombs that I remember sweeping over my head from the back of the crowd and raining down on the front of the building.
Wisely, the gardaí withdrew.
Some men managed to shin up drainpipes of adjoining buildings and cross the facade of the Georgian terrace, balcony to balcony, until they reached the embassy.
Using a first-floor balcony as a brace for his back, one man reared up, feet in the air, and launched both with full force at a window.
The reinforced glass didn’t shatter but cracked eventually under his pounding, bent inwards, and the whole frame eventually crumbled into the room.
Petrol followed and then – whoosh! – the embassy went up, to a great cheer from the crowd.
As then minister for justice Des O’Malley said later, “the emotions of the time spent themselves in the flames of that building”.
The poet Thomas Kinsella went to Derry a month after the atrocity and wrote a lengthy poem, Butcher's Dozen: A Lesson for the Octave of Widgery,which he published in April 1972:
A month had passed. Yet there remained
A murder smell that stung and stained.
On flats and alleys – over all –
It hung; on battered roof and wall,
On wreck and rubbish scattered thick,
On sullen steps and pitted brick.
Maybe after Saville the smell and stain will be lifted. Maybe.