Introduction: Actors, Contexts and Temporality

Just a day after newspaper coverage invoked the memory of the Holocaust to make sense of the killing by British soldiers of thirteen civilians while peacefully marching against internment in Derry, Northern Ireland.1 An article in the nationalist Derry Journal newspaper under the title ‘The March That Ended in a River of Blood’ registered the deeply felt collective anger among Derry people and observed that ‘as more eyewitness accounts of the holocaust that was the Bogside of Sunday, 30 January 1972, became available deeper was the conviction that it was a day of deepest shame for the British army’.2 The very application of the term “Bloody Sunday”3 as a cultural shorthand for what happened symbolically joined the event to other previous Bloody Sunday events in Irish and world history.