The Five Demands

Bloody Sunday: ‘March for Justice’ events programme launched (Bloody Sunday March for Justice)

The programme of events which will run up to this year’s March for Justice marking the 44th anniversary of ‘Bloody Sunday’ has been announced.

The extensive schedule will open in the week before the march which this year will take place on Sunday, January 31st. These are some of the events that will take place.

The official launch of the programme has been organised for January 25 in the Eden Place Arts Centre at Pilots Row between 7.30-8.45pm and will coincide with the launch of the first event which is ‘Ardoyne – A Photographic Exhibition’ by photographer Joe Gilmartin. The exhibition explores aspects of life in the North Belfast area over recent years and “the experiences of its residents as they struggle against State control, repression and sectarianism”.

The exhibition will run throughout the week.

On January 27 at 4.30pm in An Culturlann Doire, there will be the launch of a book entitled ‘The British Media and Bloody Sunday.’ In a cross media analysis that spans a period of almost 40 years up to the publication of the Bloody Sunday Report in 2010, the work idenitifies two countervailing impulses in media coverage of Bloody Sunday and its legacy -an urge in the Press to rescue the image and reputation of the British Army versus a troubled conscience in TV current affairs and drama about what was done in Britain’s name. Written by Greg McLaughlin and Stephen Baker, the book has a foreword by Eamonn McCann.

On Saturday, January 30 at 12 noon in Pilots Row, a discussion panel with the heading ‘The Whole Truth’ will see three women exploring their experiences of their quest for justice from the state for the murders of their loved ones. Kate Nash, whose brother William was shot dead on Bloody Sunday, will speak about where the campaign for justice for the victims of Bloody Sunday is now. Janet Donnelly (nee Murphy) will speak about the murder of her father Joseph during the Ballymurphy Massacre and the recent exhumation of his body in pursuit of fresh evidence and waht lies ahead for the campaign for the eleven people killed by the Parachute Regiment.

Shauna Moreland, the third of the panellists, will talk about the murder of her mother Caroline Moreland in 1994 by the IRA under the direction of British state agent ‘Stakeknife.’ Speaking recently about the role of the IRA and the British state in her mother’s murder she said: “One made the bullet and the other fired it.” The event will be chaired by Eamonn McCann.

On January 26 at 7.30pm in The Nerve Centre there will be a screening of the film ‘This Changes Everything.’

The film is a wake-up call to the threat to human life on earth posed by climate change.

The planet will survive but this may be the last century in which it is habitable for human kind. The film, based on Naomi Klein’s book of the same name argues that we can seize this crisis as the opportunity to transform our failed economic system into something radically better for all of us.

Following the screening, James Orr, Director of Friends of the Earth Northern Ireland will draw out the local significance for us here in Northern Ireland.

Also at the Nerve Centre on January 27 at 7.30pm is a screening of ‘Reunited Lives’ which traces the experiences of ‘refugees’ from Ballymurphy and Ardoyne who fled from Northern Ireland to the Reoublic at the outbreak of the ‘Troubles.’

This will be followed by a panel discussion involving Breige Voyle from Ballymurphy who features in the film and Agim Kryezieu a Kosovan refuggee who has been living here for 20 years. The event will be chaired by Bernadette McAliskey.

Other events during the week are ‘Hairy Jaysus’, a play by Donal O’Kelly which centres on the life of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, a Dublin socialist shot dead in April 1916, which will be performed at The Playhouse. For more information on all these events and many more offered in the programme, go to http://bloodysundaymarch.org