Bloody Sunday
The British government introduced internment on 9 August 1971. The British Army in co-operation with the RUC, but acting on out of date intelligence interned hundreds of men and women. This eventually rose to several thousand. Most of those interned were innocent of involvement with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). The IRA, having been tipped off about the internment, either went underground or fled across the border. Many of those imprisoned were civil rights activists.
By this stage support for NICRA began to wane. However NICRA organized marches against internment. In Derry on 30 January 1972, fourteen unarmed demonstrators were shot and killed by British troops during an anti-internment march. This became known as Bloody Sunday. The army later claimed it had come under fire. No guns were uncovered. Most of the victims were shot in the back, indicating they were running away. The British government's Saville Report published 2010 cleared the names of the protestors as innocent victims and blamed a "breakdown in the chain of command" for the deaths.
Read more about this topic: Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association
Famous quotes containing the words bloody and/or sunday:
“It is the women of Europe who pay the price while war rages, and it will be the women who will pay again when war has run its bloody course and Europe sinks down into the slough of poverty like a harried beast too spent to wage the fight. It will be the sonless mothers who will bend their shoulders to the plough and wield in age-palsied hands the reaphook.”
—Kate Richards O’Hare (1877–1948)
“Give a lift to a tomato, you expect her to be nice, don’t ya? After all, what kind of dames thumb rides, Sunday school teachers?”
—Martin Goldsmith, and Edgar G. Ulmer. Charles Haskell, Jr. (Edmund MacDonald)