Extracts from 'NO GO - A Photographic Record of Free Derry',
by Barney McMonagle

NO GO
A PHOTOGRAPHIC RECORD OF FREE DERRY
by Barney McMonagle (1997)
Edited by Adrian Kerr

ISBN 0 946451 41 9 Paperback 120pp

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This section is copyright © Barney McMonagle 1997 and is included on the CAIN site by permission of the author and the publishers. You may not edit, adapt, or redistribute changed versions of this for other than your personal use without the express written permission of the author or the publisher, Guildhall Press. Redistribution for commercial purposes is not permitted.

Barney McMonagle was born on the island of Malta in October 1944. He moved to Ireland, to the city of Derry, on 12 August 1947, where his family settled in Anne Street in the Brandywell area. He lived there for twenty-two years before moving, first to Shantallow, then Prehen, and finally to the Culmore road, where he still lives today.

He first took up photography in 1968, just as the situation in Northern Ireland was beginning to transform so radically. He felt that what was happening had to be documented, and, with his camera, attended most of the major protests and disturbances, taking more than 1,000 black and white photographs of the events between November 1968 and the late summer of 1971.

He remembers his feelings during the riots, recalling a sense of excitement more than danger. To most of those involved it was unthinkable that this could lead to the widespread death and destruction that followed, and to similar scenes being repeated in the city almost thirty years later. The real danger was brought home to him in the late summer of 1971 when, as he was taking photographs during a disturbance in William Street, a soldier, possibly mistaking his camera for a gun, took a shot at him, missing him by inches. He never took another photograph of a riot.

This book is intended to be a purely photographic record of events in Derry between 1968 and 1971. Brief captions for each photograph are contained at the back of the book, but there is no attempt to analyse or to explain. For those interested in a much deeper analysis of the background and meaning of the "Free Derry" period the following books are recommended. The list is by no means exhaustive. Curran, Frank, Derry: Countdown to Disaster (Gill and Macmillan 1986); McCann, Eamonn, War and an Irish Town (Pluto Press 1993); McClean, Raymond, The Road To Bloody Sunday (Guildhall Press 1997); O Dochartaigh, Fionbarra Ulster's White Negroes: From Civil Rights to Insurrection (AK Press 1994); O Dochartaigh, Niall, From Civil Rights to Armalites: Derry and the birth of the Irish Troubles (Cork University Press 1997).

Time tends to impose order on the past. We look back on the early days and think we discern the outline of what comes later.

Knowing now how things happened, we assume this is the way it was bound to be.

But the trajectory wasn't pre-set. The chaos we felt around us was for real, and rich in possibilities other than those which came to pass.

The well-composed, neatly cropped photograph doesn't always tell the truth. The out-of-focus picture is sometimes more accurate.

It's said now with a certain sadness that nothing ever changes. We inscribe the thought ourselves on our own gable walls: "1968-1997 - No Change". It's the same thought from a different direction as comes more disdainfully from London or Dublin. The integrity of their quarrel... attitudes cemented into history... no change, or changing them, ever.

It's hard to recall now what a heady sense of change there was then in the trembling Derry air, what a tumult of ideas and bright seeming glimpses of a different future beckoning.

What was said then was 'Everything's changed. Nothing will ever be the same again.'

In part, the feeling arose from the fact that, indeed, nothing at all had shifted in the political landscape, not so that you could feel it, for a whole half century. There's a story, probably made up but possibly true, of a ten-year-old girl hurling a stone down Rossville Street at the RUC and shouting 'I've waited 50 years for this!' Everybody will have known what she meant.

From the earliest I can remember, the Bogside was an immobile place to live. Society around us was simply-structured, too. The Unionist minority ran the town and there wasn't much to be done about it except occasionally indulge in riot and patriotic whimsey, especially around St Patrick's Day. The first riots I was in the thick of erupted on 17 March in, I think, 1952. Somebody raised a tricolour inside the Walls which was accounted sacrilege by illegitimate city fathers.

'Inside the Walls there were some squalls...
Some Irishmen they raised the flag of orange, white and green,
Brook's RUC would not agree to let the flag be seen.'

So the cops broke Nationalist heads and fighting surged all around the city centre. The impressive display outside Gault's at the corner of Little James Street ("Fresh Fruit, Flowers and Vegetables Daily") was purloined for ammo. A fusillade of turnips, tomatoes and carrots stopped a baton charge up Sackville Street.

The Derry Journal published a picture of a cop with a club about to crack down on the head of Helen Kelly, daughter of Paddy and Gretta, the horse dealers. It caused no end of outrage at the time. Eddie McAteer created a fuss at Stormont over it. It was talked about in Derry for years.

That's how little was happening. Incidents of that sort seemed of historic significance.

Typical pictures from that period, now commonly seen ornamenting earnestly authentic pubs, present sepia tableaux of stoic people with wan smiles, suffused with stillness.

So when the log-jam shifted and a deluge was let loose, the change was instantaneous and bewildering. The times were now of shemozzle and hullabaloo, best caught in snatched shots taken on the run.

Nobody had anticipated 5 October 1968, when the first civil rights march, a few hundred strong (four out of five people who say they were on it were not) was battered into disarray on Duke Street. Or, more accurately, nobody had anticipated the response, the Bogside having little tradition then of vibrant responsiveness.

As far as returning elected representatives was concerned, the area had been on automatic Nationalist pilot for decades, fervently, religiously as it might be said, supporting Mr McAteer's party, it's candidates not so much selected as anointed.

Now all of a sudden, as pent-up anger against the RUC burst forth, everything was a ferment. Street politics were the order of the day, and the ideas flourishing on the street were different, new, exotic, dangerous, exciting. At least in comparison with the stolid political fare which had been dominant until just a week or so previous.

To an extent that had never been experienced before, and has never been repeated since, the mass of the people were active participants in political events, authors of change, creators of, not spectators at, the political show. The crowd on the street was the lead actor, not an amalgam of anonymous extras, or supporters to be summoned up when a leadership thought it appropriate to stage a mass demonstration.

No political tendency had hegemony. Nationalism still surged strongly, although now tending to by-pass Mr McAteer's party and beginning to gouge out the new channels which were eventually to lead to the formation of the SDLP and the revival of Sinn Fein. Socialist ideas, some flinty in their absolute ideological correctness, some flamboyant in their premature celebration of revolution, some common-sensible, were taken up and debated in lively fashion all around.

The prominent role of the Derry Labour Party in the street agitation and civil disobedience which had paved the way to 5 October, and then the prominence and popularity of Bernadette Devlin from the far-left student group the Peoples Democracy, gave socialist ideas resonance and real credibility.

This was the most democratic period Derry has known, when every voice against oppression was given a hearing and history was not something we appealed to for validation but something we were conscious of being in the process of making. It is by no means coincidence that it was a period of most rapid progress, too.

Effectively, there had been only three Stormont Prime Ministers in almost half a century, then three in three years and Stormont abolished when the last of them fell. Gerrymandered Derry Corporation, the focus of anger against sectarian discrimination since before the foundation of the State, was whisked away in a twinkling. The B Specials, the bane of vulnerable Catholics since the 1920s, were abolished. A points system for the allocation of houses was drawn up in the time it took to write it down. By March 1972, 41 months after Duke Street, Stormont itself was no more.

The changes that came about may not have been, or turned out eventually not to be, the changes we had wished. The Specials became the UDR and then the RIR. Stormont was gone at a cost in a general curtailment of accountability. And so on. But movement there had been, after the long years of the political permafrost.

If these weren't exactly the shiny new things we had wanted, at least the notion of newness wasn't abstract any more. And one of the advantages of nobody knowing exactly where we were headed was that you could advocate almost any direction without seeming daft.

This democracy of the streets is well depicted in these pictures. It's in the pell-mell rushing of undirected crowds towards a common objective, in the casual cooperation of young women selecting throwable stones, in the orderly militancy of a chorus of cat-callers pressed against a security barrier outside the Corner Boot Stores.

The scenes here are presented from the heart of what's happening. Every shot is an action shot, but there's none with action orchestrated. B-Men unsure now in Waterloo Place, b-tech pick-axe handles ludicrous alongside the BA weaponry, Bernadette as one of the crowd except that everyone is arranged around her, a water-cannon at McLaughlin and McLaughlin's squirting a thin jet-stream at something or other, squaddies with looks of perplexed alarm perusing the Belfast Telegraph in exhausted Sackville Street, steady handed schoolboys on pouring duty for petrol bombs... scenes glanced out of the corner of the eye or taken in when passing by or recorded running at full tilt amidst mayhem all around or captured in an instant from a maisonette balcony.

Some of the street-scapes are well past recognition. The houses that Free Derry Wall formed a gable-end for are gone, changing, not for the better, the relationship between the slogan and the entity for which it proclaims liberation. It's an inscription on a reverential monument now, not a slogan on a neighbourhood wall.

What hasn't changed is hurly-burly at Butcher's Gate, the carpeting of William Street in rubble, soldiers erupting into the Diamond or inching up Rossville Street before making a scurry into rioters in the hope of bringing a captured native back by the scruff of the neck, and, always, men uniformed to represent the State in mutual attitudes of enmity with the plain people of the place.

What hasn't changed either, fundamentally, is what it's about. The questions posed then had to do with how and whether Catholic working class areas with their general sense of Irishness might be incorporated in the State on terms congenial to themselves. The main reason militant Republicanism won out and for a long time held dominance over local political thinking was that the State proved unwilling, maybe on account of being unable, to make space for the Bogside to exist and develop in.

Politically, that's what's there to be seen in the comportment of the State's forces.

But now? Can the Bogside become associated with the State, after all, on terms congenial to itself?

We have passed across pitiful, terrifying terrain to come full circle, those among us who have made it. Perhaps we can regenerate our democracy and begin to move forward again, no rigid requirement to follow a path gouged out by history, no arrogant imposition of one political morality on all.

What if there is no space for the Bogside even yet within existing constitutional propriety? Does it follow we must have communal war and a common ruination?

Or are there different, new, exotic, dangerous, exciting possibilities? Perhaps stiffened with realism now, and more understanding of the persistence of elderly notions?

That heady feeling we had back then was a whiff of revolution. Lenin said that revolution was 'the festival of the oppressed.' Like the time we were robbing petrol from the garage owned by Marcus Harrison on William Street and Fr Mulvey arrived in a flurry of outrage at such disrespect for the rights of private property. 'But, Father,' explained somebody, 'we need the petrol,' and elaborated further, since the priest seemed unsure that this constituted adequate moral justification, speaking as one would to a slow thinker, 'for the petrol bombs...' Mulvey left the scene looking back, saying, 'alright then, as long as you don't take more than you need,' and wondering, I think, what our little world was coming to. To each according to their need, from each according to ability.

What we were hoping, even if we didn't articulate it exactly, was the world turned upside down, the most festive thought of all.

Nothing has changed, it's said. But everything must. Unless it's everything that's being changed we can't bring everybody with us. Can we free the Bogside into a society in which Nelson Drive [a Protestant estate in Derry's Waterside], too, would delight to live?

One solution, revolution.

It was the best and broadest-minded time we have seen, and we must bring the best of it back.

It's here to be seen, if we look to see it.

Eamoun McCann

July 1997