Two films depicting the events of Derry’s Bloody
Sunday, 30 January 1972, were premiered this week in
Derry. The first, a Granada Television drama entitled
"Bloody Sunday" shown in the city on Sunday night, was
built around the character of Civil Rights campaigner
and SDLP Stormont MP Ivan Cooper. Perhaps not
surprisingly, the film came under fire from
revisionist historian Ruth Dudley-Edwards, writing for
the British tabloid The Daily Mail. Under the heading
"Bloody Fantasy" Dudley-Edwards and another Mail
journalist made a number of spurious claims about the
film’s accuracy. The articles provoked outrage,
leading to a call for a boycott of the Daily Mail and
other papers in the Mail group, including Ireland on
Sunday, according to the Derry News and the BBC.
The second film, titled "Sunday", by Channel 4 writer
Jimmy McGovern, was shown on Wednesday night in the
city and is likely to provoke even greater
controversy. This film, which was the result of a long
term project with greater community involvement,
charts the build up to the day of the ill-fated Civil
Rights march, the massacre itself, and the subsequent
massacre of the truth at the hands of Lord Widgery.
Following the screening of the two films, all people
would agree that both make a valuable contribution to
understanding the traumatic events of that day. To
make comparisons between the two would be invidious
but there is widespread consensus in the city that
"Sunday" is by far a more powerful and accurate
reflection of the events.