Derry

I'm now in Northern Ireland, in Derry...known in English circles as Londonderry, but none of the Irish in the Republic call it that. The site of Derry has been inhabited for at least 1500 years, but the current city is relatively new by European standards...400 years old. Several earlier settlements were destroyed or abandoned. When the current town was started, the planners decided to make it more defensible and built this sturdy stone wall around it, from 1614-1618. The walls are still almost completely intact...the only Irish city with that distinction. They were tested twice later in the 17th century and were never penetrated by an invader...thus Derry's nickname, The Maiden City.
This is Roaring Meg, the largest cannon on the walls at 1794 kilos. Meg was built for the city in 1642 on the first occasion enemies tried to breach the wall. The cannon was used extensively, probably in this very spot, during the 1689 siege when James II, the deposed Catholic king of England, was trying to win his kingdom back. But Derry would not yield, and after 105 days the siege was broken by a fleet allied with William of Orange, which came up the River Foyle and chased James away. There of course have been many disturbances since then. Though things are fairly calm now, I find it ironic that Roaring Meg is pointed...right at Bogside. That neighborhood was of course a central spot of The Troubles that plagued Northern Ireland from the late 1960s til the early '90s.

One of the most tragic events of The Troubles occurred right here, in Bogside, on 30 January 1972. Derry was crawling with British troops then...there had been violence at times for over three years. On this day paratroopers fired into a crowd demonstrating against a policy of internment without trial, an emergency measure imposed the previous year. Thirteen unarmed protesters were killed on the spot...another died of his wounds several months later. Another twelve, also unarmed, were injured. Two inquiries were held into the shooting. The first, by the British government, merely found that the shootings "bordered on the reckless". This finding destroyed what little faith the Catholics had left in the British authority. After peace had returned decades later, a second inquiry was held. This time the shootings were declared "unjustified and unjustifiable" and British prime minister David Cameron made a formal apology on behalf of the British government.

Of course, it's still a hot topic here, but discrimination against Catholics has been reduced significantly and these days disputes are almost all settled with words instead of guns. I had been interested in The Troubles for many years...I remember watching the unrest on TV during my college years and thereafter, and thinking it was sad that a Christian first world country would have so much sectarian violence. It was rather emotional to visit Bogside, where a lot of the trouble went down.

Of the fourteen people killed on Bloody Sunday, six were younger than me...a seventh was just about the same age. For almost four decades since, I've been carryin' on...they should have been too.

Derry has been renovated considerably in recent decades, but there are still many rows of old homes on the narrow side streets.

Whoa! Look who's on the UK ten pound note. Charles Darwin his own self. Now can you imagine what an uproar would go down in the US if Darwin made an appearance on our money? The creationists would go postal!! And in the UK, when Darwin published Origin of Species in the mid 1800s there was a ton of controversy. But since then, faced with a mountain of corroborating scientific evidence, apparently the large majority of English have accepted his theory of evolution, and the remaining dissenters are politely ignored. A refreshing difference from the US.