#ivan cooper

[glendaleigh]

Civil rights activist Ivan Cooper presented with honorary doctorate

Mr Cooper was made an Honorary Degree Doctor Of Laws at the Ulster University’s summer graduation ceremony in the Millennium Forum

[dreamcatch22]

Movie Reflections: Bloody Sunday

In this reflection, I also discuss the play Ourselves Alone, written by Anne Devlin. Events involving The Troubles are depicted realistically in both Ourselves Alone and Bloody Sunday. It is also the perspectives of the characters that differentiate between the purpose of both this play and this movie. I personally felt a strong sense of fear and concern while learning about The Troubles from the two sources. Ourselves Alone focused more on a family that was broken by the paranoia and conviction associated with the organisations like Provisional IRA or the Unionist Party. Bloody Sunday gave viewers a detailed account on the peace marches, the shootings and the level of communication between the British soldiers. I learned more about the atmosphere and mindset of people in Ourselves Alone. While watching Bloody Sunday, I felt like that I was marching behind Ivan Cooper. The narrative for each work is the main reason why I reacted differently to some of the characters that I was relating to. Josie, Fried and Donna experienced some of the problems associated with the IRA like house raids or planting car bombs. Overall, the details in the play are much more personable because the perspective is told from characters who are not exactly a member of an organisation. Each woman reacts differently to the troubles. Ourselves Alone allowed me to pick a character that I could identify with if I were to experience something as traumatizing as The Troubles. Bloody Sunday meticulously detailed what happened on January 20, 1972 at The Guildhall. It was a recreation for what happened. Yet, Bloody Sunday did not focus on a few characters and their social conditions. Instead, the film presented an account for the people who participated in something that they stood. Ivan Cooper represented the Catholics who followed through him in his planned path. The film also allowed me to have a point of view where I saw civilians shot, smoke bombs filling a street and British soldiers shielding themselves from the stones. The unnecessary, unfortunate tragedy in Bloody Sunday was the main point of the film. It was an incident that Ireland was scarred by throughout the Troubles. England did not even initially develop a stigma of killing thirteen, innocent Irish Catholics. It was not even until recently that David Cameron apologized for the unjustified killings. The film perfected all of the relevant details for a determined cause and a disturbing outcome. I was not focused on any other minor characters while watching Bloody Sunday. It was the shootings and frantic reactions that demanded empathy and consciousness from all viewers. Ourselves Alone had a grim, hopeless tone throughout the storyline. Yet, the play did not completely analyze or focus on the history. The message was about how the conditions for three sisters invigorated each of the character’s motives. They are all miserable, lost and even abandoned. Whether some people are skeptical like Josie or naïve like Frieda, audiences can still identify with the sentimental, domestic challenges that haunt the entire family. The play does not describe a specific historical event such as Bloody Sunday. Instead, there are references to other relevant tragedies such as Bobby Sands participating in the hunger strikes. I also learned about different organisations and personalities just from thinking about the dialogue to the play. Ourselves Alones is very personable. The arguments between McDermot and Frieda or Josie and Joe reveal more than just attitude for the characters. It is their cultural, political ideology that is being introduced to the audience. I can understand the amount of confusion and frustration among the couples that want to live a normal life but simply cannot. I did not get to learn about a specific Irish Catholic character besides Ivan Cooper in Bloody Sunday. The most important characters in Bloody Sunday were victims and people who had a voice. The sentimentality is a matter of politics, not corroded domestic values. The play could also be considered relevant for some of the issues that people are currently struggling with like broken families and political hypocrisy. Plus, Bloody Sunday also qualifies as a very relevant film since it has indirectly been a part of pop culture. Bloody Sunday also marks a day that Ireland will never forget.

[brianjohnspencer]

Being a Protestant and facing Bloody Sunday 1972

Ulster protestant Jimmy Nesbitt portrayed protestant nationalist and founder of the SDLP Ivan Cooper in the BBC production, ‘Bloody Sunday’ (2002). Nesbitt explained how he approached the Derry killings as a protestant from Northern Ireland. He wrote:

“Bloody Sunday was important for me, not only as an actor but for my understanding of myself as an Ulsterman. It helped me realise that this episode was the watershed, and that the ensuing 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland were in large part due to what happened that day in 1972. For it was on that night that young men all over the country joined up with the IRA in a sense of rage and injustice at what had happened.

Northern Ireland is a very small place, yet you were able to exist 30 miles away from real hotspots of conflict in relative peace and happiness. I came from a Protestant background but co-existed very easily with Catholics. Growing up, I was aware of atrocities committed on both sides and probably felt more keenly those that I thought had been visited on victims from a Protestant background. That was just the very nature of things in Northern Ireland.

I was recording Cold Feet in Manchester when the writer and director of Bloody Sunday, Paul Greengrass, and the producer, Mark Redhead, came to see me. I knew Greengrass a little socially. A lot of people of my Ulster Protestant background would have been very suspicious of the notion of a film about Bloody Sunday. Our fear would have been that it would be terribly anti-Britain and anti-soldiers, a piece of nationalist propaganda.

But I read the script and it was tightly written and balanced. I thought it interesting that Paul had chosen to put my character, the Protestant MP Ivan Cooper, at the centre of the piece. It was controversial but ultimately the right choice to place at the heart of the story a man who came from a Protestant background like my own but who as the MP for Derry had a constituent vote that was almost exclusively Catholic and who was at the forefront of the predominantly nationalist civil rights protest. I felt then that Paul Greengrass wasn’t coming at the story from a particular side.

Before filming began in 2002, I went to Derry and spent the afternoon with Ivan. I asked him to tell me about the day and his memories and he spoke for hours. Then I persuaded him to do the march, which he hadn’t done since Bloody Sunday because of a terrible sense of culpability.

I didn’t tell Greengrass I was going over. I was worried about the fact that I, a Protestant from just up the road, was arriving in Derry to tell this nationalist story. I was worried about what the families would think, about what Derry would think, and about what my own community would think.

That night I booked into the Strand hotel in Derry. As I sat in the bar with a pint of Guinness I got a tap on the shoulder. I looked round and this guy said "Who am I?” I looked at him and said “You’re Bubbles Donaghy, you were the first man shot on Bloody Sunday; you were 15 and shot in the thigh.” It was something imbued in me because of all the research into Bloody Sunday that Greengrass had made me do. Donaghy reached across and said “OK, you’ll do for us.”

Meeting the families of the victims taught me how much of a limbo these people were in. It wasn’t just that without closure you can’t move on from the sense of loss – they also had a terrible sense of injustice. Widgery’s original Bloody Sunday report is universally accepted as a rewriting of truth in the most terrible way. It was unquestionably a whitewash and the victims were smeared. What the families wanted was to be told that the relatives they lost were innocent and that it was murder.

I hope Saville will provide another brick in an increasingly strong wall of peace. It will hopefully close one chapter for the Bloody Sunday families and make it incumbent on the authorities to fully investigate all the unsolved killings from the Troubles. And drama has its own small part to play for there are many more stories to be told from both sides.

I think the character of Northern Ireland is now strong enough to absorb the conflicting rhetoric that will come out of all this.“

See in full here: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/james-nesbitt-growing-up-i-knew-what-bloody-sunday-meant-2001674.html

My previous post on this topic, here: http://eamonnmallie.com/2015/06/uncomfortable-conversations-orchestrated-by-james-galway-now-brian-spencer-exercises-his-embouchure/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

[foshizzlemovies]

I just want to say this to the British Government.... You know what you've just done, don't you? You've destroyed the civil rights movement, and you've given the IRA the biggest victory it will ever have. All over this city tonight, young men... boys will be joining the IRA, and you will reap a whirlwind.

James Nesbitt as Ivan Cooper in Bloody Sunday (2002)