Book brings to life savage events of Bloody Sunday
A small gathering was praying at the spot where Mick Hogan, a Tipperary footballer, had been shot and killed. Another man was going about the task he had been assigned of picking up the bodies amidst all the hats and umbrellas and apples and oranges scattered all over the ground.
The previous day had been Bloody Sunday and, thanks to a new book, The Bloodied Field, published by O’Brien Press, we now have a much more vivid and greater understanding of the frightening events that happened that time. Michael Foley of The Sunday Times had brilliantly captured another monumental moment in Irish sport with Kings of September: The Day Offaly Denied Kerry Five In A Row. He has now turned his attention to the dead of November, bringing those people and the climate of the time back to life. What follows is virtual cinema, though probably all the more important because of cinema. For younger and, indeed, older generations, their abiding image of that day is that from Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins: Machine-gun equipped armoured cars go into Croke Park and open fire. Jordan would explain his deviation from fact on the understandable grounds that he felt the machine-gunned tank captured the faceless callousness of imperialism more strikingly than soldiers shooting, explaining that “I wanted the scene to last 30 seconds”. The film was about Collins, not Bloody Sunday, but Bloody Sunday went on for much longer than 30 seconds and Foley here captures the mayhem before and on that day.
