MAKING HISTORY SKILLS BOOK Irish Independent


PEACE COMES TO THE BOGSIDE


Friday, August 15, 1969 British troops armed with machine guns, were welcomed into Derry’s Bogside last night amid scenes of wild jubilation with Bogsiders cheering, singing, dancing and shaking British officers by the hand (writes Martin Brennan). It was the end of three days of the worst fighting ever experienced in the city. Earlier it had seemed that the police had


totally lost control of the situation and had been beaten back by local resistance. Then the army in jeeps and trucks, helmeted and with automatic weapons at the ready, rolled into the city and, donning gas masks, threw a barricade of barbed wire across the mouth of William Street. After the police withdrew, Bogsiders advanced from behind their barricades and shouted welcomes at the troops, who stood immobile. Mr. Eddie McAteer, the Nationalist leader, summed up the mood of the people when he said: ‘It is not that we love the British troops, but that we hate the RUC’.


At least 5 people, including a nine-year-old


boy, were killed elsewhere in the North in the bitterest battles since the terror of the ‘20s. Hundreds of refugees have fled across the


border – mainly to Donegal – since the new spate of troubles started last Tuesday. More than 200 families have spent the past three nights billeted and fed in Buncrana.


Monday, August 18, 1969 Ireland yesterday requested an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council to consider the dispatch of a UN Force to the strife-torn North. After last week’s call by the Taoiseach Mr. Lynch for UN intervention, a formal request for a meeting of the Security Council was delivered by our Ambassador Cornelius Cremin. Meanwhile, in a joint statement, three Northern


MPs – Paddy Devlin, Paddy Kennedy and Patrick O’Hanlon – accused the Unionist Government of pursuing a deliberate policy of genocide against the Catholic population of the six counties. The statement said: ‘They have now embarked


upon a course of action similar in intent and method to the Hitlerite regime in its policy against the Jews’.


1. How were British troops welcomed when they arrived in Bogside?


2. How many were killed elsewhere in the North? 3. Where did most refugees go? 4. Why did Ireland request an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council? 5. What is genocide?


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