bricolage
31st August 2012, 11:31
nice speech.
This is a city that knows that too well. I'm conscious that standing here in this place and in this company and there's not much a person like me can tell you about rights. Whether you call it Derry, LondonDerry, Foyleside or Stroke City this town will always be synonymous with civil rights. You don't have to know a lot about history to know that in the summer of 1969 when gays and lesbians were engaged in the Stonewall riots in New York City the battle of the Bogside was happening here in Derry.
At first the comparisons between those two things seem remote and far fetched. As Eamon McCann has written, when the policemen came mobhanded down Lecky Road into the Bogside they sang
Hey, hey we're the monkees
and we're going to monkee around
till we see your blood flowing
all along the ground.
Who said Nazis have no sense of humour.
A few thousand miles away in Greenwich Village gays were facing down their own mob of police. IN New York though it was the protestors who were singing.
We are the stonewall girls/ we wear our hair in curls/ we wear no underwear/ we show our pubic hair/ we wear our dungarees/ above our nelly knees.
The Bogside in 1969 wasn't the time or the place for eamon mccann or bernadette devlin to come up with a similar ditty, (though Nell McCafferty must surely have nelly knees) , but the theme in both cities was the same. You colonise places and societies by getting one part of that society to think they have the right to police another section of society.
And hey presto once the people doing the abusing have somebody to demonise or something to be scared of they don't notice the poverty of their own lives.http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/0825/breaking27.html
This is a city that knows that too well. I'm conscious that standing here in this place and in this company and there's not much a person like me can tell you about rights. Whether you call it Derry, LondonDerry, Foyleside or Stroke City this town will always be synonymous with civil rights. You don't have to know a lot about history to know that in the summer of 1969 when gays and lesbians were engaged in the Stonewall riots in New York City the battle of the Bogside was happening here in Derry.
At first the comparisons between those two things seem remote and far fetched. As Eamon McCann has written, when the policemen came mobhanded down Lecky Road into the Bogside they sang
Hey, hey we're the monkees
and we're going to monkee around
till we see your blood flowing
all along the ground.
Who said Nazis have no sense of humour.
A few thousand miles away in Greenwich Village gays were facing down their own mob of police. IN New York though it was the protestors who were singing.
We are the stonewall girls/ we wear our hair in curls/ we wear no underwear/ we show our pubic hair/ we wear our dungarees/ above our nelly knees.
The Bogside in 1969 wasn't the time or the place for eamon mccann or bernadette devlin to come up with a similar ditty, (though Nell McCafferty must surely have nelly knees) , but the theme in both cities was the same. You colonise places and societies by getting one part of that society to think they have the right to police another section of society.
And hey presto once the people doing the abusing have somebody to demonise or something to be scared of they don't notice the poverty of their own lives.http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/0825/breaking27.html