McCann was born and has lived most of his life in Derry. Raised Catholic,he attended St. Columb's College and is prominently featured in the documentary film,The Boys of St. Columb's. He later attended Queen's University Belfast,where he was president of the Literary and Scientific Society,the university's debating society.[2] McCann left Queen's without graduating,a decision he says was forced on him by the university authorities acting in a sectarian manner towards someone they regarded as a troublemaker.[3]
He was tried (as one of the so-called Raytheon 9) in Belfast in May–June 2008 over alleged damage caused during the 2006 War on Lebanon to a facility operated by multinational arms company Raytheon in Derry. The jury unanimously acquitted McCann,and all the other defendants,of charges of criminal damage to property belonging to Raytheon. The jury had heard that the group's actions were prompted by repeated bombing of Lebanese property in which numerous civilians died,and the wish to protect those lives and that property from being attacked by Israeli forces with weapons,weaponry systems and missiles supplied by Raytheon. The judge dismissed charges of affray after hearing the prosecution evidence. However,McCann was convicted of the theft of two computer discs,for which he received a 12-month conditional discharge.[6]
In a statement outside the court,McCann said:"[We] have been vindicated. ... The jury have accepted that we were reasonable in our belief that ... Israeli ... Forces were guilty of war crimes in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. The action we took was intended to have,and did have,the effect of hampering or delaying the commission of war crimes".[6]
His appearance at the funeral of former Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteer,Old Bailey bomber,and republican activist Dolours Price,and a tribute he paid to her,was criticised by a son-in-law of Jean McConville,who was kidnapped and murdered by the IRA. Price was suspected of being one of the paramilitaries who took part.[7][8][9] McCann explained that her family had asked him to speak at her funeral. He said:"I don't think I said anything at Dolours Price's grave that contradicted that [calling McConville's murder 'a horrible and unforgivable act'] ... The point I had in mind,the point I was making,was there are some people deeply implicated in the cruel murder of Mrs McConville who appear not to be undergoing any inner turmoil. They appear to find it very easy to handle the knowledge of their own involvement in that murder".[10]
He was elected as an MLA for Foyle in May 2016 but lost his seat in January 2017 when the number of seats in the Foyle constituency was reduced from six to five. McCann and People before Profit attracted criticism from Sinn Féin and pro-EU activists for supporting Brexit in an area with the fourth-highest 'Remain' vote (out of approximately 400 counting areas) in the whole of the United Kingdom.[11][12]
In May 2019 he was elected to Derry and Strabane District Council as a PBP candidate in The Moor electoral area.[13] In March 2021,he announced his resignation from the council for health reasons.[14]
Campaigning work
McCann was central to the setting up of the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign;the role of his investigative journalism and decades of campaigning for justice for the Bloody Sunday families was recognised in 2010 when several of the families proposed him for the Paul Foot Award for campaigning journalism. Their citation[15] said:"EAMONN McCANN has been using his journalism to campaign for justice for the Bloody Sunday families for almost 40 years. The publication of the Saville Report in June marked a victory for the families,a victory of which McCann was very much a part."
In February 1972,within a month of the killings,McCann published the first pamphlet on Bloody Sunday,What Happened in Derry. Throughout the 1970s,1980s and 1990s he wrote about the injustice of Bloody Sunday whenever he got the opportunity. In the run-up to 1992,the 20th anniversary of the massacre,McCann made a proposal to the families for a book to mark the occasion. The publication of Bloody Sunday in Derry:What Really Happened was crucial in helping to bring together all the Bloody Sunday families for the first time into a single campaign.
Throughout the 1990s McCann wrote constantly about Bloody Sunday,[16] ensuring that every new piece of evidence about what had happened on the day and in the course of the subsequent cover-up was analysed and publicised. He wrote in the local Derry papers,in the Belfast Telegraph,[17]The Irish Times,the Sunday Tribune,in the London Independent,The Guardian,[18]The Observer –anywhere he could place a story. With the announcement of the Saville Tribunal,McCann's writing on Bloody Sunday came into its own. While other journalists focused only on the evidence of the more high-profile witnesses,McCann attended almost every day of the tribunal. He attended the hearings in London's Central Hall,paying his own costs to travel to and from London and staying with family while there. He wrote a weekly analysis for the Sunday Tribune in Dublin,and covered the proceedings daily for the Irish commercial radio station Today FM,as well as contributing articles to the Guardian,Observer,Irish Times,Irish Mirror and Irish Daily Mail.
Much of his journalistic work reflects what he himself describes[23] as a "shuddering fascination" with religion which, when coupled with his profound skepticism, has made it a topic to which he has often returned.[21][24]
In March 2008, McCann spoke with National Public Radio in the United States about the solidarity between the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland and the civil rights movement in the U.S.[25]
In March 2014, following Crimea's referendum on joining Russia, McCann had a piece published in The Irish Times on the situation there. He commented: "After six years in office, Obama believes he has a right to invade anywhere, bomb anything, kill anybody whose jib the CIA doesn't like the cut of, irrespective of national or international law or, indeed, of the provisions of the US constitution. And now he lectures Putin on the necessity of 'respecting international law'. He has a nerve." In the same piece, he wrote: "Vladimir Putin may run a vicious regime but the people of Crimea have a right to be accepted as Russian if that's what they want, which evidently they do",[26] and added: "Putin is right that the main motivation of the US and NATO has been to encircle and enfeeble his country. It might be a close-run thing, but in this instance, Russia has more right on its side than the West".[26]
In 2021, McCann was interviewed during the Docs Ireland documentary festival in Belfast, following a screening of his appearance on After Dark.[27]
List of works
War and an Irish Town (1973)
War and Peace in Northern Ireland
Dear God – The Price of Religion in Ireland
He has also edited two books on Bloody Sunday:
Bloody Sunday: What Really Happened (1992)
The Bloody Sunday Inquiry: The Families Speak Out (2005).
Personal life
McCann was the partner of Mary Holland (1935–2004), a journalist who worked for The Observer and The Irish Times. He has a daughter from that relationship, Kitty, who is now a journalist for The Irish Times, and a son, Luke, who works for the US-based human rights think tank The Center for Economic and Social Rights. The academic and activist Goretti Horgan has been his partner since the mid-1980s and they have an adult daughter, Matty.[28]
Bloody Sunday, or the Bogside Massacre, was a massacre on 30 January 1972 when British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians during a protest march in the Bogside area of Derry, Northern Ireland. Thirteen men were killed outright and the death of another man four months later was attributed to gunshot injuries from the incident. Many of the victims were shot while fleeing from the soldiers, and some were shot while trying to help the wounded. Other protesters were injured by shrapnel, rubber bullets, or batons; two were run down by British Army vehicles; and some were beaten. All of those shot were Catholics. The march had been organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) to protest against internment without trial. The soldiers were from the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, the same battalion implicated in the Ballymurphy massacre several months before.
Derry, officially Londonderry, is the largest city in County Londonderry, the second-largest in Northern Ireland and the fifth-largest on the island of Ireland. The old walled city lies on the west bank of the River Foyle, which is spanned by two road bridges and one footbridge. The city now covers both banks.
Foyle is a constituency in Northern Ireland covering Derry, represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament. Its current Member of Parliament (MP) has been Colum Eastwood of the SDLP since 2019.
Jean McConville was a woman from Belfast, Northern Ireland, who was kidnapped and murdered by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and secretly buried in County Louth in the Republic of Ireland in 1972 after being accused by the IRA of passing information to British forces.
Free Derry was a self-declared autonomous Irish nationalist area of Derry, Northern Ireland that existed between 1969 and 1972 during the Troubles. It emerged during the Northern Ireland civil rights movement, which sought to end discrimination against the Irish Catholic/nationalist minority by the Protestant/unionist government. The civil rights movement highlighted the sectarianism and police brutality of the overwhelmingly Protestant police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).
The Battle of the Bogside was a large three-day riot that took place from 12 to 14 August 1969 in Derry, Northern Ireland. Thousands of Catholic/Irish nationalist residents of the Bogside district, organised under the Derry Citizens' Defence Association, clashed with the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and loyalists. It sparked widespread violence elsewhere in Northern Ireland, led to the deployment of British troops, and is often seen as the beginning of the thirty-year conflict known as the Troubles.
Ivan Averill Cooper was a nationalist politician from Northern Ireland. He was a member of the Parliament of Northern Ireland and a founding member of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). He is best known for leading the civil rights march on 30 January 1972 that developed into the Bloody Sunday massacre.
Joe Brolly, born Padraig Joseph Brolly, is an Irish Gaelic football analyst, former player and barrister who played at senior level for the Derry county team. He is from Dungiven.
Bloody Sunday is a 2002 film written and directed by Paul Greengrass based around the 1972 "Bloody Sunday" shootings in Derry, Northern Ireland. Although produced by Granada Television as a TV film, it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 16 January, a few days before its screening on ITV on 20 January, and then in selected London cinemas from 25 January.
Dolours Price was a Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteer.
Marian Price, also known by her married name as Marian McGlinchey, is a former Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteer.
Raymond McCartney is an Irish former Sinn Féin politician, and a former hunger striker and volunteer of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA).
Events during the year 1972 in Northern Ireland.
People Before Profit is a Trotskyist political party formed in October 2005. The party is active in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Cyril Toman was a political activist in Northern Ireland.
The Raytheon 9 are a group of anti-war activists from the Derry Anti-War Coalition who caused considerable damage to the Raytheon factory in Derry, Northern Ireland. The nine are: Colm Bryce, Gary Donnelly, Kieran Gallagher, Michael Gallagher, Sean Heaton, Jimmy Kelly, Eamonn McCann, Paddy McDaid and Eamonn O'Donnell.
Claude Wilton was a politician, solicitor and civil rights campaigner from Northern Ireland.
Eamonn Melaugh is an Irish socialist, political campaigner and activist from Derry, Northern Ireland.
Colum Eastwood is an Irish nationalist politician who has served as Leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) since 2015. He has served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Foyle since 2019, served in Northern Ireland Assembly from 2011 to 2019 and served on Derry City Council from 2005 to 2011.
The Northern Ireland civil rights movement dates to the early 1960s, when a number of initiatives emerged in Northern Ireland which challenged the inequality and discrimination against ethnic Irish Catholics that was perpetrated by the Ulster Protestant establishment. The Campaign for Social Justice (CSJ) was founded by Conn McCluskey and his wife, Patricia. Conn was a doctor, and Patricia was a social worker who had worked in Glasgow for a period, and who had a background in housing activism. Both were involved in the Homeless Citizens League, an organisation founded after Catholic women occupied disused social housing. The HCL evolved into the CSJ, focusing on lobbying, research and publicising discrimination. The campaign for Derry University was another mid-1960s campaign.
References
↑ "Mr Eamonn McCann". Northern Ireland Assembly. Archived from the original on 31 March 2016. Retrieved 17 May 2016.
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