Notions connected to the song

Identities and Exchanges

Art and Power

Memory and territory

As we have seen throughout this unit about Ireland and ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, Music is fully integrated into the Irish culture. It’s part of their own identity, and it fully defines it.

In fact, major historical events (such as Bloody Sunday(1972), Easter Sunday (1916), the civil war (1922-23 ……) have helped and influenced Irish music.

Not only do they share their music within their own country and culture, but they need to / want to share it with the rest of the world too. Even with songs in Gaelic too.

For Irish people, Music is a kind of Universal language.

About Ireland, we can see clearly that not only do they try to support music, but they also try to integrate music in the heart/core of their country.

For them, creative and artistic expressions are also part of their political expression.

For ex, The harp, as we’ve seen has also been used as a symbol of Identity and resistance against GB in the 17 th.

Besides, if we consider ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, eventhough this is a call for peace and that they don’t want to favor one side.

It has been at some point misunderstood and misinterpreted by politicians from the IRA. In fact, they tried to use it as a rebel and aggressive song against GB.

So that U2 had to clarify many times that this was a song for peace . They just wanted the conflict to come to an end.

This specific song is testimony about Northern Ireland and Irish history.

As matter of fact, it refers directly to two terrible events in the Irish conflict.

To begin with “Bloody Sunday” was a term given to an incident to an incident, which took place on 30th January 1972 in Derry, Northern Ireland where British Soldiers shot 28 unarmed civilians who were peacefully protesting,  13 People died that day.

The second took place earlier in November 1920 and made this time 14 casualties.

In both cases, this song was meant to remind people how pointless and stupid this conflict was.

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