Derry Uprising pt 1

Some of our readers are aware that one of the authors on this blog, not me, is from Ireland and was involved in the Civil Rights movement that took place in the North during the 1960's. He was also on the Bogside Defense Association when the Catholic population occupied their community in 1969.

I watched a couple of these short interviews with John Throne (Sean O'Torain) again from 2007 and they are an interesting glimpse in to that period through the eyes of a participant caught up in it all.

The Catholics of the North had clearly had enough and were in many ways also inspired by the struggle of the black workers and youth in the US. A revolutionary period in a revolutionary decade.  John now lives in Chicago and his only income is from the sale of his book The Donegal Woman about his grandmother, a peasant woman hired out as a girl to a landowner through the  Hiring Fair System, a form of indentured servitude that went on until the 1930's. You can get to the book's webpage and order it in e book form by clicking the image on the right hand side of this blog.  Some people have seen them but we have a lot more visitors since we first posted them as a look at Irish working class history. I will post a couple more of the interviews covering these events over the next few days.

These events took place amid a global revolutionary period from the  US, to France 1968, the struggle in Vietnam for self determination and the colonial powers being driven from direct rule in the former colonies and the uprisings against Stalinism in Europe.