The famous rock group U2 wrote this song which is a hymn to peace in Northern Ireland. It was published in their third album War in 1983.

1. what happened.

2. what signs of the fights can be seen.

3. what suffering it has created.

4. the meaning of the refrain question.

5. what feelings are expressed in the song.

6. what the people outside the fight feel like.

7. the aim/goal of all that.

 

I can’t believe the news today.   
I can’t close my eyes and make it go away.   
How long, how long must we sing this song?
How long? Tonight we can be as one.
Broken bottles under children’s feet,
Bodies strewn across a dead end street,
But I won’t heed the battle call,
It puts my back up, puts my back up against the wall.
Sunday, Bloody Sunday.
Sunday, Bloody Sunday.
And the battle’s just begun,
There’s many lost, but tell me who has won?   
The trenches dug through our hearts,   
And mothers, children, brothers, sisters torn apart.
Sunday, Bloody Sunday.
Sunday, Bloody Sunday.
How long, how long must we sing this song?
How long? Tonight we can be as one.
Tonight, tonight.
Sunday, Bloody Sunday.
Sunday, Bloody Sunday.
Wipe the tears from your eyes,
Wipe your tears away,
Wipe your bloodshot eyes.
Sunday, Bloody Sunday.
Sunday, Bloody Sunday.
And it’s true we are immune,
When fact is fiction and TV is reality.
And today the millions cry,
We eat and drink while tomorrow they die.
The real battle’s just begun
To claim the victory Jesus won,
On a Sunday, Bloody Sunday.
Sunday, Bloody Sunday.

 

 

 

Republicans • Nationalists • Unionists • Orange parades • Sinn Féin

stem from • strife • doomed • pogrom • besieged.

 

1. Why have Orange marches always been a problem?

2. How did DUP and Sinn Féin try to solve the problem?

3. What is the real issue behind this violence, according to Gerry Adams?

4. What should be done to stop all of this?

The Orange marching season in the north of Ireland always provides its share of problems. […] This year, as in previous years, a small number of contentious Orange parades have been the focus for confrontation and conflict. There is also no doubt that a tiny element of so-called dissident republican groups – some of whom are little more than criminal gangs – were able to mobilise an antisocial element to engage in street disorder. […] The fact is that violence around Orange marches is not new. These marches have been responsible for sectarian strife in the 19th century, the 20th and now the 21st century. […]

Those who do not learn the lessons of history are often doomed to repeat them: 41 years ago it was an Orange march in Derry that led to the Battle of the Bogside and the pogroms in Belfast. And the following year, 1970, it was another Orange march on the Springfield Road in west Belfast that led to the first serious confrontation between nationalists and the British army.

Little wonder that host communities feel besieged and are fearful when the marching orders insist on parading through areas where they are not wanted. The Orange Order still refuses to talk directly to the host communities.

Earlier this year the DUP (Democratic Unionist Party) and Sinn Féin agreed a new way forward to resolve this issue. It seeks to legally protect the rights of the marching orders, and equally those of host communities. Two weeks ago the 'Grand Lodge' of the Orange Order rejected the draft proposals. […]

After partition […], the northern state – the Orange state – belonged to them. Orangeism gave unionists a sense of belonging, of cohesion and superiority.

And now all of that is changing. The sectarian certainties of the past have gone. Political unionism has compromised, and executive and assembly power is based on equality. And the Orange community finds it difficult, and some within it impossible, to come to terms with the new realities.

So the issue of parades is only a manifestation of a bigger problem – sectarianism. Tackling this and breaking down the prejudices that exist within unionism and Orangeism is one of the big challenges facing all of us. But the starting point must be dialogue. And this is particularly important in light of the efforts by some on the fringes of unionism and nationalism to provoke conflict and street disorder in recent days.

 

1.What is the thesis of the writer?

2.What does the word 'yob' mean?

3.Which other word in the text has the same meaning?

4.Who is it used for?

5.Who was responsible for the riots?

6.In the writer’s opinion who will take advantage of them?

7.What happened in the 1970s?

8.What has/hasn’t changed today?

 

The past week has been a very good one for the republican dissidents opposed to the peace settlement in Northern Ireland.

Amid all the condemnation and claims that the trouble over the last seven days has been 'recreational' or a kind of 'Disneyland theme park violence' one outcome is clear: the disturbances across the north of Ireland had a level of coordination to them that governments in Belfast, Dublin and London care not to admit. It was no accident that violence flared in the Ardoyne, Short Strand, Lower Ormeau and Markets area of Belfast synchronising with trouble in Lurgan, Armagh City and Derry. What all of these parts of the north of Ireland have in common, apart from being predominantly working class and nationalist, is that in each of these areas there are dissident republican units.

In addition to the ability to temporarily destabilise the province during the height of Ulster's marching season those republicans opposed to the peace process now have a potential new army of recruits. While politicians, priests, statutory organisations and other stakeholders in the peace process dismiss the rioters as mindless thugs, recent history teaches us that from out of this mass of the disaffected and the seemingly nihilistic will come the foot soldiers of the next generation of republican terrorism.

During the early 1970s the level of street disorder was far more intense than has been the case over the last few days. The mass riots from 1970 onwards were often the precursor to armed attacks on the security forces including the army. What the leaders of the nascent Provisional IRA learned quickly in that critical period of the Troubles was that many of those engaged in throwing stones, bricks and petrol bombs at the police and military had the potential to become 'soldiers' in an underground army. […]

The external conditions of the 1970s do not pertain to 21st-century Northern Ireland. There are no internments, Bloody Sundays, curfews or army snatch squads as there were in the early years of the Troubles, which all contributed to further disillusionment from the state and drove thousands of people into the ranks of paramilitary forces.

Nonetheless it would be foolish to dismiss those young men (it is nearly always young men) who went on the rampage last week as a homogeneous mass of apolitical yobs. Rather, they are the descendants of the supposedly slain beast of armed republicanism, currently growing up in a soil that is still toxic with sectarianism.