Sir, – Eamonn McCann’s piece on Bloody Sunday (Opinion, January 28th) fails to mention that 500 of the then 600 clerical and lay students at Maynooth College also marched in silence all 15 miles from Maynooth to Dublin city centre that week, a fact which remains largely unrecorded.
The trek of several hours was marshalled along the Sligo-Galway road by student stewards, many of them senior seminarians and the marchers included college staff. From O’Connell Bridge we dispersed towards Merrion Square where the great numbers made it impossible to approach the British embassy long before it burned down. We took the 66 Bus home later that evening.
The decision to march had been taken during one of the nightly meetings that week of all members of college in a packed Callan Hall. Feelings ran high, a protest march in Dublin was agreed and at one memorable juncture a member of the professorial staff (nearly all clerics at that time), who hailed from the Midlands and who later became a Fellow at TCD, suggested that the Maynooth march should begin at the Wellington monument in the Phoenix Park and progress the short distance down the quays. A lecturer, also a cleric from the North, who later became a senior translator in Brussels, immediately and forcibly pointed out that of all places with which to associate a Maynooth protest march against the actions of the British army in the North the phallic monument to the Duke of Wellington was not the most appropriate. Therefore we marched from Mayooth.
It was a rare and wonderful example of popular democracy; and while the lack of attention by the media was an obvious disappointment, some of us regret neither the long march nor the aching joints and muscles which marked a memorable demonstration. – Yours, etc,