Bloody Sunday still resonates 98 years on

IT’S not often that a list of names will stop you in your tracks. It’s not often that we’re moved to mourn those we’ve never met and who died almost a hundred years ago and, yet, there is something enduringly poignant about what happened ninety eight years ago this week that continues to resonate through time.

To read those names, their addresses, the age they were when they died and the jobs they held, helps to make real something that we all know about, something we’re reminded of every time we walk into Croke Park, but don’t always necessarily grasp the full significance of.

Mick Hogan from Grangemockler in Tipperary is the most famous of the fallen. The footballer gunned down on the field of play at just twenty four years of age, but his is not the name that really brings home the horrors of that day, well not for us anyway.

The names that struck us most of all are those of the children who died. Jerome O’Leary aged ten, William Robinson aged eleven and John William Scott aged fourteen. They were all from Dublin. They were all schoolboys. Their lives were extinguished before they even had the chance to truly begin. The pain their families and friends suffered is beyond imagination.

On Wednesday the GAA is to hold a ceremony to mark the grave of John William Scott. Before now he was one of the eight victims without formal recognition of their final resting place and thanks to the work of people like GAA writer Michael Foley and the Glasnevin Graves Trust that’s changed.

They and the GAA deserve massive credit for the work they’ve done on this project. Proper remembrance keeps the victims with us in some small way. It’s the least they deserve.