Eamonn McCann will be the main speaker addressing the rally at this year’s March For Justice on Sunday, 31st January 2016.
Eamonn is a writer, journalist and political activist who has lived most of his life in Derry.
He was one of the original organisers with Derry Housing Action Committee (DHAC), a radical campaign group focusing on access to social housing. It was DHAC in conjunction with the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) that organised the 2nd civil rights march. This march, which took place on 5th October 1968, provoked a violent reaction from the RUC that was caught on camera and beamed around the world.
Eamonn went on to become one of the most prominent civil rights activists of that time and was on the anti-internment march on 30th January 1972 as Bloody Sunday unfolded before his eyes. He wrote the first pamphlet on the killings, entitled “What Happened In Derry“, which was published in February 1972. He attended the British Government’s notorious Widgery Tribunal in April 1972 and within a week of its findings, his pamphlet ‘The Widgery Whitewash’ was in print.
In 1973 he wrote one of the seminal books on the Northern Irish conflict, ‘War And An Irish Town’. He then went on to write two books on Bloody Sunday, the seminal. ‘Bloody Sunday In Derry What Really Happened’ published by Brandon in 1992 and ‘The Bloody Sunday Inquiry: The Families Speak Out’ (2005) as well as a number of other pamphlets and scores of newspaper articles on the massacre. He also wrote and produced three television programmes on the subject.
Eamonn was chairman of the Bloody Sunday Trust for 10 years. He joined the Bloody Sunday March Committee in 2011. As a journalist, with only a few exceptions, he attended everyday of the second Bloody Sunday Inquire inquiry chaired by Lord Saville. In 2010 he won Amnesty International’s award for journalism. In the same year he won a special award from the Guardian Newspaper and Private Eye for his investigative journalism Bloody Sunday.
In 2014 he wrote the pamphlet, “Go On The Paras” critiquing the conclusions of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry Report published in June 2010.