Faith leaders have praised the courage and dignity of the Bloody Sunday families as they delivered a stark warning over the state of the world today, with Bishop of Derry Donal McKeown saying it had ‘not been a good year for the human race’.
Bishop McKeown was among several Catholic, Protestant and Muslim speakers at the annual Bloody Sunday inter-denominational commemoration held at the Monument on Rossville Street on Sunday morning.
Fr. Michael Canny led those gathered in prayer as the service got under way, while Canon David Jennings recited a passage from the Gospel of Matthew.
Bishop McKeown then told those gathered: “It hasn’t been a good year for the human race, if we look back over 2025, for all our assumptions about inevitable progress. We have seen an enormous level of high tech brutality and carnage on massive scales, not only in the Middle East but in other parts of the world as well.
"We have heard the arrogant claims that some people are accountable to nobody except their own ego and to their own little clique. And we have been told by the powerful – in their words and their deeds – that no-one has a right to question their assumptions about their spheres of influence in the world.”
Bishop McKeown referenced Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent allusion to 5th Century BC Greek historian and author of The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides, who mused: “The strong can do what they can; the weak must suffer what they must.”
"We are small on a world scale but not insignificant. But this morning we ask ourselves what can the little ones from Derry who suffered teach the strong?
“We know all violence of this is born of an arrogance bolstered by a ludicrous victim narrative. For example: the US has been trampled on by other countries we can do whatever we want; Russia has been disrespected by the west, we can do what we want; China owns Taiwan and Tibet, we can do whatever we want.
"My first lesson from the people of Derry is that persistent courage helps us keep our heads high.
"Facing the horrors of Gaza, can we speak the truth to power without just being angry? Can we forgive our own past for all its pain and loss? Can we model a way of being honest about where we are, and where we have been, so that we can inspire our young people rather than nourish them on helpless anger?
“And finally on this St Brigid’s day, we pay tribute to the strong women who have suffered so much from all sides – from poverty and from violence on the streets and very often in their own homes. Some of them are here today with us. There was a piece of graffiti on the Lecky Road many years ago. It said ‘women didn’t just make shirts, they made community’. Their role in the search for justice and peace should never be played down.”
Bishop McKeown also referenced G.K. Chesterton, “who wrote fairly wisely ‘fairy tales are more than true not because they tell us that dragons exist but because they tell us they can be beaten”.
“This city has shown that it can speak the truth in love for that is the only way that dragons will be beaten,” the Bishop added.
Fr Canny said the thoughts and prayers of those gathered where with those in Gaza, Ukraine and other parts of the world before he led those gathered in the ‘Our Father’.
Reverend David Latimer said he had considered, having retired, “to bring my annual attendance stretching across 20 years to a close”.
"However,” he said. “the not guilty verdict last October in the Bloody Sunday murder trial persuaded me that the time was right not to stand aside, but to stand in solidarity with you."
Rev. Latimer added: “In the aftermath of the Civil Rights march back in 1972 that ended in the bloodshed and death of 13 innocent people on these very streets, you relatives to your credit have succeeded in making a way where there was none so as to clear the names of your loved ones.
"Despite waves of opposition, you have been equally steadfast and unshakeable in the pursuit of justice for your nearest and dearest who did not deserve to die on the streets of the town they all loved so well.”
He said the outcome of the Soldier F trial and the DPP decision to uphold an earlier decision not to prosecute soldiers in relation to false information announced over recent days “could so easily discourage and deflate you all, but don’t let it,” he urged.
"Rather, recall Prime Minister David Cameron’s apology spoken in 2010 – an apology that made it clear there was no doubt what happened was wrong. Ernest Hemingway once said: ‘The hardest lesson I have had to learn as an adult is the relentless need to keep going no matter how broken I feel on the inside’.
"There is no pause button for grief and you folk know that only too well… but the bottom line is: life expects us to push forward despite all the scrapes and the bruises. We stumble, we break, we fall to the ground, but we don’t stay down and gosh you are the proof of that.
“While justice may be late in arriving, history teaches us no matter how long it takes a better tomorrow is ahead.”
Dr. Sameh Hassan from the North West Islamic Association, representing the Muslim community, said those killed on Bloody Sunday were people who “should have grown old, raised families and shaped this city”.
He said the ‘One World, One Struggle’ theme this year “reminds us of the shared responsibility we all carry, to remember and to learn”.
"It reminds us that injustice is never isolated. The cry of a mother in Derry equals a cry of a mother in Gaza, in Khartoum, in Kiev, anywhere an innocent life is taken and truth is barred. Different places, different histories, but the same human being."
"Yet remembrance alone is not enough. It should shape how we live together. In both the Christian and Islamic traditions we are told that love, not hatred is the foundation of faith.”
Dr Hassan added: “Across the world we are hatred that feeds on division. Muslims are spoken about as a threat. Migrants are spoken about without seeing the people behind the words. Difference is turned into danger and history teaches us here in this very city where that path leads. Bloody Sunday did not begin with bullets. It began with dehumanisation, with people being seen as a problem rather than as neighbours. That is why standing together matters.”