Share
23rd March 2017
11:09pm GMT
Grey clouds hang over the town's morning sky like the weight of the most recent tragedy to have befallen this place.
The Bogside somehow looks a little broken. Nothing visible, just a sense that all is not once what it was. You can feel the strangeness or whatever it is - perhaps depression - in the air but you can't see it. It's there though, as disguised but as prevalent as the bitter wind rolling over the green hills of Fahan Street to hit you straight up the face at the corner of the Walls overlooking such an historic part of Ireland.
On the unforgivably steep hill curving up to Creggan from Bull Park, people are starting to gather. It's not even 10 o'clock yet and a smattering of young and old are dotting themselves on the route towards the city cemetery. They don't need to be here this early, the first funeral mass doesn't start until 10. They don't need to be here at all, there's plenty of road for everyone - even on this day of all days. But they're here and they're waiting.
Just off the flyover, rising above the Free Derry corner that's decorated with a proud image of Martin McGuinness, there are more bodies planted with the obedient discipline that such a day commands. It's standing room only in the chapel at Long Tower but even that beautiful building with a seated gallery atop a pretty generous offering of room has failed to contain the masses and the crowds overflow in three different directions outside.
One man is on his own staring into the space before him with tears in his eyes. The red and white scarf wrapped around and tucked inside his neck would almost break your heart. You can tell by just looking at him that this is a Derry City fan who might not have known Ryan personally but had formed that connection with the footballer, the warrior - the sort of respect that brings us to sport in the first place, the sort of admiration that gives you no option but to force this way of life onto your first kid.
Straight outside the church, around to the side in the courtyard and on out into the lay-by off the flyover it's just wall to wall people of different ages and backgrounds and different reasons for being there.
A kid is sprinting around the place in the candy-striped jersey and you wonder to yourself who brought him or if he even knows what's going on. He goes by and you see the back of his top: McBride 5.
This whole place is just etched in memories and love and now heartache and that's not even down below where Rossville Street and the pain of 1972 is in plain sight. This is for one man who touched an entire town himself and the community is already at a standstill.
Shane Duffy is standing in the entrance of the church with a protective boot over his left leg. Some kid has shown up in a St. Columb's College uniform - a good hour after his class should've started at the other side of the city - and he's keeping a safe enough distance behind the fence of the tiny graveyard at Long Tower.
GAA men are there and one quips that McBride was as close to a GAA soccer player as you'll get because of the toughness with which he played, the humility he portrayed and the offers, which he says, the player turned down to stay loyal to his hometown club.
The City's ladies team are there, all of them kitted out. The underage teams are together with young players from McBride's boyhood club Ballymoor. They'll be joined by the current Derry team any minute now to form a spine-tingling guard of honour after the club manager Kenny Shiels recites a poem for his captain that has drawn tears from everyone inside and outside the church.
No-one is any closer to understanding why this would happen and what's worse is that no-one seems any wiser as to how this has happened. The sense of injustice is rife but then that's when Derry shows itself.
Through all the sadness and despair of Thursday in the Bog', you'd go a long, long way to find so many people so unified in solidarity and support with one another. Pairs of close friends are there braving it together. Hands are being shook, embraces are frequent and three older men are holding a specially-designed banner for the entirety of the first service which honours two fallen soldiers in Ryan McBride and Mark Farren.
https://twitter.com/JOEdotie/status/844907577720885250The faces lining the streets are familiar. Even when you don't know these people, you know them. That's part of what makes Derry so special but it's also why the town feels it so badly on days like these.
By the time the first hour of the afternoon has passed, it's complete and utter bedlam on the streets. Along that iconic straight from William Street past the Free Derry corner to the flyover, there's not an inch of the kerb that isn't occupied. Outside Martin McGuinness' house alone, on that tight road running down towards the Bogside Inn, there's just a blockade of people and there are more waiting to filter in from the adjacent road that takes you to Celtic Park and the Brandywell Stadium sitting side by side.
Heads are seen over every crevice of the Walls that look down over the Bogside. You just know that most of them thought they'd be the only ones who were imaginative enough to dream up such a vantage point but there might be a hundred up there alone. There are even a few kids from the predominantly unionist Fountain area watching on - probably thinking or whispering up some sort of devilment but caught up in the affair no less.
Raglan Road rings through the sky from the bagpipes that lead Martin McGuinness' tricolour-draped coffin through his homeland. The people - his people - await him at the foot of the hill and they greet him there with a poignant applause. From the hills looking down, the sidewalks, the islands in the middle of the road and the thousands following behind, Martin McGuinness is clapped and thanked and remembered as he loops around and passes the wall and into Free Derry for one last time. In doing so, he passes into the realm of immortality with the sound of every being in Derry lifting him there with all their will.
https://twitter.com/JOEdotie/status/844913202022551552Everyone's helping out in whatever way they can. Voluntary stewards are desperately trying to police some sort of shape to make pathways to and from the same church Ryan McBride was just prayed for. There's not one person who doesn't want to see and hear so people are helped onto heights, others are offered better spots for resting against the walls of houses, and some are manoeuvred on through the masses if they're intent on getting closer.
People you know from school are nodding at the other side of the road. We're all repeating a missed joke for strangers who didn't quite hear what Bill Clinton quipped. We're all feeling the same way, that this little city of ours has lost two massive leaders and it's up to the rest of us to pick up the pieces.
Just as the natives of this consistently overachieving place take comfort in the safety of numbers on offer, the former president of the United States bellows the idea that the best way to honour Martin McGuinness' legacy is to finish the job he started. Finish it.
You can see the cemetery from the Long Tower church basking in the glow of the new-found sunshine warming the place up. Everything is right at your doorstep in this part of town and the residents of Creggan have hung out green, white, and orange flags to mark their own respects for McGuinness' arrival to his final resting place. Even with thousands descending on the typically narrow walkways, people are on their tip-toes and edging back off the grass so they're not standing on graves or touching the headstones. Five hours after the Sinn Fein legend left his home for the last time, he's still being followed around by the people of Derry who soon realise that the time for following will come to an end and that they must become the leaders now.
Amidst all the sadness and goodbyes, there are reminders everywhere that the people of this town are capable of great things. The sportsmen, the writers, the musicians, the leaders, even the clergy. The history, the visionaries, the two Nobel Laureates in three years. The resilience and the humour, the kindness and warmness and, above all else, the togetherness.
A day like Thursday is God-awful but, even in such tragedy, it shows what a special place Derry is.
A day like Thursday is too sad to ever want to have repeated again but the people, they healed together. And they left with a new mission to carry on the work of the leaders before them. To dream of a better place. To dream of better days than having to say farewell to men like Ryan McBride and Martin McGuinness.
I can only pray for a bright, brand new day. In the town I loved so well.
Explore more on these topics:
