Ivan Cooper
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Ivan Averill Cooper (born 1944) was a Northern Ireland politician who was a Member of the Parliament of Northern Ireland. He is best known for leading an anti-internment march which ended up in the massacre of Bloody Sunday on January 30, 1972, in Derry, Northern Ireland.
Cooper was born to a working class Protestant family in Killaloo, County Londonderry, and later moved to the "Bogside" section of Derry City. He was briefly a member of the Ulster Young Unionist Council until 1965 when he joined the Northern Ireland Labour Party. Committed to non-violence, he became a major figure in the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland during the late 1960s. In 1968 he resigned from the Labour Party and founded the Derry Citizens' Action Committee. Attempting to rise above sectarian politics, he remained hopeful that both Catholics and Protestants could work together, particularly the working classes of both groups, whom he believed shared the same greater interests. His ideals left many fellow Protestants viewing him as a traitor.
In the 1969 general election, Cooper was elected as a Member of the Parliament of Northern Ireland for Mid Londonderry, defeating the sitting Nationalist Party MP. Cooper was later a founding member of the SDLP, and organised a civil rights and anti-internment march for Sunday, January 30, 1972. At the end of the march, members of the Parachute Regiment of the British Army shot and killed 13 marchers and wounded 14 others, later asserting that they had been under attack by snipers. Whether those killed were armed or unarmed is disputed and the subject of the Saville Inquiry. Only one of the dead (Gerry Donaghy of Na Fianna, a republican youth movement), could be regarded as a republican.
After the prorogation of the Stormont Parliament, Cooper was elected as one of the representatives of Mid Ulster to the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1973 and the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention in 1975. He was also the SDLP's candidate in the constituency in both the February 1974 and October 1974 Westminster elections. By standing in the first of these, he split the Nationalist vote and in effect ensured the defeat of independent MP Bernadette McAliskey.
