It doesn’t matter if you are a solo traveler, couple, educational class, university or want to have a Derry tour in a family group, we will make your experience exceptional with our tour guide services. Our tour guides are highly trained, knowledgeable, local and authentic professionals who know how to give the best five-star tour in Northern Ireland. If you have arranged a school trip, you will find the friendliest tour guides explaining things in the simplest and most interesting ways. It is our utmost priority that our clients feel comfortable and enjoy every minute of your tour of Derry.

Tours of Derry has been providing its service for the past 15 years plus. Our customer-orientated approach and immense knowledge of Derry’s history has enabled us to win the award for the best Derry tour over many years. We are not just performing a job, we love Derry as this is our hometown and that is why our walking tours are passionate and come straight from the heart!

• Origins of the Conflict
• The Civil Rights Movement
• The beginning of the conflict
• Free Derry
• The Battle of the Bogside
• Internment
• Bloody Sunday
• Operation Motorman
• The Hunger Strikes
• The current Peace Process

In the 1950s oppressed people around the world began to demand civil rights and change. Increasingly alert to events in the wider world, Derry noted the US, South African and other struggles for justice, and by the mid-1960s small groups in Derry and elsewhere were taking to the streets to demand action on housing, jobs and votes. Some unionist politicians were making promises of change, but opposition from within their own ranks frustrated this and civil rights protests spread. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was formed to coordinate actions. “We Shall Overcome” became the anthem of the civil rights movement in Ireland.

The background of the Battle of the Bogside was the emergence of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland and the resistance it faced from the state. In August 1969 The Battle of the Bogside was a three-day riot in the city which saw the people of the Bogside area erect barricades to prevent the RUC entering. The violence ultimately led to the deployment of British troops on the streets, a decision that was initially welcomed by many of those in the area.

British and unionist politicians fumed at the existence of Free Derry. But internment had stiffened the community’s resolve. An anti-internment march was planned for 30 January 1972. Fifteen thousand people gathered in Creggan on a bright, crisp winter’s day. There were rumours that paratroopers were amongst the heavy British Army presence in town, but the mood was cheerful. A peaceful day (by Derry standards), was expected. The march began shortly after 3pm. A little over an hour later, 13 men and boys lay dead – innocent and unarmed marchers shot down by members of the British Army’s Parachute Regiment; a 14th man died later from his wounds. Seventeen others, including two women, were injured. Some were shot in the back as they tried to flee. One victim was shot a second time and killed as he lay injured, others were shot as they tried to help the injured and dying.

The 1981 Irish hunger strike was the culmination of a five-year protest during The Troubles by Irish republican prisoners in Northern Ireland. The protest began as the blanket protest in 1976, when the British government withdrew Special Category Status (prisoner of war rather than criminal status) for convicted paramilitary prisoners. In 1978, the dispute escalated into the dirty protest, where prisoners refused to leave their cells to wash and covered the walls of their cells with excrement. In 1980, seven prisoners participated in the first hunger strike, which ended after 53 days.[1]

The second hunger strike took place in 1981 and was a showdown between the prisoners and the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. One hunger striker, Bobby Sands, was elected as a member of parliament during the strike, prompting media interest from around the world.[2] The strike was called off after ten prisoners had starved themselves to death, including Sands, whose funeral was attended by 100,000 people.