Sunday Bloody Sunday uplifting structure. Bono once commented that "love is...a central theme" of "Sunday Bloody Sunday" The band have said the lyrics refer to the events of both Bloody Sunday in 1972 and Bloody Sunday in 1920, but are not specifically about either event. The song takes the standpoint of someone horrified by the cycle of violence in the province. Bono rewrote the Edge's initial lyrics, attempting to contrast the two events with Easter Sunday, but he has said that the band were too inexperienced at the time to fully realise that goal, noting that "it was a song whose eloquence lay
Sunday Bloody Sunday was going to get us killed." Drummer Mullen said of the song in 1983: We're into the politics of people, we're not into politics. Like you talk about Northern Ireland, 'Sunday Bloody Sunday,' people sort of think, 'Oh, that time when 13 Catholics were shot by British soldiers'; that's not what the song is about. That's an incident, the most famous incident in Northern Ireland and it's the strongest way of saying, 'How long? How long do we have to put up with this?' I don't care who's who – Catholics, Protestants, whatever. You know people are dying every single