Ivan Cooper Ivan Cooper Ivan Averill Cooper (born January 1944) is a former politician from Northern Ireland who was a member of the Parliament of Northern Ireland, and a founding member of the SDLP. He is best known for leading an anti-internment march which developed into the Bloody Sunday massacre on 30 January 1972, in Derry, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Cooper was born to a working-class Protestant family in Killaloo, County Londonderry, and later moved to the "Bogside" area of Derry city. He was briefly a member of the Claudy Young Unionist Association until April 1965 when he joined the Northern Ireland
Bloody Sunday (1972) in the late 1960s and it was in Derry that the so-called Battle of the Bogside – the event that more than any other pushed the Northern Ireland administration to ask for military support for civil policing – took place in August 1969. While many Catholics initially welcomed the British Army as a neutral force, in contrast to what was regarded as a sectarian police force, relations between them soon deteriorated. In response to escalating levels of violence across Northern Ireland, internment without trial was introduced on 9 August 1971. There was disorder across Northern Ireland following the introduction of