The story of Hands Across the Divide
Hands Across the Divide is the work of Maurice Harron, a sculptor born and raised in Derry. He cast two life-size male figures in bronze, each standing on its own plinth and each reaching out toward the other across a gap their hands never close. The figures are usually read as representing the city's two communities, nationalist and unionist, with the unclosed gap standing for a reconciliation reached for but not yet complete.
The sculpture was unveiled in 1992, chosen to fall twenty years after Bloody Sunday. On 30 January 1972, a civil rights march through Derry ended with British soldiers shooting dead thirteen unarmed civilians, one of the defining events of the Troubles. Unveiling the work on that anniversary tied the gesture of the reaching hands directly to the city's hardest day.
Its location was chosen as carefully as its date. The figures stand at the western approach to the Craigavon Bridge, the main crossing over the River Foyle, a river that has long marked a dividing line in the life of the city. Placing the reconciliation gesture on the bridge approach put it on the route people cross every day between the two sides of Derry.
More than thirty years on, the bronze remains one of Derry's most recognisable pieces of public art and a fixed stop on tours of the city. Local councillors have at times debated improving it, including calls to have it floodlit, a sign that the piece is still very much part of the living conversation in the city rather than a relic of it.