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Thursday, June 24, 2010
The day they said sorry
BY FINBARR SLATTERY
Truth is established by investigation and delay; falsehood prospers by precipitancy. - Tacitus
IT took almost four decades for the truth to unfold but as the quote at the outset by the famous Roman orator and historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus (56-120AD) states, the truth has been finally established, albeit by investigation and delay.
Lord Saville got it right in his 5,000 pages report – the longest and most costly in British legal history – on the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry on 30 January 1972. On that day British soldiers of the Parachute Regiment shot dead 13 unarmed men, and one who died subsequently, in peaceful, though illegal, civil rights demonstrations in Derry. A further 12 people were injured.
The march in which over 6,000 took part was to be addressed at the Guild Hall by Bernadette Devlin, MP, and the veteran British socialist Fenner Brockway.
The security forces confined the demonstration to the Bogside area, where army units were deployed to arrest troublemakers.
Some soldiers, claiming afterwards that they had first been fired upon, began shooting near Rossville Flats where most of the fatalities occurred.
I remember vividly hearing the news on the radio that evening – it was something you could never forget, as the shooting of innocent people on your own doorstep leaves a lasting impression.
I later saw the aftermath of what happened on TV and will never forget the stooped head of Fr Edward Daly, later Bishop of Derry and now retired, as he led some protestors to safety.
The killings were widely condemned and some protests followed, the most notable being a march on the British Embassy in Dublin which was attacked and burned.
Straight away the British Government established an inquiry under the Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Widgery, whose report in April 1972 found that some of the dead were "proven to have been shot whilst handling a firearm or bomb".
Yet, Lord Widgery exonerated the soldiers although he conceded that some of the fire had been reckless. And there matters stood, with annual commemoration marches letting it be known that the killings were not forgotten, until January 1998 when the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced the setting up of a new investigation into the events of Bloody Sunday.
Lord Saville, a senior English judge, was the man in charge and it is his report that has now been published.
The contents of Lord Saville’s report were completely unknown to the public until 3.30pm last Tuesday, June 15, when the British Prime Minister, David Cameron let the House of Commons and the world know that what happened on Bloody Sunday was "both unjustified and unjustifiable, it was wrong".
There was no beating about the bush. Continuing his statement which lasted over 11 minutes the prime minister said "what happened should never, ever have happened. Some members of our armed forces acted wrongly. The government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the armed forces. And for that and on behalf of our country, I am deeply sorry".
Mr Cameron’s statement was shown on a large screen in front of the Guild Hall in Derry where a large gathering was present to hear it.
Ironically, remembering the day it was, the prime minister’s words were greeted by a mighty cheer from those looking at the big screen. Who would ever have thought that such a thing could happen?
Among those watching on the big screen, or at least nearby, was the man whose image waving a white cloth on Bloody Sunday was one of the most potent images of that day, was retired bishop, Edward Daly, who was visibly moved by what he had heard.
"It is wonderful to see somebody stating quite clearly that those people weren’t posing any threat and were not guilty of any offence and that the killing was unjustifiable," he said.
The Financial Times, in its editorial of June 16, headed, Truth at Last About Bloody Sunday – stated: "It is difficult to overstate the importance of this inquiry – for the sake of justice and of enduring peace in the island of Ireland.
Many Northern Irish, British and Irish memories are scarred by the horrors of the troubles. Yet it is important to remember how they began: in a peaceful movement to end discrimination against Catholics in the province created by the 1921 partition of Ireland – discrimination over votes and housing, jobs and justice.
Bloody Sunday killed that civic movement. Unionist leader Terence O’Neill’s reforms had already been blown away by his own electorate, as the overwhelmingly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary and B Specials swung behind unionist paramilitaries – a reminder of how essential recent devolution of justice and policing is to the current power-sharing regime at Stormont.
Internment without trial, which started in 1971, could alone have triggered the troubles. But after Bloody Sunday there was little space for civil dissent. Sending paratroopers against unarmed protesters lit the fuse for war.
Lord Saville’s inquiry was too long, and in methodology, elided an inquest with a prosecution. But it was needed: to cleanse the stain and the erase the whitewash of the 1972 Widgery Report.”
And as a follow up to Lord Saville’s report, I suggest that those dreadful killings in Derry on Bloody Sunday 1972, should be remembered for all time by the inclusion of the word – Widgery – in the English language. I think that just as the word ‘boycott’ is there to commemorate forever the wrongs of estate manager Charles C Boycott (18321897) whose unfair practice of collecting high rents got him boycotted and added the new word ‘boycott’ to the English dictionary, so too should the word ‘widgery’ make it with its meaning being ‘whitewashing an evil deed (called after Lord Chief Justice Widgery, of England who did just that in his report on the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry on January 30, 1972.
And to end with a final word on the Saville report, here is the concluding paragraph of the editorial in The Irish Times on June 16, headed The Day They Said Sorry:
"Bloody Sunday represents a horrible legacy from a terrible past. In all truth, it probably garnered recruits for the Provisional IRA. The establishment of the Saville inquiry coincided with the Belfast Agreement. Today there is a functioning, power sharing Executive and an elected Assembly. The past is a separate country and the acts of violence that scarred it should be left there".
Yes, let’s go forward and make this island we live on show the world that we can live in peace and harmony.
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