Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday exonerates the innocent

INNOCENT


“What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong”

Fergus Kelly

The 5,000-page report of Lord Saville’s inquiry into the deaths of 14 people who were shot dead by soldiers of the Parachute Regiment on January 30, 1972 in Derry’s Bogside was published last Tuesday. The report exhonerated every one.
The victims’ families, tireless campaigners for truth, were overjoyed.
British Prime Minister David Cameron commented on the report in the House of Commons: “The conclusions of this report are absolutely clear. There is no doubt. There is nothing equivocal. There are no ambiguities. What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong. On behalf of our country I am deeply sorry.”
The dignified Derry people gathered in Guildhall Square cheered. It was a momentous day in the history of ‘Stroke City’  matched only in importance by Bloody Sunday itself and the lifting of the siege in July 1689.
The report of the Lord Widgery Tribunal of 1972 is no longer history. It has been exposed as a cover-up that took 38 years and cost £192 million to put right. The whitewash has been erased. It has been torn to shreds, literally and metaphorically, with the publication of the Saville report. The people of Derry asked for the truth of what happened on that day and that’s what they got.
Fourteen innocents were killed. Fact.
There are many who are trying to pick the report to pieces, pointing out its flaws. But this, for me, is not the point. What the families have consistently asked for is proof that their sons and fathers were innocent, that there was absolutely no reason why they should have been shot dead that day. This is now established as fact.
It is impossible to overestimate the effects of the events of January 30, 1972. Saville said that Bloody Sunday strengthened the IRA, increased nationalist resentment and exacerbated the conflict. I think he was being measured with his words. Internment had already increased nationalist resentment. Bloody Sunday did not just strengthen the IRA, it normalised the IRA. The Provo ranks swelled by hundreds, if not thousands, in the aftermath. These people had seen innocents slaughtered by British soldiers and they did not want to see it happen again. A simple, peaceful struggle for Civil Rights had become a war that would rage for 30 years. It would see more than 3,000 people killed and thousands more injured, many of them innocent, many in atrocities like Omagh and Loughinisland and LaMon and Greysteel. It would breed further hatred and hostility between ordinary people who had almost everything in common except their Christian denomination and the benefits or disadvantages this bestowed.
I was born in nationalist West Belfast in 1971. Despite this, I’ve had friends from all backgrounds, a rainbow coalition of like minds from riotous republicans to blood and thunder loyalists, and many more who fell outside the restrictive gamut of ‘-ists’. I’ve heard all their stories. Polarisation of opinion is the Irish problem. To end this polarisation we must talk, and we must listen to each other carefully and with respect.
I would like to see the creation of some form of truth and reconciliation commission to empower the plain people affected by the horror of conflict to tell their stories. It would encourage people on all sides in the north, and those in the south, to understand how their action and, crucially, their inaction made other plain people’s lives a daily nightmare, fostering distrust and hatred, killing thousands in a pointless war that was ended only when all sides agreed to talk. The 1998 Agreement (“Sunningdale for slow learners” as Seamus Mallon of the SDLP famously declared it) finally put an end to the conflict. The agreement proved that talking works, guns and bombs and sticks and stones do not.
I hope that the lessons of the past few years of relative peace won’t be lost in one-upmanship of victimhood, the ‘we had it worst’ attitude that extends the problem by generations. Protestants and Catholics, Jews and Muslims, republicans and loyalists, anarchists and monarchists all lived and still live with the consequences of conflict. All of their stories deserve to be told and to be heard.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010 was a momentous day for the people of Ireland.
The Widgery whitewash is no longer history. It has been torn to shreds.
Fourteen innocents were shot and killed on January 30, 1972.
Fact.

Fergus Kelly Head of IT and Design in The Mayo News, is from Belfast.