Comment: Bloody Sunday truth is as good as it gets
One word has been used continuously by the families of the victims of Bloody Sunday: innocent.
By Matthew West
Finally, after a 13-year inquiry costing £195 million, those families have been totally and utterly vindicated.
There are still many people who do not fully understand the conflict in Northern Ireland, which has always been disingenuously referred to as the ‘Troubles’.
But then that’s the trouble with the ‘Troubles’ – successive Westminster and Stormont governments did fail to take them seriously. Between 1920 and 1969 successive governments failed to listen to the plight of Catholics in Northern Ireland whose lives were at the time not incomparable to the lives of the majority of Palestinians living in the West Bank today. That’s why, if you looked carefully at the crowd gathered outside the Guildhall in Derry today, you would have seen a few Palestinian flags being carried by some awaiting the verdict of the Saville Inquiry.
It might seem unbelievable to many people today but Catholics were denied jobs, homes and basic civil rights until the late 1970s, just as Palestinians are today in Israel. That’s why they were marching in peaceful protest in Derry on January 30th 1972, as they had been doing for over three years despite continual harassment, violence and plenty of stone-throwing by Unionists. That’s why the army was in Northern Ireland in the first place: to protect the very people the paratroopers ended up firing upon.
In a sense it’s that lack of understanding – most people living on mainland Britain simply thought the two communities of Ulster could not get along with one another – that causes problems.
Most people never fully understood what the causes of the Troubles in the province were. And they didn’t much care until the IRA brought their bombs to mainland Britain. Even then they failed to understand, simply blaming all Irish men and women everywhere.
The way the British army dealt with the protestors in Derry that day in 1972 proved a catalyst for the violence in Northern Ireland for the next three decades. Yes, you can say tensions had been brewing. And if it hadn’t been Derry then it might have been Belfast a month later. But it was the decision-making at every level that was wrong and borne out of complete ignorance of the situation in Northern Ireland.
If Harold Wilson had understood it better he might never have sent the army to Ulster in the first place. By sending the army to do what a police force should have been doing he had virtually guaranteed violence. Whenever the army carries out police action people inevitably die. There are hundreds of examples from around the world, the most recent one being in Thailand.
Until 1972 the Provisional IRA were a pathetically small number of angry young men who, while no doubt attempting to destabilise the established rule through politically motivated killings or attacks, were having little success.
They were no better than a gang of hooligans comparable to any number of criminal gangs. The statement that a third of Derry was a no-go area for the security forces is somewhat overstated. It’s like stating there are no-go areas in Nottingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow or any other British city. To some extent potentially true in every case, but as in the case of Derry, the British security forces are always better equipped and better trained.
The IRA were so useless that they even claimed responsibility for attacks they had no part in, including the bombing of the then Post Office tower – now the BT tower – in central London in 1971. An attack that was actually carried out by the communist anarchist group the Angry Brigade.
Meanwhile what’s missing from the Saville Report is what the families of the victims and many young men felt following that day of killing: that the army decided to give the dirty Irish scum a good kicking.
Many will try and say this wasn’t the case but the Saville Report has proven it to be true simply by stating that the paratroopers not only disobeyed orders but effectively lost their discipline.
That fact alone helped to swell the ranks of the IRA. The policy of internment – whereby teenage, mostly Catholic young men, were dragged out of their beds by the army in dawn raids and tortured to see if they were members of the IRA – finished the job. So much so that by 1974 the Provisional Irish Republican Army really was an army.
Still, for the families the most important thing has not been revenge. It has been establishing the truth and it has been about obtaining justice. That it has taken 38 years to only establish the truth is something that this country should be utterly ashamed of. That for 38 years the families of the victims have had to fight to clear the names of their loved ones following the Widgery Inquiry is as shocking as it is appalling.
Yet just watching them as they addressed the crowd outside the Guildhall today in Derry it was clear that can put to rest some of their pain and anguish. That they have at least proven the innocence of their loved ones will perhaps be enough for some. For others understandably it will not.
But if Northern Ireland is ever to move on then maybe the truth is the best any victims of the violence of that 30-year period can ever hope for.
Justice, in one form or another, is something all the victims in Northern Ireland have been denied.
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