Mick Fealty: Bloody Sunday Inquiry: Laying the Ghosts to Rest
[Mick Fealty is a writer, analyst and the founding editor of Slugger O'Toole (www.sluggerotoole.com), one of Northern Ireland's leading political blogs.]
David Cameron has just outlined the findings of the Saville inquiry. It was not, as he says, his responsibility to defend the indefensible. It was, he says, the fault of the "poor bloody infantry". Not the officers, not the politicians, not the government....
And we don't have to go back far to see that Bloody Sunday was little less than "sheer unadulterated murder". Who said that? Well, not Martin McGuinness, whose local IRA volunteers killed their first policemen (one Catholic, one Protestant) in a hail of automatic gunfire just three days earlier – it has to be said, much to the shock of the majority of the city's residents.
No, that judgment was first pronounced by the coroner, Major Hubert O'Neill on 21 August 1973, more than a year after Lord Widgery's infamous report....
This report was more forensic than comprehensive in its scope ("a PhD gone wrong", according to one legal wit). Important questions will remain unanswered about the power struggle between the conciliating local command and that of the British High Command. But the families may feel that such detailed examination is enough to right the essential wrong of Widgery, which was a public slander against those who were shot on the day.
It's a fudge. But it's one that even Sinn Féin, who once wanted the responsibility trailed back to the politicians of the day, will be happy to live with if it draws a veil over a nasty period in its own history. The 2005 Enquiries Act effectively draws a line over all such in-depth inquiries.
And the city of Derry? In 1971/2, it was a mixed community with Catholics and Protestants living on both sides of the river. In the 20 years that followed Bloody Sunday (albeit for a variety of reasons), nearly 17,000 of the latter left the west bank. The town has never quite recovered its radical composition ever since....
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
David Cameron has just outlined the findings of the Saville inquiry. It was not, as he says, his responsibility to defend the indefensible. It was, he says, the fault of the "poor bloody infantry". Not the officers, not the politicians, not the government....
And we don't have to go back far to see that Bloody Sunday was little less than "sheer unadulterated murder". Who said that? Well, not Martin McGuinness, whose local IRA volunteers killed their first policemen (one Catholic, one Protestant) in a hail of automatic gunfire just three days earlier – it has to be said, much to the shock of the majority of the city's residents.
No, that judgment was first pronounced by the coroner, Major Hubert O'Neill on 21 August 1973, more than a year after Lord Widgery's infamous report....
This report was more forensic than comprehensive in its scope ("a PhD gone wrong", according to one legal wit). Important questions will remain unanswered about the power struggle between the conciliating local command and that of the British High Command. But the families may feel that such detailed examination is enough to right the essential wrong of Widgery, which was a public slander against those who were shot on the day.
It's a fudge. But it's one that even Sinn Féin, who once wanted the responsibility trailed back to the politicians of the day, will be happy to live with if it draws a veil over a nasty period in its own history. The 2005 Enquiries Act effectively draws a line over all such in-depth inquiries.
And the city of Derry? In 1971/2, it was a mixed community with Catholics and Protestants living on both sides of the river. In the 20 years that followed Bloody Sunday (albeit for a variety of reasons), nearly 17,000 of the latter left the west bank. The town has never quite recovered its radical composition ever since....