Stakeholder

The leaked media reports about the much anticipated Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday are unhelpful and unwarranted or as Martin McGuinness has said only serve to ‘heap anguish upon anguish’ for the families of victims. The decision to delay the publication of the report until after the election was most likely intended to spare the blushes of a Labour Government and Prime Minister engaged in two wars having to apologise for the unlawful murders of some, if not all those killed on Bloody Sunday.

No doubt Labour strategists thought it was better to hand that poisoned chalice over to Mr Cameron. Perhaps too there may be something in the Saville Report which will make for uncomfortable reading for the leadership of the IRA and the Deputy First Minister. All round the Report is likely to make everyone uncomfortable – not least because of Lord Seville’s attention to detail and the turgid legalese which will make up much of its content. Yet uncomfortable reading may be as far as it goes because there is unlikely to be any political will to pursue the prosecutions of former soldiers should they stand accused of lawful murder.

38 years later, over five and a half thousand pages of evidence- at a cost of over one hundred and ninety million pounds, Lord Saville’s report is unlikely to bring closure to the events of Bloody Sunday. The families have asked the press to give them time to digest the findings of Lord Saville. This request is likely to fall on dear ears as the huge expense of this inquiry makes it an inevitable area of public interest. Whatever the outcome of Saville; the fallout will not meet with agreement. Unionists will accuse the Government of air-brushing history and will counter-demand inquiries into many of the IRA atrocities.  No doubt some members of victim’s families will feel short-changed. The families of other victims groups will press for more inquiries and one suspects a weary and cost conscious public will squirm at the prospect of further political inquires as hospitals and schools close around the country.

Piecing together the memories of thirty eight years ago is not a task for the faint-hearted as all memories are clouded by events, emotion, prejudice and the passing of time. Saville may well get us closer to the truth about that fateful day but it may never bring about the closure so desperately needed by the families. That all the victims of Bloody Sunday were innocent there is no doubt. The iconic images of that day with Fr Daly brandishing a white handkerchief whilst others were moving the body of a victim or him kneeling saying the last rights are forever imprinted in the minds of the wider nationalist community. Bloody Sunday was Northern Ireland’s Sharpeville and it led to the end of Unionist hegemony at Stormont. The waste of the thousands of lives in the intervening years up to the Good Friday Agreement is an indictment of unionist belligerence and the disastrous and counter-productive military campaigns of the Provisional IRA, Loyalist murderers and British securocrats; none of whom will ever be held accountable for their actions in this world as they are afforded of the luxury of a higher judgement at a later date.

Derry has always struggled with its past. The undoubted friendliness of its people masks an uneasy truce or co-existence. The continual battle over the name of the city is only an outward manifestation of the very real cultural tensions between its inhabitants. The UK City of Culture Bid has come at the right time for Derry. The city has an opportunity to demonstrate that it has come of age- not just to the outside world but to its own citizens. There is more than a little irony that the day after Saville’s Report is published with its all the warts view  of a battle scared city in 1972; that the promoters of the City of Culture bid will make their final submission to the UK judging panel.  This is a real chance for Derry to pick up its long awaited peace dividend. Like Cork, Derry suffers from second city syndrome but unlike Cork it has been unfairly blighted by the history of the Troubles. Its most iconic song ‘The Town I loved so well’ is about resilience and hope but it too has an all too idyllic rose –tinted view of pre- Troubles Derry. Derry today is a confident, welcoming City and its time its walls spoke to the world.