It is 30 years - on January 30th - since British soldiers shot unarmed civilians on the streets of Derry. This pivotal event in recent Irish history is the subject of two powerful dramatic reconstructions to be shown this month. But they are companions, not competitors, writes Kathy Sheridan; who watched the films and met survivors of Bloody Sunday
For those who assert that the families of Bloody Sunday victims have bleated too loud, too long and too selectively, Leo Young is a living rebuttal. He is no practised media whinger. Only moments into the interview, he feels obliged to tell of a tragedy seven years ago when a toddler was killed under his council lorry. Twisting a napkin between his fingers, voice faltering, he strives to explain: "That wee boy was somebody's son . . . "
Yet, up to a couple of years ago, this patently decent man could not bring himself to speak about a much older tragedy - the killing of his 17-year-old brother John, an apprentice tailor, on Bloody Sunday. After the futile exercise of giving evidence at the Widgery Tribunal, he kept his own stoical counsel for 28 years.
In January 1972, he was 27, a Catholic with a wife and small children, delivering coal around Derry. "My life was turned upside down after Bloody Sunday, but I never spoke to anyone about it. That's a decision I made. John was dead, killed; and as far as I was concerned, there was no point in talking about it . . . I didn't really start to talk about it a couple of years ago either, I thought I was just giving some information," he says benignly. "I really didn't think the film would be so personal into me."
So personal, in fact, that he became the emotional anchor of Jimmy McGovern's Sunday, the second of the Bloody Sunday dramatised reconstructions to be unveiled in recent days. Young has no objection to that portrayal: "Everything you see there is what happened to me".
It is through his reflective character that we see a social context for the march on Bloody Sunday - his search for his brother in the mayhem; his frantic attempts to get a dying Gerry Donaghy to hospital; his baseless arrest and incarceration; his harrowing public breakdown at young John's funeral; his evidence to the Widgery Tribunal about the nail bombs supposedly "found" on Donaghy's body; his appearance at an IRA swearing-in ceremony - get a sense of the catastrophic personal and social fall-out occasioned by the events of Sunday, January 30th, 1972.
This device is one of several elements that distinguishes one film from the other, and makes them, not competitors, but enormously powerful, shocking companion pieces. Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday, with its grittier, more journalistic analysis, concentrates on the 24 hours of the day itself; the broader sweep of McGovern's Sunday brings us up to the Widgery Tribunal.
Both leave the stunned viewer in no doubt as to how this single day, which left 13 people dead, became the turning point in the modern Troubles.
Not even a generation inured to movie violence could be prepared for the hate-filled, foul-mouthed, murderous aggressiveness of the soldiers of the Paratroop Regiment, psyching up for what they are led to believe will be a defining battle with the enemy.
Greengrass portrays the end of their tour in the North, time to show HQ - and the "crap hats", as they describe the other regiments "that stand back while the IRA ponce around with guns and balaclavas" - what the Paras are made of.
Their superiors have already set the tone: "Tell the lads we want the maximum aggression, we want a lot of arrests today, and if the shooting starts, we're going to shoot back, plenty of rounds. We've got to go in and teach these people a lesson."
Both films attempt to give the Paras' fury a context beyond mindless aggression. IRA men are seen hanging around the fringes, despite promises to civil rights leader, Ivan Cooper - a middle-class Protestant, who modelled these demonstrations on Martin Luther King - that they would stay away.
In McGovern's Sunday, to the rhythmic clunk of weapons being loaded, a pumped Para chants the names of soldiers murdered in Northern Ireland, ending with Mick Willetts, the first Para to be killed there, his arms spread across a police station doorway, protecting women and children, " . . . who died for these bastards, twice the man they'll ever be, and all they've ever done is laugh about him".
In Greengrass's Bloody Sunday, another rages that he is "sick of being shot at, spat on . . . all the other shit that goes with this. This time they're not going to get away with it".
Soldier 027, a radio operator, argues the case against, in both movies - "still, can't see a kid becoming the 'enemy' " - only to be bullied into silence. "Got to stick with us on this," he is warned in Greengrass's film, "whatever happens, we'll sort it out between us."
Also stalking through both movies is the shifty, arrogant, pivotal figure of Gen Robert Ford, commander of British land forces in Northern Ireland.
THROUGH him, we know that, at the highest levels of the British establishment, patience had run out with Derry's no-go areas, and that the old short-sharp-shock method of quelling the natives was in demand. In a memo to a superior about the deteriorating situation in Derry, he concluded that "the minimum force necessary to achieve a restoration of law and order is to shoot selected ring leaders among the Derry Young Hooligans [the regular rioters\] after clear warnings had been given".
In Greengrass's film, he sweeps into Derry on January 30th with a stern message for the local commander, Brigadier Patrick McLellan: "I've had a briefing from Downing Street and the PM's had enough . . . You're going to have to be tough today, Pat. Really tough. If there's any trouble at all, the Paras have to counter attack. Is that clear? And - eh - you have my full support."
McLellan had already reacted incredulously to the plan to send in the Paras: "No soldier would send in troops that didn't know the ground". When a palpably anxious local RUC superintendent, Frank Lagan, assures Ford that the civil rights leaders want no confrontation and had agreed to re-route the march away from the Guildhall (the ostensible reason for the army's massive presence in Derry that day), Ford's reply is scorchingly dismissive: "Oh. So useful to have contacts within the community".
Later, as McLellan dithers about sending in the pumping, psyched-up Paras, Ford is seen prowling the streets, itching for action. Soldiers line the walls, hunker down in derelict buildings, position rifles at windows. When the armoured carriers finally career toward the crowds, he cheers them on like a punter at the races : "Go the Paras!"
Who fired the first live shots is not clear in Greengrass's film; here, through a soldier's eyes, it's possible to believe that the they thought they were under attack - just as their superiors had convinced them they would be. In McGovern's, in one fudged scenario, there is a crack of rifle fire, then the soldiers are firing live bullets. Soldier 027's evidence - seen in flashback - tells a more sinister story. The production notes say, however, that the film portrays the soldiers as shooting first.
And still, for all that we know of that story, when the shooting starts - particularly in McGovern's Sunday - it is brutal beyond imagining.
The terror, screaming, sobbing and vulnerability of inoffensive men, women and children, running for their lives, huddling in doorways, trapped in the open, crawling slowly, agonisingly to shelter, desperate to escape from what they suddenly realise is live ammunition, allied to a sense of escalating aggression among the soldiers, make for some profoundly shocking sequences.
Images abound: a crouching Father Edward Daly holdinga white handkerchief aloft while leading the little group carrying young Jackie Duddy's body; a dying boy imploring "tell me mammy I'm sorry, tell me mammy I'm sorry"; the cries of Paddy Doherty - "I don't want to die on my own" - after being shot while crawling towards safety; the screams of Geraldine Richmond as she begs Barney McGuigan not to go out to the dying man; the heart-stopping report as McGuigan, holding a white handkerchief, is shot through the head; the shooting at a nurse in uniform - "Your white coat makes a good target".
Psychopathic Paras pick off people at random, fire almost casually into crowds and shoot people with their hands up. But probably the most shocking scenes of all are the execution-style killings, particularly that of Jim Wray, a 22-year-old peaceful protester who had been sitting cross-legged at the barricade. Already wounded, prostrate and helpless, he was finished off, according to several eyewitnesses, by a Para who walked up to the body and fired twice into his back at point-blank range.
The sense of mayhem is intensified as the frenzied shooting continues for long moments after the radio operator - soldier 027 - has repeatedly screamed the order to cease fire. Returning to their APCs, a breathlessly exultant soldier boasts that he had "got off" 22 rounds - much of it, we learn later, from his private stash: "I shot 22 into the bastards, right up the Irish bastards!".
By now, the pressure was on the officers to produce evidence - guns, bombs, anything - that would justify the Paras' actions.
Gen Ford is seen telling stunned journalists that the Paras "fired three shots altogether, after they had something like 10 or 20 fired at them from the Rossville flats over there".
"Three shots only?" queries a disbelieving reporter. "I've personally seen three dead bodies."
Ford doesn't miss a beat: "They may well not have been killed by our soldiers".
Meanwhile, Leo Young is taken from the car trying to get a dying Gerry Donaghy to hospital, and Greengrass shows the nail bombs being planted on Donaghy's body.
Young was detained for two days, during which his family had no idea of his whereabouts. He, too, was kept in brutal ignorance. On release, he was still under the impression that the only people dead were the three bodies he had seen; he did not know that his brother John was also dead, along with nine others. "But they knew. They probably knew all along," he said last week. "As I was leaving the barracks, a detective asked me how many brothers I had. I told him two and he said 'well, you've only one now . . . ' I had no idea what he was talking about."
On the night of Bloody Sunday, we see Ford taking leave of his officers, having asked for his thanks to be passed to the men for, "as ever, their restraint and, I believe, great professionalism".
He turns to the hapless McLellan, instructing him to take charge of the inquiry - "issues of timing, when the Paras went in, etc." - before delivering the coup de grace: "My role on the day, of course, was purely as an observer".
As for Gen Ford, we get a final glimpse of him the following year, marching through Buckingham Palace to be decorated by the Queen. Back in Derry, Leo Young - his sense of justice outraged by Widgery - sits in a queue of barely-grown boys stepping forward to take their oath of allegiance to the IRA.
As it happened, Leo did not join the IRA. "I did all it shows in the film, but I couldn't go through with it. I knew I couldn't do what the IRA would have expected of me. My mother would have died, and Kathleen [his wife\] would have left me. They were totally opposed to any killing. Everybody could have killed a soldier then, but I couldn't have sat down and planned to kill some mother's son".
Kathleen is still with him, and he lives for their 16-year-old son, Kevin. "It's possible that I'm associating Kevin with John [Leo's dead brother\]. He's quiet, he's tidy, he's doing well at college. He's deputy head boy, and his maths teacher says he is Cambridge material . . . So hopefully, he will go on and have a peaceful, a contented life."
Margaret Wray, whose brother Jim was executed sitting at the barricade, speaks now of a big, boisterous family from which the life disappeared after Bloody Sunday. A house of story-telling, jokes, music and dancing - Margaret remembers her mother teaching them to jive - became inward looking and silent. "My youngest brother was only nine, and when he was older, if he heard us talking about times before Bloody Sunday, he would say 'that's not the family I remember'."
While their mother "talked, prayed and cried for everything to be done by peaceful means", their father - who from day one never believed that Widgery would rule against the army, and read out a statement to that effect at the tribunal - became obsessed with British justice. "Up to then, we were only learning about politics in theory. After Bloody Sunday, it became very real . . . My father would have been watching what the British Government were doing all over the world . . . He in-bred it into us and never let us forget, to the day he died, five years ago. You couldn't go into the house without hearing about it all - that his son was murdered by 'a couple of renegade paratroopers . . . bordering on the reckless' [in the words of Widgery\]. He would not accept it.
"I remember asking him what was the difference between Bloody Sunday and Claudy or Enniskillen, and his reply was that Bloody Sunday was carried out by the peacekeepers, the people brought to Northern Ireland to protect us."
Through these films, these eyes, these bald facts - soldiers who took no casualties themselves, shot 28 civilians, killing half of them, no guns were found - it becomes easier to see why Margaret Wray's father could never let go.
Still the battles rage over details. Former Paras (who propose to give their evidence to Saville behind screens, by video-link, from London) have re-appeared to assert, for example, that the scenes where Jim Wray sits cross-legged in peaceful protest, never happened. In fact, there are photographs of Jim Wray doing precisely that.
As for the Paras' protests that "the petrol and nail bombs that rained down on us that day" are not recorded in the films, it has long been noted that there is not a shred of evidence of even one such attack in the great mass of footage or photographs taken that day, although the short-lived fight-back by the IRA - and their being hunted away by angry civilians - is faithfully recorded in both films.
So are they "IRA propaganda" (Daily Mail) and "viciously anti-British" (Ruth Dudley Edwards), or are they "putting the record staight" (Paul Greengrass) and providing "a fitting requiem for the dead" (Jimmy McGovern)?
The major figures in these production teams are no lightweights. Greengrass spent 10 years as a producer on BBC's World in Action and wrote and directed the BAFTA award-winning factual drama about the murder of Stephen Lawrence. He knows that the scenes showing the killing of Jim Wray and the planting of nail bombs on Gerry Donaghy will tax the belief of some - "But they both happened". He is also convinced the soldiers fired first.
In McGovern's Sunday, the factual producer, Katy Jones, is also a veteran of World In Action and worked with McGovern before as the factual producer of Hillsborough, in which she unearthed new evidence of the police cover-up. Her investigative work has led to three government inquiries.
McGovern frankly admits that he "doesn't give a shit who fired the first shot . . . I don't want to go to the son of Barney McGuigan and say, 'Your father, who was holding up a white hankie while going to help a dying man, was murdered because someone had taken a pot shot at the British army half a mile away'. Who fired the first shot is irrelevant to me as a human being, I don't find that very important."
IN JONES'S interviews with paratroopers, she found an ethos that saw the day as "a game of cowboys and Indians, fuelled by a sense that one Para soldier was worth 10 Coldstream guards. As far as they were concerned, the yellow card [rules of engagement\] meant nothing. So, for a couple of Paras, Bloody Sunday 'was just another day . . . ' A few said it was what the Paras aspired to - because they 'took on the IRA and won'. A lot - right up to senior level - really believe that IRA gunmen were wounded or killed that day and were spirited away."
But the point is, says Jones, that the army was expecting high casualties. "Lord Carver, who died recently, had an interesting perspective. In his memoirs, he wrote that he was rather relieved that there were only 13 dead. He expected it to be 30."
As for the films being "viciously anti-British", it seems appropriate to let an Englishman, in the articulate form of Jimmy McGovern, say his piece on that: "I speak as a patriotic Englishman, I love my country because I was born there - it's instinctive. But you then look for your country to earn your love and respect, and it does that by upholding truth and justice. And Bloody Sunday spat on those fundamental principles."
Meanwhile, Lord Saville sits over an inquiry that has already incurred £52 million sterling in costs. "I'm hopeful from what I've seen so far," says Leo Young. "I really have the hope that this will all come to rest in 2004, when the report comes out." Margaret Wray says she would love to hopeful, "but I'm not. Every major issue in the inquiry, the British have stood in our way and there is a High Court in London that is ruling against us. Pictures have gone missing, rifles have been destroyed, soldiers given anonymity, and now they're not even coming to Derry. I really don't know why, because they know well by now that they are under no threat from the people of Derry. These are supposed to be the brave men, the élite of the British army.
"So I would say to them: 'Be brave, come to Derry and tell your story - even if I don't like it'. There are people of our own who have said things I don't like, but I would just thank them for coming; that's their truth and I accept that. So all I want is for the Paras to give me their truth."
Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday is on TV3 and ITV tomorrow and is available on video. Jimmy McGovern's Sunday is on Channel 4 on January 28th
The Northern Ireland Troubled Images exhibition is at the National Library, Dublin