Senator Maurice Hayes said in Derry last night that he did not believe the lengthy and costly Bloody Sunday inquiry would uncover any "essential" truth about what happened on the day in 1972 when British soldiers killed 13 people during a civil rights march.
Warning that "picking at the sores" of the past could frustrate the development of peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland, Senator Hayes, in what many nationalists will view as a controversial opinion, said he was unconvinced about the value of the inquiry into Bloody Sunday, which resulted in 14 deaths.
"I do not believe that the Saville inquiry will unearth the essential truth, the definitive account of the events on Bloody Sunday, which are so deeply incised on the psyche of this city," said Senator Hayes, who was one of the members of the Patten commission on police reform. "I can think of many better things to do for the families of victims and survivors for £200 million. And if Bloody Sunday, why not inquiries for every other atrocity, beginning at Abercorn and ending at Omagh?"
Senator Hayes, who was delivering the latest in the series of Tip O'Neill peace lectures at Magee College, Derry, suggested in his address, titled "Moving out of Conflict", that there was a lot to be said for drawing a line under the past.
"The present democratic institutions are a delicate graft on a rootstock riddled with memories of sectarian struggles, deeply rooted in centuries of animosity," he continued. "There is a real danger that the graft might not take if there is too much scrabbling in the underground looking for evidence of the bad husbandry or the criminal neglect of yesteryear.
"The general political will that the institutions should be made to work, should be allowed to do so, could easily be frustrated if we insist on picking at the sores of old wounds, raising old ghosts, revive old animosities and suspicions, and most of all shattering the burgeoning trust which is a prerequisite for peaceful co-existence and co-operation."
Senator Hayes said that the Border had "virtually disappeared, shrunken to a line on the map", and now was the time for a loosening of the tightly-packed knot of competing national identities on the island of Ireland.
