In preparation for writing this column on this, the 30th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, I reached for David McKittrick's Lost Lives, and by chance it fell open on a random page. The name Jane Davies caught my eye. It meant nothing to me; nothing to you either, I dare say. Jane was 17 years of age when she was blown to pieces while drinking with a group of friends in the Tavern in the Town public house in Birmingham in 1974.
She was not alone, of course. Twenty-one people died in Birmingham that night, and for all the talk about the victims of Derry not having the emotional release of seeing the murderers of their loved ones, much the same applies to the families of those killed in Birmingham.
In many senses, a worse fate was to befall the relatives and friends of the Birmingham 21, because they were almost entirely replaced in the popular imagination by the Birmingham Six, the innocent men imprisoned for the bombings.
Real killers
For decades the campaign to release the Birmingham Six raged on, and the bereaved of that city, and the 160 people who were injured, were simply forgotten. Just as the authorities made no attempt to identify and imprison the culprits of Bloody Sunday, once they had settled on the Birmingham Six, nothing was done to apprehend the real killers.
Those men were able to return to Dublin, where they probably live to this day, their nights no doubt untroubled at the decades of grief and suffering they have caused (though they must sometimes have wondered why their deeds were never celebrated in a stirring ballad or two).
The knowledge that your loved ones have been murdered for no fault of their own, and that nobody will be punished for what befell them must be a terrible thing.
But far from being a unique agony for the families of the dead of Bloody Sunday, it was a commonplace in Northern Ireland's troubles.
No paratrooper ever did time for the mass killings of the residents of Springhill/New Barnsley in August 1971 and July 1972.
The perpetrators of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, the worst of all the killings, escaped without consequence. So too the butchers of Warrenpoint, where 18 soldiers died.
There is, in fact, a blood-soaked laundry-list of multiple massacres where the culprits got off scot-free, and those who are left can only wonder at the grotesque and malignant injustice of this world.
The families of Jean McConville, the widow abducted and murdered and buried secretly by the IRA, of Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee, also abducted and murdered and buried secretly, or the nine people murdered by the IRA on Bloody Friday, or the 130 others maimed on that day; they have a particular grief to bear.
Far from seeing the man central to their suffering receiving the punishment he deserved, he went on to celebrity and acclaim. As, indeed, did the man who was probably most to blame for Bloody Sunday, General Ford.
Propaganda impulse
But the price that was paid in Ford's journey was not just of the innocent of Derry, but of the lives of young soldiers, hundreds of them, murdered by an IRA which was given such a vast moral and propaganda impulse by the events of this day, 30 years ago.
Those victims vanished in graves in their home towns across the sea, and for the most part, their families never had the emotional closure that would have resulted if the state had managed to imprison the people who had robbed them of those they had loved.
No public price was placed on the lives of so many. Nobody was jailed for Warrenpoint; nobody was punished for the murder of the 10 blameless Marine bandsmen blown asunder in Deal; nor was anyone jailed for the massacre of the eight young soldiers of the Light Infantry, killed in a landmine attack on their bus.
A firing party, a bugle over a mound of clay, a cluster of people weeping in some publicly unseen cemetery somewhere in Britain; and then dispersal and public amnesia. Yet ahead lay years of private grief for just a handful of people, and the knowledge that someone had deliberately robbed them of the person they cherished most in this world; and all without redress, all without justice, now and forever more.
Public inquiry
It is true that nobody heaped the indignity of a Widgery upon any other dead but those of Bloody Sunday: that was an insult reserved for them alone. But then no other dead have had over £100 million spent on a public inquiry investigating what happened to them; and no other dead have been the subject of two major television drama-documentaries within a couple of days of each other.
As the murderous realities of the IRA campaign to overthrow the Northern Ireland state recede in the popular memory, a new historical landscape is being created in the public imagination, with a few visible blood-clad peaks: Internment Day, Bloody Sunday, the assassinations of Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson.
This is precisely the kind of careful amnesia that formed around the abominable violence of 1916-1922, which lauded the republican culture of violence and its obscene and selective victimhood.
We forgot the truths about that time, and so were doomed to relive them: if we do the same about the recent Troubles, then we are merely printing a passport for readmission, yet again, to a bloodied and tragic land with entire mountain ranges of suffering that we should have left behind us long ago.