Publication next week of the report into Bloody Sunday will be a big day for the city with mixed emotions
ONE COMMUNITY’S civil rights protesters and innocents were the other’s troublemakers and covert terrorists. Bloody Sunday went to the heart of Northern division, still does. The wound went deep and the pain will linger, regardless of what happens next week.
While some are waiting with anxiety or scepticism for Tuesday’s publication of the Saville report, others still don’t admit it was wrong for the state’s army to fire on unarmed citizens. Some cannot recognise that this made it exceptional, deserving of public inquiry. And other Derry people are making bombs, to argue that the IRA which grew on the back of Bloody Sunday outrage has sold out for a place in the ineffectual local administration of continued British rule – which still leaves Derry, where the Troubles began, a depressed border town.
It was also often said that in Derry the IRA had ceased fire years before downing arms elsewhere. It completes the irony that the most famous local IRA leader is now Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, in the running to be next first minister – but dissident republicans have his hometown on edge. McGuinness admitted his IRA status, at least up to a point, in Saville’s tribunal. He denounces the dissidents as throwbacks, as does much of the North. There is little sign of them developing wider support beyond the most depressed districts.
That still includes Derry, despite the efforts John Hume made over decades to draw in investment and whatever influence McGuinness can now exert in Stormont. It wasn’t enough to counter a decision by DUP Finance Minister Sammy Wilson that it would be uneconomic to relocate a government department to Derry. Almost half a century after Hume campaigned for the North’s second university to be sited in Derry, it must make do with an out-station from the University of Ulster.
An effort to boost civic cheer by competing to be a UK City of Culture has drawn fairly broad-based support – despite, to some, the irritant sense that it is also intended to counter Saville’s potential for underlining the local political divide.
The organisers have even found another way to bypass unionist insistence on “Londonderry” as formal title, with “Legenderry”. Winning would bring income from tourism, say supporters of the bid. But it cannot counter interest in Saville.
An SDLP councillor elected to head Derry council this year used his election on Monday to say he wanted to be a mayor for everyone, and then offered the Bloody Sunday families his support. DUP MP Gregory Campbell told him he could not “say what he chose on the Saville report and purport to represent the entirety of the city”.
Getting justice for the dead has preoccupied much of a generation in Derry, at its centre a place of inter-woven families. The inquiry heard from more than 900 witnesses, the city housing senior lawyers and judges including Lord Saville for so long that he became a familiar figure, who convinced many against their first instincts that he was fair. The families have different beliefs about what he should find.
Armouring themselves against disappointment, some want a decent minimum. But other expectations are higher, up to and including prosecution of politicians who defended the shootings and senior civil servants who were part of the original whitewash.
“Saville won’t work if he moves away from finding unlawful killing, and the families want him to say murder,” says an observer. He notes ruefully that he was 11 in 1972 and has watched surviving siblings and children grow to be adults, with children themselves. He feels for the families in this last anxious week, admires their dignity.
Like others, he reveres Liam Wray, a brother of one of those killed – 22-year-old Jim – who was shot a second time as he lay wounded. There was a big local reaction a few years ago when Liam Wray told a Radio Foyle programme that a year after Bloody Sunday he had gone with a wounded soldier in an ambulance to hospital, to hold the soldier’s hand – because he wished somebody had held his brother’s hand.
Wray would like the soldier responsible for killing his brother to admit his guilt in court, but no longer sees the point in having him jailed. It is a general belief that the soldiers did the shooting and blackened the names of the dead, but were only the sharp end of a machine.
Whatever British law delivers next week, Derry will go on struggling with its place in history. Dissidents will shoot and bomb in the name of an ideal republic, with occasional detours to kneecap or kill alleged drug-dealers.
The police they also target will respond to calls for help slowly, and with suspicion. Hence support for terrorising alleged drug-dealers. The record in Derry so far makes it hard to argue that peaceable protest can deliver fairness.