BLOODY SUNDAY

On 30 January 1972 an illegal march took place in the Bogside area of Londonderry, one of the heartlands of Catholic nationalism in the then bitterly divided Northern Ireland. The march was met by the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, drafted in from duty in Belfast and one of the hard men units of the British Army. What followed, on what later became known as Bloody Sunday, was "a tragedy for the bereaved and wounded, and a catastrophe for the people of Northern Ireland".

13 people were shot dead by the paras, and a similar number wounded. Although by no means the only case in which the army shot and killed unarmed civilians during the Troubles, it quickly became a cause celebre amongst both nationalists and human rights activists. An inquiry set up in 1972 by the then Lord Chief Justice (the head of the criminal division of the Court of Appeal) Lord Widgery held that some of the dead were gunmen and bombers, and restricted criticism of the soldiers to saying that some of their behaviour "bordered on the reckless". In 1998, Tony Blair was persuaded, not least by additional witness material presented by the Irish Government, to establish a new inquiry under a High Court Judge, now Lord Saville. The quote in the first paragraph comes from his report into the events of that day, which has just been published, 12 years and £195m later.

To cut a very, very long report short, Saville essentially says that the Widgery inquiry, widely believed at the time to be a whitewash, was indeed just that. All of the people killed and injured were innocent, and none of the shootings was justified or justifiable. The commanding officer of 1 Para disobeyed the operational orders of his direct superior. A number of the soldiers involved lied to both inquiries in order to try to cover up what had happened. David Cameron, announcing the report's findings in the House of Commons, was quick to endorse its findings and to offer an unequivocal apology.

Judging from the enthusiastic reception which the report's conclusions and Mr. Cameron's apology were given in Northern Ireland, one might think that this a milestone in the troubled history of the province. In one sense it is; in another it is not. It is easy for Mr. Cameron to dissociate himself from events that took place when he was still a small child; for others it is more difficult. The statement given by the former head of the British Army, General Mike Jackson, who was a Captain in 1 Para on the day itself, although formally endorsing his Prime Minister, was much more nuanced; the IRA killed a lot of soldiers, he reminded us. More generally, Bloody Sunday was only one of many controversial incidents that took place in and around that time. Yet Saville-style inquiries into all of them would be impossible, not least because of their ruinous cost. Indeed, Saville himself felt bound to set aside any discussion of one particular theme - namely whether the army's actions on the day were part of a wider policy of shoot-to-kill - on the grounds that in order to come to a view on that question, he would have to investigate all possible incidents in similar depth.

The Saville Report has widely - and rightly, in my view - been portrayed as a stain on the British Army. In the long run, this must be to the country's good. The U.K. is involved in war, on average, more often than other countries; and the knowledge that shit happens in war - as Northern Ireland was at the time - should make politicians that little bit more wary of gung-ho intervention. It is all very well to have a foreign policy of "punching above our weight", but not if that punching is outside the law. It will be interesting to see if the Director of Pulic Prosecutions feels that there is evidence for charging some of the soldiers with perjury, manslaughter or murder sufficient to meet the criminal test of beyond reasonable doubt.

There has been less comment about the development of the judiciary since that time. I can still remember as a teenager the sense of fear that the IRA and its bombing campaigns on the U.K. mainland provoked in the ordinary citizen. And I can still remember the collective sigh of relief when the police surely and swiftly got the perpitrators; the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven. Despite howls from Irish nationalists and others that the police had framed them, they languished in British prisons. Yet when the Birmingham Six applied to Lord Denning, perhaps the finest, and certainly the most influential, common-law judge of the twentieth century, for legal aid in an action against the police for injuries received in custody, he dismissed them out of hand. He exonerated the police in the same way that Widgery had exonerated the army. We now know that he was wrong.

I like to believe that such whitewashes couldn't happen again. A new generation of senior judges, brought up to apply the Human Rights Act, obliged to defer to the judgments of the European Court of Justice, and subject to the informational power of the Internet, would find it extremely difficult to come up with the sort of 1-man "kick the ball into touch" report produced by Widgery and Denning. Lord Hutton's inquiry into the death of weapons expert David Kelly looks as if it might have fallen into that category, but pressure is building to reopen that. If the Saville Report has spurred the development of a more critical appraisal of such matters, then it will have achieved much. Members of the Iraq War Inquiry, please take note.

Walter Blotscher