SHEILA SAID SHE was going to Lourdes. She wanted to know had I ever been. I met her while weaving around the crowd at the Guildhall Square in Derry last week, her pale skin rosy with sunburn like mine. Both of us had been out around the town all the day as the city waited, teetering between expectation and anxiety, for news.
Three women clutching pictures of their relatives were standing at the front of the crowd singing We Shall Overcome. Deep in their hearts, they still believed that they would overcome some day.
Their voices held the soulful promise that today might be that day. One of them had a gorgeous soprano voice and the words sailed strong and true through the summer air. I was moved, enough to sing along with them, even though strictly speaking I was only there to observe. Sheila, a small woman with blond hair, asked me if I liked singing. I said I did. And we got chatting.
She was there that day, 30 years ago. She went on the march with two friends but she didn’t tell her parents because “they would have murdered me”. Her family were not the kind of people who went on marches. So afterwards Sheila didn’t tell anybody, especially not Lord Saville even though he came here 12 years ago to find out the truth from ordinary people like her who had seen things and knew things about that day.
She never gave a statement and over the years, watching the families in their pain and their struggle for justice for their dead loved ones, Sheila felt bad about that. She came today to see justice done. “It wasn’t right what happened,” she said.
Her parents are dead now. No more reasons to stay silent. And maybe it is too late, and maybe it won’t make a difference to anybody anymore, but the other night she sat and wrote it all down for the first time. It wasn’t a chore, the remembering, because the details had never left her mind in all that time. They never would.
“Go on, you have it,” she said, thrusting a battered brown envelope in my hand. “You have it, you might do something with it, or och, just maybe read it, I needed to write it down.”
I asked her did she have a copy because I didn’t want to take the original and she told me not to worry about that, just to take the document she had. So I stuffed the envelope into my bag, and carried on taking notes as Cameron apologised and relatives in the crowd gasped with joy and the families came out of the Guildhall thumping the air in victory. Saville had cleared the names of their 14 dead family members and the others who were shot that day. Innocent, all innocent.
It wasn’t until early next morning, flying home from Derry, that I took the envelope out of my bag. “For the Attention of Lord Saville Inquire” Sheila had written on the front. A small sticker of Jesus was placed where a stamp might have been.
She was 15. She’d been reading newspapers and listening to the radio and she felt that Catholics were denied a say in their own town. “I went to the civil rights march unknown to my parents as they did not have a republican background and would not have wanted their third child to be put in any danger that can come from marches.”
She went on the march in secret with two friends. They got as far as William Street, close to the Guildhall, when the British army unleashed the water cannons and they ran, ending up in the car park of the Rossville Flats. One of her friends got hit on the hip with a rubber bullet. She fainted. “I am ashamed to say we ran on,” wrote Sheila. “And the next thing I remember, and will do till the day God calls me home, was the sound of bullets being fired into the crowd.”
She fell and ripped her left leg on barbed wire. A man helped her up. Then all she remembers is young men dropping like flies around her. One man, she knows now it was Barney McGuigan, fell beside her. She wrote that people tried to give him the kiss of life but it was too late. Sheila watched as “every drop of blood drained from his face to his toes”.
At the end of her handwritten statement she appealed directly to Lord Saville, who of course had already made up his mind, but now all these years later she needed to ask him anyway. The word closure has been bandied around in Derry a lot lately, and this was Sheila’s attempt to close the chapter for herself. To do the right thing. Even if it made no difference to the outcome, 38 years later.
“I will be on my way to Lourdes in France tonight and I hope after all these years that justice will be served . . . and that you will find it in your heart to make the right decision in finding their loved ones innocent victims of a terrible Sunday afternoon.” roisin@irishtimes.com
THIS WEEKEND
Róisín will be attending a “Big White-Trash Gay-Pride Barbie-Q”. Dress code: “Desperate Housewife Sue-Ellen Ewing Southfork Ho-Down”, and has an appointment with Jedward in Smyth’s toystore. Could this weekend get any more camp?