Bloody Sunday families: ‘The memory of that day will never leave me’

Tomorrow morning John Kelly will retrace the steps he and his brother Michael took as they marched from Creggan to the Bogside on what became known as Bloody Sunday.

“It is important for me to do that for all those who died, and for the many thousands of people who aren’t here anymore, and I do think it will help me get through the day.”

Sunday is the 50th anniversary of the atrocity. On January 30th, 1972, elite British Army Parachute Regiment soldiers opened fire on an anti-internment protest march in Derry's Bogside, killing 13 and mortally wounding another, and injuring 18.

The consequences – for their families, for the city of Derry, for the North and its Troubles and for relationships on and between these islands – are still being felt.

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Today, the Museum of Free Derry stands at the heart of where Bloody Sunday happened; two of the victims were killed and four injured just outside in Glenfada Park, and bullet holes can still be seen in the wall.

As the anniversary approaches, the museum has become a gathering place for the families and their supporters; among those who are here when The Irish Times calls are Gerry Duddy and Leo Young, brothers of two of the victims, Jackie Duddy and John Young, and Kelly, who works in the museum.

All three were on the march: Kelly remembers "footage of Michael at the very front of the march standing beside Ivan Cooper and he has a big smile on his face, and I think he was really excited that he was going on his first march".

He warned his younger brother to be careful. “The next time I saw him he was being carried out of the house in Abbey Park where he was taken after being shot.

“I helped carry him and put him in the ambulance and I can still see him lying there, there were three in the ambulance and I can still see his face, it was a sort of a grey colour.

“I didn’t know if he was alive or not, if he was still part of this world or not.”

At the hospital he found out Michael was dead; he had to tell his father, and then go home and tell his mother. “It was a terrible day. Even though it’s 50 years ago, it’s still there. The memory of that day will never leave me.”

Michael Kelly was only 17 years old; so too were Jackie Duddy and John Young. "They were only finding their way in life," says Duddy.

“People ask me to tell them about John, I say, ‘what can I tell you?’ Schoolboy antics, boxing club, John was into clothes. He was only putting his life together at that point, getting a wee job working in the tailors, and all of a sudden, blank,” says Young.

Kelly explains how Michael had a job in a local factory as a sewing machine mechanic, reared pigeons and was “going steady” with a girl. “He was happy, he was really, really happy.”

He became involved in the families’ campaign after his father died in 1991. “Me being the eldest son, I felt I had to do something and help my mother. It changed my life, because I became the figure within the family to represent us and represent Michael during the campaign.”

The culmination was the 2010 Saville report, which declared the victims innocent and resulted in an official apology from the British prime minister.

“It was massive,” says Kelly. “We proved the innocence of our people. I still maintain it was one of the best days of my life, apart from marrying my wife, because it was the result of a lot of years of hard, hard work carried out by ordinary people and we took on the British establishment and we beat them.”

The Bloody Sunday campaigners had achieved two of their three aims: the declaration of innocence and the repudiation of the initial, Widgery report into Bloody Sunday. The third was prosecutions.

Following a police investigation, in 2019 it was announced that one soldier, Soldier F, would face prosecution for two murders and a number of attempted murders on Bloody Sunday.

Last year, this was halted when the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) said it intended to discontinue the prosecutions – a result of the collapse of another trial of two former soldiers. The decision is the subject of ongoing legal challenges by the families.

“We still hope to see the prosecution of everyone involved,” says Kelly, but acknowledges the UK government’s proposals to ban Troubles-era prosecutions, civil cases and inquests make “the future unsure at the moment”.

“Even after all this hard work there is a possibility they will bring in this statute of limitations and we will not see justice for our people.”

“It’s not just us that are affected, it’s thousands of families in the North,” says Duddy. “Everybody deserves truth and justice.”

"The Bloody Sunday campaign is not just about us," adds Young. "It's about Ballymurphy, it's about Hillsborough, it's about all those other families who supported us through thick and thin."

"Weighing heavily on me," says Young, is another of the victims, Gerald Donaghey. Young saw him being shot and tried to save his life. "I take it to heart very much that this young fella that I never knew, I can't forget."

Lord Saville found that none of the casualties had posed a threat when they were shot, and none had been armed; the exception, he concluded, was Donaghey, who had "probably" been carrying nail bombs.

“He disbelieved me, disbelieved 11, maybe 12 witnesses. Those words, he ‘probably’ had,” says Young. “He had not.

“You try and take a step forward, but you start to think about it and it drags you back. How are we ever going to find peace in this? Rest?”

“We spoke about this as a family recently,” says Duddy. “Are we ever going to be able to lay Jackie to rest? No.

“Is there ever going to be a time when we can close the chapter on Bloody Sunday and Jackie and everybody else? People say the 50th anniversary would be a good point for that, not to forget – never to forget – but to actually have closure on it.

“But it just doesn’t seem to be happening . . . [I] don’t want the next generation of my family to have to go through all that we went through.”

Listening to their conversation is 25-year-old Ciara O’Connor-Pozo, who also works at the museum.

The UK government’s legacy proposals, she says, are “a kind of forced amnesia” and “really undemocratic. All it’s going to do is pass things on to my generation.

“It is frightening to think about because I think it says a lot about how even though so much has changed in 50 years it’s very clear the British government still has so much contempt for this part of the world.

“It’s an insult, and even if you’re not a relative or weren’t born at the time everyone should care about it, because it’s going to define our futures.”

“Fifty years,” says Duddy, shaking his head in disbelief. “I was 14 years old at the time, and suddenly there’s a figure on it like 50 years.

“But it’s important it’s being commemorated. For us, it’s to let them know we stood by them and we’re still fighting for them and they’ll not be forgotten.”