Relatives of the 14 dead want the Saville report finally to set the record straight
FAMILIES OF those killed and injured on Bloody Sunday 1972 are behind a campaign to “Set The Truth Free”.
They are calling for Lord Saville’s 12-year inquiry to be made public quickly and without any unnecessary redactions. They are anxious to have the state designate the killings as murder and to have the findings of the original investigation by Lord Widgery formally set aside.
Gathering in Derry last month, the last living parent of a victim of the shootings began the campaign. Only four widows of the 14 men who died are still living, pointing to the march of time and the persistence of the families’ call for justice.
Regina McLaughlin was just eight when her father, Gerry McKinney, was shot dead by British paratroopers. Thirty-eight years later she wants nothing more than for the state to admit what it did that day.
“We want the truth, not prosecutions, not compensation, not an apology. I want to say put your hands up like men instead of children in a playground and say what you did. Admit to your wrong.”
She speaks with neither anger nor bitterness and displays only the quiet and dogged persistence of those afflicted by this atrocity and others throughout the Troubles.
“People were saying at the time that these men were either hooligans, they were terrorists they were involved in something. I would like people to sit down and to imagine a 17-year-old boy lying in the street and my father behind a wall, protected, he had seven children and another on the way and he risked his life to go to a 17-year-old child.
“My father went out with his hands in the air shouting ‘Don’t shoot’, to help this wee boy. Now that was somebody’s son. Would you still call my father a hooligan? Because to me he was a hero.
“That’s when he was shot, with his hands up, shot in the chest and out the other side. It’s disturbing that the world thought that these men were involved in something. If my father had his hands in the air what was he holding? Why say ‘don’t shoot’? There was a young fellow, innocent, lying dying. I’m proud of my daddy for going out.”
Gerry McKinney had headed out of the family home to “take a few photographs” of the march, but Regina reckons he went to join the protest and didn’t want his wife to worry. The subsequent report on the killings carried out within months by Lord Widgery added outrage to the McKinneys’ hurt and sense of loss.
“That was the worst part,” Regina recalls. “My entire family are not looking for any retaliation of any kind. We’re not really looking for people to go to jail or anything. That’s all gone as far as we’re concerned and it’s not going to bring daddy back. But you have defamation of character and the world sees a stain on this man’s character. We grew up with a stigma that because my daddy was killed on Bloody Sunday then we must be into the IRA, Provo Sinn Féin and all of this. We are so, so not.
“We are against any form of murder. I don’t care what you are, all murder is murder regardless of who does it and everyone no matter when you come from is entitled to an inquiry.”
Like the other families of the dead and the wounded, she trusts Lord Saville to put right the perceived wrongs of Widgery. But she is sensitive to criticisms of the inquiry which has taken 12 years and some £200 million to complete its work, provoking much public anger.
Mickey McKinney, no relation to Gerry, was on the march on Bloody Sunday. He was a teenager then and his older brother Willie was recording the events of the day on film.
“He was on the march and he was filming the march – it was a bit of both. I didn’t know [he was dead] until I went home after evening Mass that night. I met my girlfriend and went up to her house, we went to Mass and I made my way home. Going into the house my father met me and he said, ‘Willie’s dead’. . .”
He knows families such as Regina McLaughlin’s simply want the British state to acknowledge the truth, but he takes another stance. “Generally the families are after truth and justice. Some might not be as hardball as I am. The families are very focused on the truth. I want to prosecute . . .”
He is angry at the time and cost of the inquiry, at the series of judicial reviews and at what he sees as the special concessions offered to soldier witnesses.