OPINION:Saville will bring healing to the divided peoples of Derry and perhaps to the North's wider community
ON THE Tuesday morning after Bloody Sunday three priests stood on a veranda overlooking the Bogside. Two days earlier 13 people had been killed and 14 seriously injured.
The priests were leaving a home where one of the dead was being waked. Fr Edward Daly was telling the other two he had been asked by the Irish government to do a media tour of America to counter the propaganda that the British government was already disseminating throughout the world. The image of him waving a blood-stained handkerchief as he tried to lead the dying body of young Jackie Duddy through a swathe of paratroopers would become an iconic image of that awful day.
For the next 38 years he would act as a champion for the innocence of those killed. He would become Bishop of Derry and would be a major actor in the events that would unfold during the interminable years of the “Troubles”. He would be the touchstone of what the Catholic community believed about what happened on that day.
Fr Tom O’Gara and myself were still too traumatised to understand fully the significance of such a public and political itinerary of America. We were young and innocent of the world of politics and the power of the media. We would scarcely have realised that the British information services were already pumping information to broadcasters and embassies throughout the world. It was their version and their propaganda of what had taken place.
That information was a far cry from what we had witnessed on those same streets just two days before.
As the dark descended on the city that awful Sunday, Fr O’Gara and myself had walked the streets still trying to understand what had happened. Both of us were only in ministry a short time and already we had experienced many incidences of violence and death.
But that Sunday was different. The IRA and the security services had already brought violence and death on to the streets. The Parachute Regiment had brought war.
We talked with groups of young men about the events of the day. The shock and the anger was already coming to the fore. We tried to talk about the ugliness and the futility of violence but it was already clear that their young minds were closed to such thoughts and that they intended to meet the violence of the state with their own violence.
Tom spent the next weeks and months visiting and befriending some of the families of the dead and the wounded. Tom died at a young age and some of the families will be saddened that he was not there to share the end of the long and tortuous journey that has lasted for 38 years.
I became part of a trio who liaised between the IRA and the British government, coaxing both sides to begin talking to each other and, on the far side of the talk, to negotiate a political settlement. In my heart I knew Bloody Sunday would make that dialogue difficult in the short term and inevitable in the long term. The international outrage that immediately followed Bloody Sunday forced the British government to establish an inquiry chaired by Lord Chief Justice Widgery. Weeks later, all the Catholic priests who had been present on the day came together to decide whether to attend or stay away from that inquiry. That same group had already held a press conference at which we accused the Parachute Regiment of murder and declared the innocence of all of those who had been killed.
Some argued in favour of attending, others argued against. We were conscious that the people of the city and the families of the dead and wounded would more than likely follow our lead. The decision was to attend. I was one of those who argued in favour. In hindsight it was the wrong decision because it gave some respectability and traction to the inquiry.
We should have realised that there was no likelihood of a British court finding frontline soldiers, who were facing increasing violence from a strengthening IRA, guilty of murder. Those who prepared David Cameron’s speech to the House of Commons had the same dilemma uppermost in their minds. As the deaths of British soldiers in Afghanistan stretches towards the two hundreds, how does a British prime minister acquiesce with a report that bluntly states that all the killings of that day were unjustified and in most cases cold-blooded?
The fact that he grasped the nettle and acquiesced with the findings so wholeheartedly has brought great relief and possibly some healing to the families and the community that has clung for so long to the truthfulness of their story.
On the night before the report was launched, I attended a prayer service in a Protestant church that stands within yards of where the killings happened. Prayers were said for the families and for a reception to the report that would bring healing rather that further division. They were ambitious prayers because the narrow and dividing positions were already being articulated on the airways.
The battle for the moral ground between those who see the Troubles as a political struggle and those who define it as a terrorist insurgence continues and the Saville report in itself will not bring an end to that struggle. But the prayer service and the significant words and gesture of the Protestant bishop Ken Good in meeting the families of the dead provide some grounds for hope.
The politicians have not matured enough yet to acknowledge and accept the differing moral positions that would free them to find a way through and out of the past. But many of the victims and some of the churches are moving towards a greater tolerance and openness to hearing and feeling not just their own stories and pain but also that of their former opponents.
The sun shone in Derry all day on Tuesday and with it a sense of justification. Widgery has been set aside, the dead have been declared innocent and truth has won out.
As I was leaving the Guildhall Square someone shouted at me: “a good day for Ireland.” It was, I wanted to shout back: “a good day for Ireland and a good day for England.”
Denis Bradley left the priesthood, married and had a family. He became a drug treatment counsellor and later served as vice-chairman of the police board for the PSNI. He lives in Derry.