Six men injured on Bloody Sunday carry the memory of a friend who died before any justice was achieved, writes DICK GROGANin Derry
NOT JUST bullet scars bind a group of six Derrymen who await with very personal interest the unfolding tomorrow of the Saville Inquiry report into the Bloody Sunday shootings of 1972.
They are now more close-knit as friends and mutual intimates than any outsider can grasp, as they have shared for 38 years the multiple problems that beset disaster survivors: chronic pain, physical disability, psychological trauma and – not least – survivor guilt. Each member of this little group was struck by a high-velocity bullet fired by a British paratrooper, and each is acutely aware that only a fraction of an inch or a micro-second saved them from being listed among the fatalities.
The dead from that day lie at peace in family graves high above the city in Creggan cemetery, to which they were carried amidst thousands of mourners. A poet’s eye noted that coffin after coffin seemed to float from the church door “like blossoms on slow water”.
Thus Seamus Heaney immortalised the funerals which brought home to a still-stunned community the reality and extent of their loss. It was a day of which this writer remembers chiefly the relentless, slanting sleet and rain that hopelessly smeared my attempts at taking notes with a ballpoint pen.
The six surviving wounded of Bloody Sunday are, unsurprisingly, weary of the long drawn-out and much-delayed inquiry process and the endless debate about details of the day.
“Everybody wants it finished. Everybody wants it over and done with,” said Michael (Mickey) Bridge.
Bridge was 25 years old when he went on the huge Civil Rights march through the Bogside to protest against internment without trial, which had outraged nationalist opinion in the North – particularly as word spread about the ill-treatment of detainees.
He was fleeing from Rossville Street with hundreds of others when the paratroopers, in armoured vehicles and on foot, began their race into the Bogside on a supposed “arrest operation”.
Although Bridge early on saw a soldier fire at him and narrowly miss him, he admits that he had no real concept of what was happening. At that stage, it is clear, nobody in those crowded streets could credit that the troops were actually shooting to kill civilians.
Coming around a corner, Bridge saw Fr Edward Daly tending to the bleeding and dying youth, Jackie Duddy, in the middle of the Rossville Flats car park. All around, people fled in terror as the paratroopers advanced with rifles at the ready. But Bridge, as the realisation dawned that the soldiers were firing live rounds at people, was overcome by an impulse of combined rage and despair.
He ran out towards the soldiers with his hands spread wide at shoulder level, shouting (according to various inquiry witnesses): “What do you b*****ds think youre doing” and “Shoot me . . . don’t shoot the priest.”
A soldier no more than 20 yards away casually shot him through the thigh.
At almost the same time and in the same vicinity, 22-year-old Michael (Mickey) Bradley also confronted the soldiers when someone shouted that they were firing live rounds.
Incredulous, he stood up from cover behind a low wall and shouted abuse at them. A bullet passed through both arms and the front part of his chest.
Bradley was later to describe himself as “a living victim” of Bloody Sunday, for he became obsessed with it through the years. “I live, eat and sleep Bloody Sunday. It never goes away,” he admitted some years ago. Bridge, who became his close friend, said: “Mickey (Bradley) had a room at home in which he kept every transcript of every inquiry hearing, every CD and every book that was written about Bloody Sunday. He was addicted to it.”
Bradley said during his evidence to the Saville Inquiry that he wanted to meet the paratrooper who had shot him, in order to ask him why he had gunned down an unarmed man.
However, he is among the many Bloody Sunday casualties who did not live to see justice or truth (if the inquiry report delivers these), for he died last year. Among those who carried his coffin were his friends and fellow Bloody Sunday survivors, Michael Bridge, Joe Friel and Damien Donaghy.
Joe Friel was shot through the chest from behind as he ran with dozens of others to escape from the enclosed courtyard of Glenfada Park as a squad of paratroopers entered from an alleyway opposite. Friel managed to keep running, but two others, Jim Wray and Joe Mahon, fell wounded to the ground.
Mahon, playing dead, lay motionless and silent. He heard a soldier approach and he said, from the corner of his eye, he saw him fire two more shots into Jim Wray who was calling out and trying to rise.
Joe Friel spoke later of the enduring guilt he suffered from as a survivor.
“Jim Wray was my friend – I was shot where he fell. If I had fallen the soldier who shot him would have finished me off too.”
As it was, Friel’s surgeon said he was extremely lucky, as the bullet that passed through him missed vital organs. Nonetheless, he had to retire from his job in Inland Revenue because of ill-health.
Mahon’s survival from this incident is the stuff of legend. When he finally dared to raise his head from the ground, he saw the soldiers were still in the vicinity and one of them was looking at him and raising his rifle again.
At this precise moment, a young Knights of Malta volunteer, Eibhlin Lafferty, aged only 18, ran into the courtyard to assist the wounded, and when she saw the soldiers she shouted; “Don’t shoot – first aid”.
Giving evidence to the inquiry, she said one soldier shouted back: “ Your white coat is a good target, but your red heart is an even better one” (referring to the Order of Malta emblem on her coat).
She said she threw her medicine bag to the ground in anger when she heard this – “that he would say this to a first aider”.
However, she managed to treat 16-year-old Mahon. Months later they met again, and in March 1974 they were married.
Both, however, have suffered ongoing consequences of post-traumatic stress which has deeply affected their lives, and they no longer give media interviews.
Damien “Bubbles” Donaghy is now aged 54 and is as ebullient as his nickname suggests. As a 15-year-old, he was shot in the leg by an army sniper shortly before the paratroopers rushed into the Bogside.
The soldier alleged he had fired at a youth lighting the fuse of a nail bomb, though no witnesses heard an explosion.
Donaghy admitted in evidence to the Saville inquiry that he had, with others, thrown stones at the British soldiers. At the same hearing of the inquiry, counsel representing the soldiers accepted that Donaghy had not, in fact, thrown a nail bomb at them.
Donaghy spent eight months in hospital, and even now is awaiting a knee replacement operation. He and Bridge both describe suffering regular harassment from police and army in the years after Bloody Sunday – “You were effectively tagged”.
As survivors, they were assumed to have been active militants.
Bridge says that in one period he was arrested seven times in one week. Police raided his home and were cock-a-hoop when they discovered a military dress uniform and a combat uniform in his wardrobe – until he explained that he had been serving in the Territorial Army and that, moreover, his grandfather’s name is inscribed on the War Memorial in Derry’s Diamond for service with gallantry in the first World War. They took the uniforms anyway, he says.
From encounters over the years at Saville inquiry hearings, Bridge came across as a taciturn man, full of character but somewhat tense and giving an impression that one should be circumspect in dealing with him.
Now, however, he has mellowed and relaxed. Unlike Michael Bradley, he deliberately freed himself from the mountain of inquiry documentation – “I built a fire and burned mine”.
He can even joke about the perennial jibe he has had to endure on entering pubs – “Here comes the only man in Derry that ever asked to be shot!” Asked does he always manage to keep his cool, he replies: “It depended on who said it.”
Both Bridge and Donaghy say that, as they raised their families, they never talked about their experiences on Bloody Sunday.
“We just refused to address it,” says Bridge, whose daughter only found out about the incident when somebody at school produced a newspaper clipping with his photo.
Both men feel that, even in the exhaustive Saville inquiry, they did not enjoy an equal footing with the soldiers who shot them – and they are plainly angry that all but one or two of the “shooters” failed to show any signs of remorse or regret when giving evidence.
The survivors ask why it has taken five years to assess the Saville findings, and they question how it can be called an independent inquiry when the report has been sent in advance to MI5 “for vetting”.
They will scrutinise carefully the wording used by Lord Saville, as they are well aware how phraseology can be subtly twisted and toned down – witness the dubious phrase invented by the previous inquiry head, Lord Widgery, when he dubbed the soldiers’ firing in Glenfada Park as “bordering on the reckless”.
The survivors are pragmatic. “You can turn a word one way or another,” one of them says. “Ultimately, it doesn’t matter one monkey’s f**k. The soldiers shot us – anybody knows that.”
Asked what he will do when the inquiry report is finally published and the hubbub dies down, “Bubbles” Donaghy frowns and ponders for a moment, then brightens. “I’m going to get a life,” he says.