AN UNCENSORED version of Lord Saville’s report into the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings was yesterday presented to the Northern Secretary Owen Paterson and then on to the British prime minister David Cameron.
Earlier this year a group of lawyers were granted confidential access to the document to test whether it contained any matters that constituted a threat to the right to life of any individual or threatened British national security.
The lawyers found that there was nothing in the document of over 5,000 pages that needed to be cut, with the result that the report that is being formally released this afternoon is full and unabridged.
The report will be formally released when Mr Cameron makes a statement on Lord Saville’s findings in the House of Commons at 3.30pm today.
Even on the eve of publication there was no moratorium in terms of criticism. Local city councillor and DUP MP for East Derry Gregory Campbell last night complained about the “exorbitant” cost of the inquiry, currently at over £190 million.
“This massive expenditure on politically motivated inquiries whilst thousands of other victims see nothing spent on obtaining any degree of truth or justice surrounding the deaths of their loved ones is not acceptable, nor is it sympathetic to the loved ones who still seek justice,” he said.
However, John Kelly, whose 17-year-old brother Michael was killed on Bloody Sunday, said he did not want to react to such comments. But he added: “We see it as anyone attacking the inquiry as attacking the families. This is a human rights issue. It is not about the republican or political aspect, it’s about what happened on the day. My young brother died on a civil rights march that day. He did not die fighting for a united Ireland. He was walking on a peaceful civil rights march when his life was taken from him by a paratrooper. This is a non-political, purely civil rights issue,” added Mr Kelly.
When Christopher Clark QC, counsel to the Bloody Sunday inquiry, first addressed the tribunal in Derry’s Guildhall in 2000, he said that every continent, save Antarctica, had been visited as part of the process to find witnesses who would give evidence over the next five years.
The same could be said in terms of international media interest in the publication of the Saville report into the killings.
A media centre set up in the Derry City Council-owned Tower Museum, staffed by officials from the Northern Ireland Office, has so far granted accreditation for today’s events to print, radio, television and online journalists from news organisations in the US, Italy, France, Russia, Nigeria, Australia and from the Middle East, as well as journalists from throughout Ireland and Britain, together with local journalists.
Almost 500 media representatives have been granted accreditation for today’s events which have been described by one local historian as “probably the most historic day in the history of Derry since the siege of 1688”.
The centre of activity will be the Guildhall, where most of the evidence was given by almost 1,000 witnesses to the tribunal of inquiry over a five-year period. Evidence was also taken in London. The Guildhall is located close to the west bank of the river Foyle.
Directly opposite the Guildhall on the east bank of the river is the former Ebrington Barracks, from where the British army’s operations on Bloody Sunday were controlled. Today work is continuing on a peace bridge that will join the two river banks, symbolically linking the Guildhall to the former barracks.
Among the thousands of people who await the report is Leo Young, whose brother John was one of the 13 unarmed civilians shot dead on January 30th, 1972. A 14th, John Johnston, died from wounds in June that year.
“I didn’t know my brother had been shot until the next day,” he recalled. “I was arrested trying to take another of the victims, Gerald Donaghey, to hospital. I was detained in a British army camp beside the Craigavon Bridge and was then taken to Strand Road police barracks and then on to Ballykelly army camp where I was kept incommunicado for 24 hours.
“I was then brought back to Strand Road barracks in Derry where a detective asked me how many brothers I had. I replied two but he said ‘you’ve only got one now’. That was the first I knew that my brother had been killed. I’ve never forgotten that detective’s words. Now I want to hear and read the words that my brother John was innocent. Then hopefully that will help me to forget that detective’s words,” he said.