Sir, - Even with all the horrors now emerging from the Bloody Sunday inquiry in Derry's Guild Hall, I have yet to hear anything resembling a forthright condemnation of this brutal crime from any Unionist political, communal or religious leader. The furthest any of them will go is to refer to it as "a tragedy" - an ambiguous term if ever there was one, apportioning neither guilt nor innocence to anyone involved.
The standard unionist response to Bloody Sunday has been to mumble platitudes through the tightest of tight lips before rushing headlong into "whataboutery": OK, Bloody Sunday was a tragedy, but what about Bloody Friday, or Enniskillen or La Mon? In a further development, we now have the successor to whataboutery, the counter-inquiry. Demands for inquiries to match earlier inquiries are now made in a tit-for-tat fashion, as if a contest of grotesque one-upmanship were being played out.
This is the context in which Dennis Kennedy makes his constant appeals for an inquiry into the events of 1970, or at least those partial, pre-selected bits of the whole - the Arms Crisis, the South and the Provos - designed to fit unionist preconceptions. He ignores the other factors - intensifying state violence, including murder, the inappropriateness and indeed insincerity of unionist "reform", etc. By all means let us have a major, wide-ranging investigation into the escalation of violence in Northern Ireland between the years 1969 and 1972 - one that includes Bloody Sunday within its remit. - Yours, etc.,
Michael Morgan, Glen Road, Belfast 11.