Saville defends cost of Bloody Sunday Inquiry

The Bloody Sunday inquiry which cost nearly £200m (€227.7m) could not have been done "on the cheap", its author, Mark Saville, said today.

The Law Lord gave evidence to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee at Westminster, where he also said it was inevitable it took 12 years to piece together the events in Londonderry in 1972.

His historic inquiry was born out of the North's peace process and prompted an apology from British Prime Minister David Cameron when he said the killings of 14 civil rights marchers by members of the Parachute Regiment were "unjustified and unjustifiable".

Saville said it had been an honour to conduct the probe and that he was duty-bound to ensure the relatives of the dead and the accused soldiers got legal representation given the seriousness of the allegations at the heart of the controversy.

"If you're going to have a thorough, proper, fair inquiry... it is going to cost, necessarily, a large sum of money and take a very long time," he said.

"Simply, because, if you're going to do it properly and fairly, you've got to look in the greatest possible detail at the evidence and other materials that are available, on which you are going to form a view. That is the starting point.

"If you try and do an inquiry on the cheap, or you try and do it quickly, you come seriously unstuck."

In a reference to the previous investigation into the events of Bloody Sunday which infamously cleared the soldiers of blame, he added: "Lord Widgery was asked to do an inquiry very quickly. And, if I may say so, boy, did he come unstuck."

The Saville Inquiry began in 1998 after it was ordered by the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

It was the same year that politicians in the North negotiated the Good Friday peace agreement and the then Labour Prime Minister agreed to call the inquiry in a bid to heal one of the running sores of the Troubles.

Nationalists had long branded the Widgery Inquiry a whitewash. The shootings in Derry had also fuelled republican anger against the forces of the state and swelled the ranks of the Provisional IRA, which had only emerged as an organisation in 1969.

The Saville Inquiry delivered its damning findings earlier this year, establishing its position as the most costly and longest running inquiry in British legal history.

But Saville said it was vital he and his inquiry colleagues examined events in the "greatest possible particularity", if they were to be fair to all those involved, including the British government and the soldiers who he said faced the most serious charges possible.

"I know I have been criticised with people saying that the inquiry was a disaster in terms of time and cost," he said.

"But the difficulty with those criticisms is, what's the benchmark?"

He said critics had failed to show where money or time could have been saved without compromising the inquiry's work.

Saville said his team were conscious of the need to respect public money, but he defended the large legal fees involved in the exercise.

"If you're a mother of one of those lads that was shot, and there's going to be a big public inquiry, don't you think you should have a lawyer to protect your family's interest," he said.

"If you're a soldier accused of callously murdering people on the streets - British streets of a British city - should you have a lawyer to protect your interests?

"And in a case where people have died as a result of state agencies, such as soldiers, it is now our law under article 2 of the human rights convention in effect that you should have legal representation."

He said it was an unfortunate reality that "lawyers are expensive", and while nearly £100m (€113.85m) of the inquiry costs went on legal fees, this was not the fault of the inquiry.

Pressed on whether he could, with hindsight, have saved money, he said that perhaps the inquiry should have bought a house near its base in Derry to save on accommodation costs, but he then noted that the inquiry later moved to London for two years.

He said he accepted that the inquiry cost a lot of money and took a long time, but said it was wrong to conclude it therefore cost too much and took too long.

Saville said thousands of pages of documentation had to be gathered and read, while huge efforts had to be undertaken to trace evidence from the early 1970s.

He said it was also necessary to investigate the particular circumstances of all the shootings so as to avoid painting each soldier with the same brush.

"I'd like to say we could have done it quicker, I was very keen to finish it," he said.

"It's taken a decade of my life, but we worked as hard as we could."

He said he and his colleagues had been committed to producing a fair and accurate report and believed they had achieved that.

"Whether people agreed with our conclusions or not was really a matter for them," he said.

"The one thing we didn't want was people to say was 'They didn't look at it in enough detail'.

"And so we looked at it in the greatest possible detail.

"And if people accept our conclusions, I'm very happy, but I repeat, my ambition was to do a thorough, fair inquiry.

"What people make of it, and I've done that, is a matter for them."