Drama of history: final curtain set to fall on the Bloody Sunday saga
Many readers of a certain age will no doubt recall vividly where they were and what they were doing on that Sunday evening in 1972 when they first heard that British soldiers in Derry had shot at and killed marchers.
Those of us of the next generation are too young to have those specific memories. However, Bloody Sunday has been part of our modern history. Books, documentaries and, most recently, films have left an imprint of the basic facts and images of that day on our minds.
Over the course of 17 minutes at the end of an otherwise peaceful anti-internment march, 13 people were shot dead by the British army’s Parachute Regiment. Fourteen other marchers were injured by gunshots. One of those injured died five months later, bringing the Bloody Sunday death toll to 14.
We’ve all seen, somewhere or other over the years, that iconic picture of Fr Edward Daly (as he was then) waving a white handkerchief as he sought to carry a dying 17-year-old boy to safety. We know, too, that passions ran so high that 100,000 people marched in protest in Dublin the following weekend - some of whom later burnt the British embassy to the ground.
In more recent years we have a vague appreciation that Tony Blair established a new judicial inquiry which sat for a few years in Derry, then for a while in London and back again for a while in Derry. Here in the Republic (where we can be forgiven for suffering from tribunal fatigue), it is accurate to say that the evidence unfolding in the Bloody Sunday tribunal pricked our consciousness only sporadically.
I suspect I wasn’t alone in no more than occasionally dipping into the media coverage, usually through the distinctive voice and perspective of Eamon McCann on one or other of the drivetime radio programmes.
Of course the reality is that since March 2000 the inquiry, chaired by Lord Saville, has been beavering away on this massive fact-finding mission. It sat for 434 days, finishing last November, and is currently writing its report. In all, more that 16 million words were uttered at the inquiry and tens of thousands of documents and photographs were considered. More than 900 witnesses gave evidence in person, including 505 civilians, nine forensic scientists, 49 journalists or photojournalists and 245 military witnesses. All at an ultimate cost of £155 million.
While we await the report we have been given a useful insight into the impact of the inquiry from an unusual source, in the form of a play, Scenes from Saville, which did a short run in the Abbey Theatre last week as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival.
This play (if a play it can be called) is made up entirely of verbatim extracts from the transcript of the Saville inquiry. It opened to rave reviews in the Tricycle theatre in north London last April.
It has since had a short but successful run in Belfast and last month it also played two nights to packed and poignant audiences in Derry. Interestingly, some of the reviews in the Dublin media have been less glowing than those in London, with some seeing it as boring or too long in parts. I am not in a position to be objective as to whether re-creation of the cut-and-thrust of a courtroom-like setting works as theatre, but it certainly seemed to work as drama for the audience in the Abbey last week.
The strength of this play is that it is a representative sampling of some of the evidence of 12 of the witnesses - six civilians, including Bishop Daly and Bernadette McAliskey (the latter played by Sorcha Cusack), five soldiers (the three commanding officers and two of those who actually fired shots on the day), and a former paramilitary (who admitted to firing a shot on the day, but only after the soldiers opened fire).
It’s a compliment to the writers’ and directors’ skill that those who sat through all or most of the days of the evidence in the tribunal itself have described the play as balanced and objective.
This drama was all the more dramatic because it was fact, but of course the evidence given raises as many questions as it answers.
Saville’s inevitably long report is due early next year and will have to address answers to some of these questions. Among the issues is whether the soldiers were fired on first. The clear evidence from the extracts in this play is that they were not.
A related question is whether IRA members, or the IRA as an entity, were active on the day. Again the weight of evidence, at least in the accounts depicted in this play, is that if IRA guns were fired at all on that day it was only the haphazard reactions of one or two IRA men to the army’s gunfire.
SOME, mainly British, commentators have suggested that one of the questions the tribunal has to rule on is whether the victims were involved in any violence - the evidence against that suggestion is overwhelming and indeed the British government formally accepted long before this inquiry began that none of those killed was involved in any shooting or violence.
The main issue which Saville and his colleagues will address is the big ‘why?’ - why did British soldiers open fire on the crowd? It’s a classic cock-up or conspiracy question. Was there, as Bernadette McAliskey suggested in her evidence, a deliberate government policy to bring the nationalist community into line or, as others have suggested, a policy to lure the IRA into a gun battle.
For what it’s worth I reckon it was military incompetence on a large, tragic and unacceptable scale. Saville’s most interesting conclusions will be on the extent to which this was compounded by the cover-up and what role political indifference, recklessness or even connivance played in the events of that and subsequent days.
The task for Saville, as for all tribunals of inquiry, is not made easier by the reality that there is never one truth. There are always numerous and various truths. All have different vantage points and perspectives about what happened that afternoon.
The most striking thing about the play, and presumably at the tribunal itself, was the extent of frailties in or deliberate distortions of memory.
In examining witnesses the tribunal put to them statements they made to inquiries or journalists shortly after the event. The memories of some key witnesses on both sides were false or out of focus within days of the event. Some have been distorted further over the passage of three decades. In the case of some (but not all) of the soldiers their accounts now, three decades later, are more honest than those they furnished to the original Widgery inquiry in 1972.
One soldier, who was 18 years old at the time, admitted he had doctored his evidence at the insistence of the military police in order to be consistent with the army line that they had come under attack. In contrast, many of the senior army officers, in short, clipped answers, still maintained they had done no wrong.
What the play Scences from Saville does above all else is bring home to those of us of a later generation the enormity of what happened in Derry that day and indeed the enormity of some of its consequences.
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