Britain has cleared the Derry air. Now it’s someone else’s turn to sing

SO has justice finally been delivered? Years late and at great financial cost, the Bloody Sunday inquiry has finally reported.

In one sense, even 5,000 pages couldn’t tell us very much we haven’t known for a very long time. The British state, after all, has long since accepted those who died that day should be regarded as innocent.

So what was the inquiry’s true purpose? Officially, it was to get at the truth, but whose? Could any inquiry focused on one event ever really capture the surrounding mayhem and the mounting number of dead soldiers? For many in Derry, though, of course, Saville was about righting the wrong done by Lord Widgery. Cynics suggest it was a form of communal therapy.

Those who can recall 1998 might suggest it was the product of sofa government: a slightly cynical attempt to shore up Gerry Adams’s position within the republican movement. Just weeks later a settlement was arrived at which stuck closely to the formula in the British government’s discussion paper of October 1972 and which the then IRA leadership regarded as anathema. Adams needed a prop.

Perhaps the most interesting interpretation, however, is that Saville’s purpose was to turn Bloody Sunday into history. For the families of those who died as a result of what happened on January 30, 1972, that’s understandably a difficult concept to handle. How can loved ones ever be history? Thirty-eight years later, we’re still talking about sons and brothers and husbands, after all. But now the IRA, the INLA and their loyalist brothers in arms have finally put away and destroyed at least some of their weapons, can Bloody Sunday be decommissioned as well?

That will be difficult and the omens are not good. The modern media demand instant verdicts. They don’t allow for periods of reflection. For the families themselves, it will be hard to accept that yesterday was the end of the journey, not just another staging post.

But will they now be allowed the time and space they need? They need to ask themselves whether their own agony would be assuaged by further investigations.

And then there is the cost of civil cases against individual Paras and the Ministry of Defence to consider.

Demands for prosecutions there will be aplenty. Some of these will be well-intentioned; others will be motivated by vengeance.

Republicans, in particular, won’t want to let go of Ireland’s Amritsar, the 1919 massacre of hundreds of peacefully demonstrating Indians by British troops at the behest of one Michael O’Dwyer from Tipperary, the then Lieutenant-General of Punjab.

Yes, the history of colonialism is a far more complex one than many would allow.

The officer commanding that day, Reginald Dyer – a student at Midleton College, Co Cork, 1875 to 1881 – insisted he had been met by “a revolutionary army”.

He later confessed he could have peacefully dispersed the crowd but did not want to be perceived as weak.

Amritsar became a torch lighting the way to Indian independence. Many hoped Derry would perform the same function. It didn’t.

Yes, Bloody Sunday has always had a hugely emotional power. Regardless of one’s views of the IRA, only the politically blind would fail to appreciate Bloody Sunday’s likely impact on the nationalist psyche. That terrorist recruitment soared in the immediate aftermath is a fact and perhaps an understandable one. Regardless of the circumstances and all the extenuating factors, the British state did kill 13 people that day; another succumbed to his wounds several months later.

But did all the blood spilt after Bloody Sunday change anything? Within a month, another 49 lives had been lost. By the end of the year, hundreds had gone to early graves. Bloody Sunday might partly explain it, but was it any justification?

Bloody Sunday certainly was different, as even unionists in 1972 accepted, not without difficulty, even if, unlike Bloody Friday when the IRA wrenched bodies apart with car bombs across the city of Belfast, it was not premeditated.

But in a painful week for ‘Middle Ulster’ would anyone seriously suggest the British state should be judged by the IRA’s low standards? What would inquiries into Claudy, La Mon, Enniskillen, the Shankill and all the IRA’s other atrocities achieve anyway except confirm the Provisionals were politically misguided and morally warped? Holding yourself accountable for your actions is the essence of civilisation.

The IRA’s lack of introspection, its inability to ask itself hard questions, on the other hand, is entirely characteristic. Long after its leaders realised their so-called war was self-defeating, they carried on excusing it. The lack of any credible narrative from Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness other than to say, rightly, that no one wants to go back, is glaringly obvious.

Bloody Sunday was a very grave wrong. Yet the sense that the families’ grief has been perverted by those with far more complex agendas than simple exoneration persists.

Long after the demand for an independent, international inquiry was acceded to, Bloody Sunday was held up as some pivotal moment after which practically anything could be justified. Keep January 30, 1972 front and centre of the Northern nationalists’ minds is the reasoning, and fewer voices will ask about what went before.

It is only when it is seen in its true context, however, that Bloody Sunday can really be understood. It was not a standalone event but, in less heated circumstances, an avoidable tragedy.

Deliberately ratchet up tensions – and the IRA was not alone in this – and something of that nature was almost bound to occur. In spite of all the films and books devoted to Bloody Sunday those who created an incendiary atmosphere must bear their share of the blame. January 30, 1972 was the petrol, not the spark.

THAT the IRA should have been handed such a massive propaganda boost is, beyond the horrible deaths and injuries themselves, one of the most appalling consequences of the army’s actions that day. The Protestant population of the city was to suffer as a consequence; much of the verbal sniping from unionists yesterday must be seen in that context. Their suffering, not forgotten at all by them, will never receive the same attention from the world’s media.

But the propaganda battle is just one of many. Irrespective of the arguments about the process, the families of Derry’s dead deserved better than Widgery. The forensic evidence simply could not sustain the original verdict. One day, but not today, Bloody Sunday will be seen in its true context. The irony is that unionists will come to rely on other parts of Saville’s massive report to back their own interpretations.

Unlike in the case of Amritsar, the evidence simply isn’t there to suggest premeditation. Partly for that reason, and partly because Northern Ireland is not colonial India, Bloody Sunday, for all its horror, could only carry the republican cause so far. If only the IRA had been thinking more strategically. Instead it allowed itself to be a conduit for a community – quite understandably – in a mood for revenge.

So whether or not Saville is the end of the process, those who sought to subvert Bloody Sunday for their own ends have the hardest questions to answer. What was achieved in the cycle of violence that followed that could not have been achieved decades earlier at far, far less human cost?

The British state has confessed its sins. It is time for others to do the same.