The Saville Report into the events of Bloody Sunday is ten volumes or 5,000 pages long and was five years in the writing. The inquiry lasted 12 years, including those five years, and cost the taxpayer £200 million. Some 2,500 people gave evidence, nearly 1,000 of whom gave oral witness. It was set up under one prime minister, Tony Blair, in 1998, and its conclusions were delivered in June 2010 under a different prime minister, David Cameron. It was the lengthiest and costliest inquiry in legal history.
The events it was concerned with — the shooting by members of the 1st Parachute Regiment of 13 civilians attending a civil rights march — took place on 30 January 1972, or 38 years before the report was delivered. Was it worth it?
One result of the inquiry is Douglas Murray’s book. The sheer scale of the Saville Report meant that few journalists, myself included, bothered to go further than the summary — we’re a lazy trade. But Murray was convinced of the importance of this attempt at truthtelling:
It revealed much about how any truth can be uncovered after such a long time — what people remember and what they forget. And what happens when things turn up from the past that might have been easier left undiscovered.
What follows is a riveting account, derived from the inquiry and report, of one of the most notorious episodes of the Troubles. Most Brits, I find, and not a few Irish, tend to blank out those events. Murray’s achievement is to turn what happened four decades ago into something like a real-life whodunnit — all the more remarkable since we know from the Saville Report more or less who did what — though by no means exactly who did exactly what.
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