On 30 January 1972, a 41-year- old man named Barney McGuigan stepped out from behind a block of flats in Londonderry. Some witnesses saw a white handkerchief in his hand, others remember his hands being empty. Across the road, a soldier from the 1st Battalion of the Parachute regiment was seen by another soldier going down on one knee to a firing pos-ition. A bullet entered McGuigan’s head from the back. The head exploded, as one witness told the judge, ‘like a tomato’.
Thirty years after this incident the soldier accused of firing that shot, Soldier ‘F’, testified in London. In the humming air-conditioned room, a mortuary photo of McGuigan’s head was shown to him at the request of the family’s lawyer. Soldier ‘F’ had stonewalled every question put to him. The silence was broken by an eruption of sobbing. McGuigan’s widow, gasping with grief, was escorted from the room by family. The smart young woman typing notes beside the judges tried to keep typing while wiping tears from her eyes.
If there had been any point to the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday, it would have been to provide answers to such bereaved. Yet the sad truth is that nothing that happened on that day has been agreed upon. And far from closing wounds, the whole exercise may actually end up reopening them.
The final report of the inquiry is published next week. Announced by Tony Blair in the Commons in 1998, its final price-tag is a record-breaking £200 million. After seven years, it broke another record, overtaking the impeachment of Warren Hastings as the lengthiest legal process in British history.
The fresh inquiry was offered in the run-up to the Good Friday agreement as part of the bargaining process. For three decades Bloody Sunday has been remembered by Irish Republicans as the British army’s day of infamy.
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