I’ve been trying to remember when transparent rubbish bags were introduced on London’s transport network. Definitely before the most recent terrorist incidents and therefore a consequence of Irish nationalist activity.
Strange that they were the first things that came to mind at the news that the Saville Inquiry had released its report on the Bloody Sunday incident in 1972 when members of the 1st Battalion The Parachute Regiment opened fire on a civil rights march in Londonderry, in Northern Ireland. They are one of the small things in daily life changed forever by those seeking to unite Ireland through violence. In theory they make it more difficult to hide an explosive device amongst rubbish.
Thirteen people were killed and another thirteen wounded, one of whom died later. The Widgery Report, released eleven weeks after the incident, concluded that the soldiers involved had fired first, believing that they were targeting people who were shooting back at them or handling explosives, and that their orders justified this. The report was regarded as a whitewash by many. Bloody Sunday was rather like a festering bag of rubbish that no one wanted to tackle, a persistent odour clinging to the Parachute Regiment. Thirty-eight years later, and at a cost of over £190 million pounds, those killed and injured have been declared entirely innocent.
It occurred to me that this incident took place when I was six years old and that it has taken most of my life for the arguments over Bloody Sunday to be resolved to the extent that it has. It isn’t over yet. Those who were serving with 1 Para and fired those shots on Sunday 30th January 1972 may be prosecuted over the deaths and injuries. It will come as a surprise to some if the families affected don’t pursue prosecutions and a disappointment to others if they do. The phrase “water under the bridge” has been used more than once which suggests to me that some people have no sense of smell.
The release of the Inquiry’s findings have meant that much of the footage that was recorded by news crews at the time has been replayed over and over again. The same images of a man waving a bloodstained handkerchief as one of the victims is carried past soldiers have been shown on TV every time that the events of that day turn up in the headlines. It takes me all the way back to childhood and the blurry memory of fear that I have, of being dragged out of Marks and Spencer by my mother because of a bomb scare and a cold ride home on a bus afterwards. A fragment of childhood frozen in black and white at a time when everyone seemed to wear roll neck sweaters and needed a haircut.
Over the next decade I became a little more blasé about these things, IRA activities went with the territory if you lived in the capital, at least that was what we told nervous visitors. But there is a limit to just how relaxed you can be when faceless people are trying to kill you. On the 20th July 1982 I was at home, near Hyde Park, when a bomb went off killing two members of the Household Cavalry and injuring twenty-three other people. Which of the seven horses killed or injured beyond recovery had woken us on early mornings with the sound of their hooves in our mews? The house shook just as the ground did when one of the big piebald drum horses stamped past me as I walked to school. You always know when it’s a bomb.
It’s called terrorism for a good reason and fear was certainly in the air following these events but anger came straight in after it. No one was happier than this nine year old when the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four were locked away. As far as I was concerned the police had done their job and they could be relied upon to get it right.
Imagine my anger when some protested that these convictions were unjust, that those accused were innocent. On an anniversary of the Birmingham pub bombings the sister of one of the victims described the impact the event had on her mother, driving her to mental illness, and the anger she felt towards campaigners for the Birmingham Six. Seeing a classmate pale with shock and bearing marks on her face from splinters of glass after the Harrods bombing didn’t help. Another lost a brother to a bomb and the school held a service for him. The irony was, of course, that he had been of Irish descent, as were many of those affected by these incidents.
I didn’t realise, until I discovered the extent of my own Irish ancestry, just how my opinion of Ireland had been skewed by all this. I felt uncomfortable about being that Irish. It came as a shock to realise the impact on me of the years of fear and bitterness worked up by people who had denied me the right to walk freely and without fear in the place I called home. It hasn’t made me a nicer person so it doesn‘t surprise me that some who grew up surrounded by checkpoints and guns in Northern Ireland feel the way they do about the British army and the police.
Over the years I have heard lies told by a number of British policemen being unravelled and shown for what they really were, in relation to a number of miscarriages of justice. To me the greatest betrayals were the wrongful convictions of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four. One lie after another exposed, undermining the certainty I felt about the justice system -and it hasn‘t made me any less angry about the impact of terrorist activities on my life.
I am lucky not to have lost a relative to a bomb and I cannot imagine what it was like not only to have loved ones killed but to have seen them branded as terrorists when they were entirely innocent. There are those who wince at the cost of the Saville Inquiry and dread the prospect of more time and money spent on prosecutions. It is too much to hope that those involved in the shootings will come forward now and ask a court to decide the truth on way or another but that is what I would like to see. It isn‘t just about the relatives, who have waited such a long time for this outcome and have done so with more grace than the judges, politicians and military in whom I had such trust. I would like to see this last scandal cleared up. If the people of Northern Ireland had allowed the setting up of a truth and reconciliation commission of the kind that helped the people of South Africa comes to terms with their past we might have been spared this lingering embarrassment.
The Parachute Regiment has proved itself since those dark days and continues to do. It was 1 Para that spearheaded a peacekeeping force in Kosovo in 1999. It was 1 Para that took part in a hostage rescue in Sierra Leone in 2000. Those who wear that badge today are very different from the soldiers who shot at those civilians in 1972.
The situation must be resolved in a court of law rather than being left to fester like a rubbish bag on a hot day, surrounded by persistent wasps, with no one prepared to risk the sting of costs and the stink of embarrassment to get rid of it for good. In my experience, rubbish bags leak if they are left too long. It is almost inevitable that those involved will eventually speak about Bloody Sunday and death bed confessions will bring no peace to those whose relatives were frozen in time.
Strange that they were the first things that came to mind at the news that the Saville Inquiry had released its report on the Bloody Sunday incident in 1972 when members of the 1st Battalion The Parachute Regiment opened fire on a civil rights march in Londonderry, in Northern Ireland. They are one of the small things in daily life changed forever by those seeking to unite Ireland through violence. In theory they make it more difficult to hide an explosive device amongst rubbish.
Thirteen people were killed and another thirteen wounded, one of whom died later. The Widgery Report, released eleven weeks after the incident, concluded that the soldiers involved had fired first, believing that they were targeting people who were shooting back at them or handling explosives, and that their orders justified this. The report was regarded as a whitewash by many. Bloody Sunday was rather like a festering bag of rubbish that no one wanted to tackle, a persistent odour clinging to the Parachute Regiment. Thirty-eight years later, and at a cost of over £190 million pounds, those killed and injured have been declared entirely innocent.
It occurred to me that this incident took place when I was six years old and that it has taken most of my life for the arguments over Bloody Sunday to be resolved to the extent that it has. It isn’t over yet. Those who were serving with 1 Para and fired those shots on Sunday 30th January 1972 may be prosecuted over the deaths and injuries. It will come as a surprise to some if the families affected don’t pursue prosecutions and a disappointment to others if they do. The phrase “water under the bridge” has been used more than once which suggests to me that some people have no sense of smell.
The release of the Inquiry’s findings have meant that much of the footage that was recorded by news crews at the time has been replayed over and over again. The same images of a man waving a bloodstained handkerchief as one of the victims is carried past soldiers have been shown on TV every time that the events of that day turn up in the headlines. It takes me all the way back to childhood and the blurry memory of fear that I have, of being dragged out of Marks and Spencer by my mother because of a bomb scare and a cold ride home on a bus afterwards. A fragment of childhood frozen in black and white at a time when everyone seemed to wear roll neck sweaters and needed a haircut.
Over the next decade I became a little more blasé about these things, IRA activities went with the territory if you lived in the capital, at least that was what we told nervous visitors. But there is a limit to just how relaxed you can be when faceless people are trying to kill you. On the 20th July 1982 I was at home, near Hyde Park, when a bomb went off killing two members of the Household Cavalry and injuring twenty-three other people. Which of the seven horses killed or injured beyond recovery had woken us on early mornings with the sound of their hooves in our mews? The house shook just as the ground did when one of the big piebald drum horses stamped past me as I walked to school. You always know when it’s a bomb.
It’s called terrorism for a good reason and fear was certainly in the air following these events but anger came straight in after it. No one was happier than this nine year old when the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four were locked away. As far as I was concerned the police had done their job and they could be relied upon to get it right.
Imagine my anger when some protested that these convictions were unjust, that those accused were innocent. On an anniversary of the Birmingham pub bombings the sister of one of the victims described the impact the event had on her mother, driving her to mental illness, and the anger she felt towards campaigners for the Birmingham Six. Seeing a classmate pale with shock and bearing marks on her face from splinters of glass after the Harrods bombing didn’t help. Another lost a brother to a bomb and the school held a service for him. The irony was, of course, that he had been of Irish descent, as were many of those affected by these incidents.
I didn’t realise, until I discovered the extent of my own Irish ancestry, just how my opinion of Ireland had been skewed by all this. I felt uncomfortable about being that Irish. It came as a shock to realise the impact on me of the years of fear and bitterness worked up by people who had denied me the right to walk freely and without fear in the place I called home. It hasn’t made me a nicer person so it doesn‘t surprise me that some who grew up surrounded by checkpoints and guns in Northern Ireland feel the way they do about the British army and the police.
Over the years I have heard lies told by a number of British policemen being unravelled and shown for what they really were, in relation to a number of miscarriages of justice. To me the greatest betrayals were the wrongful convictions of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four. One lie after another exposed, undermining the certainty I felt about the justice system -and it hasn‘t made me any less angry about the impact of terrorist activities on my life.
I am lucky not to have lost a relative to a bomb and I cannot imagine what it was like not only to have loved ones killed but to have seen them branded as terrorists when they were entirely innocent. There are those who wince at the cost of the Saville Inquiry and dread the prospect of more time and money spent on prosecutions. It is too much to hope that those involved in the shootings will come forward now and ask a court to decide the truth on way or another but that is what I would like to see. It isn‘t just about the relatives, who have waited such a long time for this outcome and have done so with more grace than the judges, politicians and military in whom I had such trust. I would like to see this last scandal cleared up. If the people of Northern Ireland had allowed the setting up of a truth and reconciliation commission of the kind that helped the people of South Africa comes to terms with their past we might have been spared this lingering embarrassment.
The Parachute Regiment has proved itself since those dark days and continues to do. It was 1 Para that spearheaded a peacekeeping force in Kosovo in 1999. It was 1 Para that took part in a hostage rescue in Sierra Leone in 2000. Those who wear that badge today are very different from the soldiers who shot at those civilians in 1972.
The situation must be resolved in a court of law rather than being left to fester like a rubbish bag on a hot day, surrounded by persistent wasps, with no one prepared to risk the sting of costs and the stink of embarrassment to get rid of it for good. In my experience, rubbish bags leak if they are left too long. It is almost inevitable that those involved will eventually speak about Bloody Sunday and death bed confessions will bring no peace to those whose relatives were frozen in time.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment