A special report on the Bloody Sunday inquiry

[SO19]

A special report on the Bloody Sunday inquiry
Philip Jacobson

The Bloody Sunday Inquiry has taken eight years and has already cost you £400m. Most of the money went to the lawyers. No wonder Tony Blair kept quiet

As Liam Wray is showing me around the Museum of Free Derry in the heart of the Bogside, we arrive at a glass case containing a rumpled brown corduroy jacket. Wray’s older brother, Jim, 22, was wearing it at the civil-rights march on January 30, 1972, when he was among the 13 unarmed Catholic demonstrators killed by soldiers of the Parachute Regiment. He was running for his life when a high-velocity rifle round smashed into his spine, knocking him down. One eyewitness recalled seeing Wray raise his head, then say: “Help me, I can’t move my legs.” Another told him: “Don’t move. Pretend you’re dead.” Moments later he was shot again at close range, the bullet entering his back before tearing through his thorax.

The jacket was returned to the Wray family after a postmortem, and it became a treasured possession, produced occasionally for inspection by journalists writing about Bloody Sunday and its aftermath. After Tony Blair’s announcement in 1998 that there would be a new inquiry – chaired by Lord Saville of Newdigate, with two senior Commonwealth judges assisting him – the family handed the jacket over for forensic examination. It was subsequently donated to the newly opened museum, still bearing the bright yellow tags attached by inquiry staff to mark the bullets’ entry points.

“What you are looking at is evidence of the murder of a British citizen by a British soldier in a British city,” says Liam Wray, a lean, articulate man in his mid-fifties who has been closely involved with the long and often painful campaign by families of the Bloody Sunday dead to secure justice for their loved ones. “My view has always been that Jim was a human being and as such had a right to live. If nobody is ever held to account for killing him, that tells me the law considers my brother as something less than human, whose death was of no significance.”

As we talked, a party of students from Hungary came into the museum, some flinching as a recording made during the march broadcast the screams of panicking demonstrators and the unmistakable crash of gunfire. There were gasps as they read the label on a case containing the bloodstained Babygro with which a frantic woman had tried to staunch the stomach wound that killed 17-year-old Michael Kelly.

Closure is not a word Wray much likes, but as he points out, without Saville’s inquiry, the only historical verdict on how Derry’s sons, fathers and husbands died would have been the hasty and demonstrably flawed investigation carried out a few weeks later by Lord Widgery, then Britain’s lord chief justice. Suddenly animated, he tells me: “That man took less than three months to clear all the Paras by ruling that they had opened fire only after coming under attack by IRA gunmen. His report ran to just 36 pages, and we’ve been waiting 36 years for the truth.”

From day one of the public hearings held in Derry’s ornate Victorian Guildhall, the Bloody Sunday inquiry has served as a cash cow for the army of solicitors and barristers involved. Official figures show that legal costs have swallowed more than half of the £181m spent up to the end of last year. The senior QCs alone have pocketed well over £20m, and the gravy train is still rolling. The final bill for Saville’s seemingly interminable investigation – which heard its last witness three years ago but continues to cost around £500,000 per month – seems certain to exceed £250m and could reach £400m, according to government sources, after the last of the lawyers’ invoices are settled.

Number-crunchers in the Tory party seized gleefully on the top end of the estimates, claiming that this kind of money would pay for an extra 5,000 nurses, 600 doctors, 11,000 police officers or a dozen Apache helicopter gunships in Afghanistan. The head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Sir Hugh Orde, may have had this in mind when describing the inquiry as “a huge money-sucking venture” (though he later “clarified” his remarks). The widely respected former ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Dr Maurice Hayes, believes the vast amounts spent on an inquiry unlikely to unearth “the essential truth” of what happened could have been put to much better use for the bereaved families. Derry’s firebrand political activist Eamonn McCann, who helped to organise the civil-rights march in 1972 and is now chairman of the Bloody Sunday Trust, is particularly scathing about the “legal feeding frenzy”. “It’s obscene that taxpayers may be funding some wealthy lawyer’s new yacht or buying him a better holiday home,” he told The Sunday Times Magazine. Yet McCann still backs Saville in his quest, “however long that may take him and whatever it costs”.

What makes Saville’s inquiry unique, McCann argues, is that unlike so many of the sectarian atrocities committed during the Troubles in Northern Ireland – assassinations on lonely back roads, bombs in crowded bars – the killings occurred in a public place in broad daylight before a huge crowd. “Every shooting was witnessed by scores of people, many of whom knew the victims personally. That’s why the inquiry has taken this long: there were so many witnesses who wanted to be heard but had been ignored by Widgery.”

When I asked Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff and invaluable point man in Northern Ireland, about the huge expense of the inquiry his former boss set up, he grimaced theatrically. At the time, nobody dreamt it was going to drag on for years, he said. “Labour had been out of government for so long, there was nobody around with much experience of public inquiries. We’d forgotten how rarely they actually resolved deep-rooted problems, and how often they came back to bite you.”

As it became clear that costs were running out of control, alarm bells had started ringing in 10 Downing Street: shovelling government money into the bank accounts of prosperous lawyers was not what new Labour was about. “There were times when we looked at each other and thought, ‘What in hell have we got ourselves into here?’ ” said Powell. Blair mentioned the inquiry so rarely in public during his last years in power that his press office could not track down any reference for me.

According to Powell, the appointment of a new inquiry was by no means top of the agenda for the Sinn Fein delegation, led by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, during the tough negotiations that produced the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement. “They certainly didn’t give the impression that this was a potential deal-buster,” he said. “Their main focus was firmly on prisoner releases, policing and the terms for decommissioning IRA weapons.” The most sustained pressure for reopening the case had come from the Irish government in Dublin, with strong backing from Mo Mowlam (then Blair’s Northern Ireland minister). “Mo was always nagging me to look at the Widgery report, because I would then understand why the families had been campaigning for so long.”

Powell concluded that Widgery’s “complete and utter whitewash” of the Paras greatly strengthened the case for a new inquiry. “We knew Dublin was preparing a report on the killings that trashed Widgery and would soon be made public. Tony and I both felt that a formal apology for Bloody Sunday from the British government would be enough to keep Sinn Fein on side, but the Irish wouldn’t budge. So we reluctantly shifted our position to demonstrate that this government had nothing to hide.”

Yet within a few days of the Saville inquiry being announced, Powell was having second thoughts, confiding ruefully to his diary that “we had not thought the issue through”. While hardline Ulster Unionists were grumbling about rewarding terrorism, Sinn Fein had already begun to agitate for the soldiers involved in the shooting to be punished – something that Saville’s terms of reference explicitly ruled out. “I told Tony that we might live to rue the day we took the decision to go ahead.”

It was not until some years later that Powell learnt, to his extreme mortification, that Sinn Fein had all along shared his and Blair’s view that a full apology for the killings would suffice. “Martin McGuinness said to me in a bantering way during a meeting at No 10 that he had never understood why we agreed to a new inquiry,” he said. McGuinness cheerfully confirms Powell’s account: “I told him and Tony Blair that all it needed was for the British government to come out with its hands up and admit the truth of Bloody Sunday.”

The decision to appoint Saville, a law lord, had raised eyebrows among the tightknit legal community in London, where he had made his name as a commercial contract specialist. In some quarters he was regarded as a plodder who had served as a High Court judge without particular distinction. “He had no background in criminal law, which is where good barristers get a feel for the grittier side of life,” one legal insider said. “Bloody Sunday was going to be a whole new experience, and I just couldn’t picture him ploughing through gruesome postmortem reports and ballistics tests, let alone roughing up difficult witnesses. It’s a long way from the House of Lords to the Bogside.”

Although Powell could not recall how Saville’s name had come up, he thought it might have been put forward by the then lord chancellor, Derry Irvine (formerly Blair’s head of chambers). “Nothing surprising about that,” says the barrister Geoffrey Robertson QC, one of Britain’s top human-rights advocates. “There’s a tradition of making safety-first appointments for major public inquiries – just look at Hutton on the Iraq war. But experience shows that judges are actually the worst people to run them. We’d be much better off with our version of America’s special prosecutors, who can put the fear of God into politicians with something to hide.”

Robertson believes the cost and duration of Saville’s inquiry have “permanently, perhaps fatally, damaged” the institution of public inquiries as a means to establish the truth behind events of great national importance. Citing Blair’s refusal to appoint one to investigate the terrorist bombings in London in July 2007, Robertson argues that the job was handed to the police because the government was “terrified of another Bloody Sunday marathon”.

Another leading lawyer, who asked not to be identified, also saw Irvine’s influence behind the choice of Sir Christopher Clarke QC – another safe pair of hands – for the pivotal position of counsel to the inquiry. “The job description was to keep the inquiry moving along briskly towards its conclusions. But Christopher made a 42-day opening speech, which set a rather unfortunate precedent. If you read the transcripts, days went by without any real progress being made because all the lawyers felt they must have their say. At times the proceedings were paralysingly boring.”

As a member of the Sunday Times Insight team who had spent three months in Derry on an investigation into the events of Bloody Sunday that challenged Widgery’s central findings, I was among the journalists “invited” to testify before Saville (with the threat of a subpoena left dangling). Waiting for my turn to appear, while other witnesses gave evidence, it was clear that with the passage of time, memories had become unreliable. Some people belatedly remembered things they did not include in their original inquiry statements; others had difficulty recalling the details of dramatic incidents they originally claimed to have seen. During my own brief but uncomfortable appearance in the box, I lost count of the times I had to answer questions with: “I don’t remember.” One of the barristers politely trying to work me over joked later that Saville must have heard this so often, he probably muttered the words in his sleep.

The opening of the hearings in Derry brought a welcome injection of serious money into the local economy, then suffering from chronically high unemployment – the jobless talked about being on the “bru”, a contraction of Social Security Bureau – and generally low wages. The city council was an immediate beneficiary, renting out the Guildhall for £500,000 a month. The four-star City hotel on the banks of the broad River Foyle also cashed in gratefully with extended block bookings for the inquiry’s team of counsels and back-up staff. Journalists helped to keep the hotel’s tills ringing. Saville chose to lodge at the more homely Beech Hill hotel, where he reportedly had a running machine installed, possibly to offset the effects of cholesterol-laden Ulster fried breakfasts.

The influx of well-paid lawyers from England provided a further boost for Derry. A businessman whose company provided services to the inquiry recalls how one young barrister had asked him if it was safe to go out for a drink at night: “Most of those boys had never set foot in Northern Ireland before, and they seemed surprised there weren’t soldiers on every street corner and bombs going off. But when I took your man to the Clarendon, he enjoyed the craic so much, he was back the next night with a bunch of colleagues, and it soon became their local.”

The visitors also adopted Marie McCarron’s tiny Meet To Eat cafe, close to the Guildhall, as the lunchtime spot of choice. Saville himself dropped by soon after the hearings began, and it was not uncommon to see pinstripe-suited types helping to clear tables when the place was busy. “They may be earning a fortune, but they have to queue up like everybody else,” McCarron assured the Derry Journal. When the inquiry was moved to London for security reasons to hear testimony from soldiers, her fan club suggested she should open a branch there.

As time passed, some of the English lawyers considered buying their own place to stay in during the hearings. Local property prices were certainly tempting: a new three-bedroom apartment beside the promenade overlooking the Foyle cost peanuts by London standards. “Those guys could have bought somewhere great for what they were making in a few months,” said a Derry estate agent. “I got some feelers but nothing worked out. It would actually have been a pretty good investment, because prices here have risen considerably.”

The administrative staff and technicians attached to the inquiry soon discovered Derry’s lively nightlife, and were discovered in turn by so-called “Bacardi bandits” – local girls out for a good time in clubs like Sandino, the Nerve Centre and the Basement.

A city-centre publican says that media reports about the money swilling around the inquiry also tempted a few prostitutes over from Belfast. “One showed up in my bar wearing hot pants and stiletto heels, which was something you didn’t see in Derry every day.”

With inquiry regulars cooped up in the Guildhall and rubbing shoulders after hours, it was hardly surprising that clandestine affairs developed. A local solicitor recalls arriving for a meal at a lakeside hotel in Donegal, just across the border with the Irish Republic, to find someone he had last seen on his feet in the Guildhall checking in with an attractive woman who he knew was not his wife. “I pretended I hadn’t seen them.”

Although Tony Blair stated about 10 years ago that all those killed and wounded by the Paras “should be regarded as innocent of any allegation that they were shot while handling firearms or explosives”, the families want Saville to go a lot further than that. Despite the fact that witnesses at the Bloody Sunday inquiry were guaranteed immunity from prosecution on matters arising from their own evidence, they have pinned their hopes on seeing soldiers facing criminal charges.

Liam Wray no longer cares much what happens to the Para he holds responsible for his brother’s death, provided that he is formally accused of murder and convicted in open court. “It wouldn’t bother me if he then walked free, because there’s really no point in locking him up now,” he told me in a Bogside pub. “I really need to get my own life back after being immersed in the inquiry for so long. It was like an addiction, following the hearings every day and poring over the transcripts afterwards. Believe me, that grinds you down.”

To judge by the accounts that they gave to Eamonn McCann for his moving book about the families and the Bloody Sunday inquiry, most of them now share Wray’s desire for justice rather than revenge. Jimmy Duddy, whose 17-year-old brother, Jack, was the first person to be shot dead – an iconic photograph shows his body being borne away while a Catholic priest, Father Edward Daly, frantically waves a bloodstained white hankie – says his feelings have changed with the passage of time. “If there could be convictions, it wouldn’t matter at all to me whether anyone served a single day in jail.”

John Kelly, brother of Michael Kelly, whose blood had stained that Babygro in the museum, is adamant that if Saville falls short of recommending criminal prosecutions, he will continue the fight. Kelly is convinced that the Para known as Soldier “F” murdered Billy in cold blood; ballistics tests on his rifle also linked him to three other killings. When “F” appeared before the inquiry in London, 130 members of the extended Kelly family travelled over to hear him testify.

“When he’s giving evidence, I’m saying, ‘Mickey, give me strength to get through this,’ because it’s hard to be in the same room as the man you know murdered your brother.”

Where the money went

Junior barristers: £750 a day plus preparation fees of £100 an hour and £62.50 an hour for travelling time

Senior barristers: £1500 a day. They could also claim up to £200 an hour for preparation work, plus £125 an hour for travelling time to and from Derry. A round trip from Belfast, 75 miles away, was worth £500

QCs: £1750 a day. Following a court application by lawyers representing some of the victims’ families, it was decided that QCs would be paid £1,750 a day, plus £250 an hour for two hours of preparation work

Total expenditure £400m

Who got what

£4.5m: SIR CHRISTOPHER CLARKE (representing the inquiry)

£4m: EDWIN GLASGOW (representing the military witnesses)

£2.7m: ALAN ROXBURGH (representing the inquiry)

£2.1m: CATHRYN MCGAHEY (representing the military witnesses)

£1.8m: GERARD ELIAS (representing the military witnesses)

£743,000: MICHAEL MANSFIELD (representing the families)

The top earners

£13m: Madden & Finucane (families)

£12.7m: Eversheds (tracing/interviewing witnesses)

£3.8m: Payne Hicks Beach (armed forces)

£3.7m: Treasury Solicitors (armed forces)

£2.7m: Devonshires (armed forces)£1.9m

More than 20 other barristers representing the families or the armed forces received payments of at least £500,000, and often more. They included Lord Gifford and Sir Louis Blom-Cooper

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/p ... 022221.ece

[barrybudden]

The tax payers money that the Government have sunk into this is unbelieveable, at the end of the day we will know that the people were shot by soldiers.

What doesnt seem to be reported so much is that Martin McGuinnes was supposed to have fired the first burst from a Thompson sub machine gun at the troops and that the Provos brought in more guns into the area.

Also if the troops fired indiscriminately why were only young men killed and not a broad section of the growd?

[London Boy]

Also if the troops fired indiscriminately why were only young men killed and not a broad section of the growd?

Lets get some facts straight shall we Barry, now I don't know what your definition of "young man" is, but it clearly isn't the same as mine.

Paddy Doherty - 31
Bernard McGuigan - 41
Gerard McKinney -35
John Johnson -59

It was murder of unarmed civilians Barry!

There was no evidence of IRA gunfire then or now. No weapons were ever recovered at the scene.

[jabcrosshook]

Were you there LondonBoy?
Ever thought that IRA could have pegged it?

[Alfa]

To be honest, you can argue until the cows come home about who did what that day but the fact of the matter is no one is going to change their own opinion of what happened on that day so it's got to be a case of agree to disagree.

However, what I don't understand is why there's an inquiry still going on into something that happened over 30 years ago when we're all expected to forgive and forget every terrorist attack that happened during the troubles.

I understand why the Good Friday Agreement pardoned those committed of terrorist atrocities and think for the sake of on going peace it's a necessary evil but surely it should be a two way street.

To move forward we have to stop dragging up the past, we don't drag up IRA/Unionist attacks so why does the British Army still have to be hauled over the coals?

It's a waste of money we're told we don't have and does nothing but rub salt in old wounds.

[London Boy]

Were you there LondonBoy?
Ever thought that IRA could have pegged it?

Please don't ask such irrelvant questions. That question totally disenfranchises anything that you might have to say. No, of course I wasn't there and neither were any of the enquiry team or judges that have deliberated on it over the years.

Believe it or not but the IRA were not behind every riot in NI. But of course it's possible, and even likely that they set it up, primarily to put a spoke in the wheels of the civil rights march, secondly to get the Army fired up. But that still doesn't excuse the murder of 13 unarmed civilians.

You'll note this time, like on the last thread on this, that I only ever comment on this when someone starts with subjective biased comments and incorrect fact i.e. Barry's "young men" comment.

[barrybudden]

There were 28 shot that day 27 were men 1 was a woman.

Of those killed that day McGuigan was 41 every one else was under the age of 35.

That doesnt really sound like indiscriminate fire to me.

[barrybudden]

Oh and John Johnson died on 16 June 1972 and not on bloody Sunday.