Daily View: Bloody Sunday report
Commentators from the British press discuss the outcome of the Bloody Sunday inquiry.
The from a non-commissioned officer with the Parachute Regiment on Bloody Sunday. He no longer serves in the British Army and says he wishes he hadn't been there:
"I am not going to say that some innocent people were not killed that day - and I am truly sorry for their deaths, as, I am sure, a lot of other soldiers are as well. But to say that we went into the Bogside on that day to kill civvies cannot be further from the truth. We were ordered to go there and sort out rioters who were hitting the Army for days with petrol bombs, nail bombs, bricks, all sorts; we were told we would be making arrests... I feel sorry for people who died if they were innocent, I feel sorry for some soldiers who they say might now get charged. And I am sorry we were in Derry on that sodding day."
[subscription required] says the cost was worth it:
"[F]or me at least, the truth is worth more than £195 million, and worth taking more than 12 years to establish. Liberal democracies are built on truth -- and they cannot survive without it.
Ìý
"And often the truth isn't pretty. It may be that optimists are happier and achieve more. But the same psychological research that finds this also finds that pessimistic people - ones who don't interpret their own actions and those of others in the most positive ways - are, sadly, on the whole, more realistic. Perhaps the evolutionary process has allowed both pessimism and optimism to survive because we need both sorts of people. We need contentment and optimism to get things done, but we also need realists and truth-tellers."
the inquiry a "grossly misguided excavation of the past":
"The quarrel of myself and millions of British people is not with what Saville reported yesterday, but with the grotesque context of his inquiry. In 1998 Tony Blair chose to indulge Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness by, in effect, placing the Army on trial as part of the price of bringing Sinn Fein into a peace process. Saville has produced more than 5,000 pages of official paper retelling the Bloody Sunday story, reaching almost identical conclusions to those of innumerable newspaper investigations, books and TV documentaries.
Ìý
"Meanwhile the long catalogue of Republican atrocities against the British and Irish peoples goes unexplored."
that Lord Saville missed the chance of deeper healing:
"You can hanker for justice and you can hanker for peace, but only rarely do you get both. In societies riven by conflict, one is usually traded for the other, victims forced to see perpetrators walk free in the name of "reconciliation". When the authorities sit down to decide whether to pursue the murderers of Bloody Sunday, this surely will be part of their calculation of the public interest: will peace be jeopardised by prosecutions or is it sufficiently embedded that it can survive the reopening of old wounds?
Ìý
"As it happens, this vexed dilemma could have been avoided. The Saville inquiry might have had a different remit, one less like a legal tribunal and more akin to South Africa's truth and reconciliation commission. The promise of a South African style amnesty would have encouraged the paras to tell the whole truth, rather than putting up the brick wall of "I do not recall" memory failure that greeted Saville. Such an amnesty would have thwarted those relatives bent on prosecutions, but it might have offered an even deeper sense of healing: seeing their loved ones' killers admit the truth."
The that prosecutions would be in no one's interest:
"[N]o one's interests are served by defending the indefensible. Equally, no one's interests would be served by prosecuting soldiers so long after the event. There were, after all, other participants - notably Martin McGuinness, now Northern Ireland's deputy first minister, whose activities on that day, and subsequently, might warrant investigation. However, after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the release of paramilitary prisoners, it was accepted, for good or ill, that much would remain unsolved."
The founder of Northern Ireland's Sluggerotoole blog what is next for Northern Ireland:
"But the wider, possibly more important question is, what do we do about our bloody past, and its longstanding social consequences? The Spanish agreed to bury it in the pacto del olvido, or pact of forgetting, which is now - 35 years after Franco's death (and that of many of the victims) - now beginning to break up. No such agreement exists in Northern Ireland. And even once (or even if) the state has discharged its final duties to its citizens, many thousands will be left to nurse their own grief in private."
