HOUSE OF COMMONS:THE UNITED Kingdom can "take some pride" from going ahead with the Bloody Sunday inquiry, which has produced "painful" findings, prime minister David Cameron told the House of Commons yesterday.
Following a prepared statement, Mr Cameron took questions from MPs for an hour, including many from Unionist MPs unhappy that Bloody Sunday victims had been given a higher place in “the hierarchy of pain”.
“Standing back from it all, we can take some pride and certainly the former government can take some pride as well in that in the end the British state has gone to huge lengths to get to the truth of what happened on Bloody Sunday,” Mr Cameron said.
The Widgery tribunal findings that those killed or injured on that day had been involved in attacks on troops “has been laid aside. Not many states in the world would do that and we should see it as a sign of strength that we have done it,” he added.
Urging all to “look to the future”, Mr Cameron told SDLP MP Mark Durkan that those killed or injured “were innocent of anything that justified them being shot. It is quite clear from the report. I hope that that is some comfort to the families and people in Londonderry”.
The 5,000-page report would be debated in the Commons in the autumn once everyone had had the chance to “digest” its contents, he said, although decisions about prosecutions, if any, were a matter for the independent judgment of the Director of Public Prosecutions.
“I am very clear about not drawing an equivalence between what soldiers and terrorists have done because soldiers are operating under the law, operating under a government. On the issue of prosecutions, [it] is important that I don’t say anything today that would prejudice either a criminal or, indeed, a civil action were one to be brought.”
Mr Durkan, whose Foyle constituency includes Derry, said the publication of the long-awaited Saville report came on a “day of deep emotion” for the city.
“These men were cut down when they marched for justice in their own streets, but not only were their lives taken, their innocent memory was then interned without truth by the travesty of the Widgery tribunal.
“And will the prime minister confirm clearly today that the Widgery findings are now repudiated and binned and should not be relied upon by anyone as giving any verdict on that day?”
Responding to Democratic Unionist MP Gregory Campbell’s unhappiness about the report, the prime minister was firm. “I hope that he will understand that there is something about Bloody Sunday – about the fact that 13 people were shot by British army soldiers – that there is something that did necessitate a proper inquiry. Don’t let’s pretend that there isn’t something about that day that didn’t need to be answered and answered clearly.”
Mr Campbell said Bloody Sunday “will live with the surviving relatives for the rest of their lives. Thousands of other surviving relatives had to do likewise. They have had no costly inquiries and no media interest, and there have been 10,000 other bloody days in Northern Ireland’s recent history.”
He complained about Lord Saville’s decision not to mention the two RUC officers shot dead by the IRA in Derry three days before Bloody Sunday.
“We did not need a £200 million inquiry to know that there was no premediated plan to shoot civilians on that day. We didn’t need a report of that length to tell us that as a result of the actions of the IRA before Bloody Sunday that parts of the city ‘lay in ruins’.
“There has been no similar inquiry into the financing of the IRA at the inception of that organisation by another state, the Irish Republic. That Irish State acted as a midwife for the birth of an organisation responsible for murdering many thousands of UK citizens,” Mr Campbell said.
Listing members of his own extended family killed by the IRA, and those killed in Teebane in 1992, DUP MP Rev William McCrea said he was “sure that Mr Cameron would not like to support a hierarchy of victimhood”.
Belfast DUP MP Nigel Dodds said one wished that the House had time to listen to the names of everybody who died in tragic circumstances in Northern Ireland.
However, he doubted if the Saville report would bring “closure and cleansing” if some people were intent on using it “as a springboard for more years of agitation over events that happened 38 years ago”.
