February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Stephen McKinley
Richard Harvey gestured across the length of New York University Law School’s Greenberg Lounge. It was, he told the more than 200 people in the audience, about 44 yards in length, the length from which a British paratrooper shot Jim Wray with his high-velocity rifle in Glenfada Park on Jan. 30, 1972: Bloody Sunday.
“This was like shooting fish in a barrel,” he said.
Harvey, a British barrister, represents the family of Wray at the Saville Inquiry, the long-running tribunal in Derry’s Guildhall that will seek to find the answers to Bloody Sunday that have eluded the people of Derry since the massacre, when British paratroopers shot dead 14 civil rights demonstrators.
Harvey and four other experts gave vivid testimony last Thursday evening from their own professional and personal experience of Bloody Sunday, events since then in Northern Ireland, and, also from Harvey, an account of how the Saville Inquiry seeks to build truth from events, images, memories.
This was the last in a series of events to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
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On the panel with Harvey were Trisha Ziff, curator of the “Hidden Truths: Bloody Sunday 1972” exhibition of images and artifacts at the International Center for Photography, and four other experts with unique insights into the 30-year-old massacre. They included Mary Hickman, professor of Irish Studies at the University of North London; Peter Pringle, the journalist who wrote “Those are Real Bullets,” a re-creation of the events of Bloody Sunday; Brian Wallis, chief curator of the ICP, and Martin McGuinness, Northern Ireland minister for education, who was present in Derry on Bloody Sunday.
The event, advertised as “Bloody Sunday, 1972-2002, Event, Image and Memory,” allowed McGuinness to weave his memories of Bloody Sunday into an account of the Republican struggle for equality in Ireland. He also thanked the audience for their attention to Bloody Sunday when the World Trade Center tragedy was still a recent, raw memory for New York and the U.S.
“I am very conscious that we’re not too far from the World Trade Center, where some 3,000 people lost their lives,” McGuinness said. “The Irish peace process can only be a beacon of hope in what is a fairly miserable world right now.”
He then described the situation for Catholics in Northern Ireland in 1972. “My community was very much downtrodden, held underfoot, and very much behaved as second-class citizens. I took a decision to join the Irish Republican Army and to fight back.” McGuinness reminded listeners that in his statement to the Saville Inquiry, he frankly described himself as “adjutant of the Derry Brigade of the Irish Republican Army.”
“Internment had turned life on its head forever. And then came Bloody Sunday,” McGuinness continued. Bloody Sunday, he said, was so radically different from other atrocities during the Troubles because it raised so many huge questions about the legitimacy of the Northern Irish state.
These questions, he said, were finally being addressed by the current peace process. But, he added, “I don’t think we have a clue of how to handle the terrible pain, hurt and grief of people who had lost loved ones in the Troubles.”
Trisha Ziff opened the discussion by reading out the names of the victims.
“To acknowledge them as individuals gives them the rightly deserved dignity,” she said.
Brian Wallis spoke of how the Bloody Sunday photographs, taken by a number of photographers on the day, raise questions about photography and memory.
“These are not conventional photographs,” Wallis said. “They are working photographs, vernacular photographs that have served in newspapers, family albums and courtrooms. The exhibition accepts them for this. The artifacts here are relics. There is a story and a memory attached to them.”
Pringle turned the attention of listeners back to the actual events of the day itself, and how huge gaps still existed in the collective knowledge of what occurred.
“We know what happened, we know pretty much where the victims were, we know pretty much where which soldiers were, but we’ll never know their names,” he said. “How did the British government get to the point in its ministerings in Northern Ireland where they put unarmed civilians at risk on a civil rights march?”
For Harvey, the answers to these questions lie in the complex web that the Saville Inquiry is supposedly unraveling.
“The Saville Inquiry has become an event in itself,” he said. He also described the uniqueness of the inquiry in British legal history. A tribunal is set up only when there is a nationwide crisis of confidence. This was the first tribunal set up to challenge another one, the discredited Widgery Inquiry, the “whitewash” of 1972, Harvey said. Its current reliance on the very latest computer technology, Harvey said, had turned Derry’s Guildhall, where the tribunal is based, into “courtroom Starship Enterprise.” Whatever the outcome of the inquiry, Harvey said he is confident that “the people of Derry will write their own report.”
Also present were the five daughters of Patsy O’Donnell, who was injured on Bloody Sunday: Donnagh, Patricia, Caroline, Linda and Marcelline accepted an award from Professor Robert Scally of NYU’s Ireland House.