The cost of peace is a price worth paying

A harrowing moment in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday

SOME 12 years after it began and some 38 years after the incident it has been investigating took place, the Bloody Sunday Inquiry will publish its findings this afternoon.

Superficially, time appears not to have diminished the dividing lines that have contributed to making Lord Saville’s inquiry the longest and costliest in British legal history. We all woke this morning to harumphing about lawyers’ fees and the betrayal of British soldierhood from Unionist politicians and right wing newspapers, nothing we haven’t heard before and all rather closing the stable door after the nags have done a runner.

Whatever Lord Saville concludes this afternoon, this is an inquiry that had to take place. It has cost £200 million to stage, which the likes of Ian Paisley Jnr has claimed could have been spent on vital public services in Northern Ireland. And it has been pointed out that the Nuremberg trials cost just a fraction of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry and were concluded in a year.

Quite apart from the fact that anyone could evidence the Nazi trials every time there is a lengthy fraud case in this country, this has to be a price worth paying. The inquiry has taken on the role of a truth and reconciliation commission, and it has to provide answers that will allow the Catholic community to put this event behind it and further secure a lasting piece in the province.

Regardless of who is to blame, what might have happened had the soldiers of the Parachute Regiment not pulled at their triggers on January 30, 1972 remains perhaps the most important counter-factual moment in modern British history. This inquiry was called for the sake of the relatives of those who died that day, but its ramifications reached far further into the future and into the lives of families everywhere in the UK – and further afield, in some cases.

Just over two years earlier,  Seán Mac Stíofáin, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and Dáithí Ó Conaill had led dissatisfied elements out of the Irish Republican Army and formed the Provisional IRA, but its appeal had been limited. Bloody Sunday transformed the organisation into the protectors of the Catholics community and the anger among Republicans manifested itself in 12 months of violence the like of which Northern Ireland had never before or since experienced. In all, 1972 still stands as the Troubles’ most bloodiest year.

We will never know if the path to peace may have been more swiftly stepped along, just as we will never know if the violence (on all sides) would have become marginalised, whether people would have become sick and tired of it some time in the 1970s, just as they finally did in the 1990s. And we won’t know whether the two communities would have become less polarised.

But one thing is certain. Anyone whose lives were ever affected by the Troubles – the mothers of dead English soldiers, the widows of policemen, the children of those killed by Unionist paramilitaries, the families of two Australians shot dead in mistake at a Channel port in the late 1980s, those who served, those who were burned out of their homes – will all pay attention to the Saville Inquiry’s report today. And, for a few minutes, they will all take time to wonder what might have been.