Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

On behalf of the Labour Party, I have co-sponsored the motion before us with the other party leaders and join them, and all Members of the Dáil, in support of the motion. It is right and proper that we remember all those who were killed on Bloody Sunday in Derry on Sunday, 30 January 1972, along with all those who were injured and all those who have suffered over many years as a result of the events of that day.

The events themselves were extraordinary and transformative. A Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march to protest against internment without trial in Northern Ireland was taking place, with more than 10,000 men, women and children taking part in what was described as a "carnival atmosphere". The march, prevented from entering the city centre by the British Army, moved instead to a rally at Free Derry Corner. Then, soldiers of the Parachute Regiment moved into the Bogside in what was subsequently claimed to have been intended as an arrest operation.

During the next 30 minutes these soldiers shot dead 13 men, and shot and injured a further 13 people, mainly by single shots to the head and trunk, assassination-style. One of the injured 13 died subsequently from his wounds.

It is not just the events of the day that we commemorate. Intimately linked with Bloody Sunday is the name of John Widgery, the then Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. The soldiers responsible for the deaths and injuries insisted that they had come under sustained gun and bomb attack by members of the IRA and fired only at people in possession of weapons. The Widgery report was produced within 11 weeks of Bloody Sunday. Faced with testimony from the soldiers, who claimed they had been shot at, while the marchers insisted that no one from the march was armed, Lord Widgery produced a report which took the army's side. In short, he firmly attached the main blame for the deaths to the march organisers, for creating a dangerous situation where a confrontation was inevitable, and he concluded that shots had been fired at the soldiers before they started the firing that led to the casualties; for the most part, the soldiers acted as they did because they thought their standing orders justified it; and although there was no proof that any of the deceased had been shot while handling a firearm or bomb, there was a strong suspicion that some had been firing weapons or handling bombs in the course of the afternoon. Lord Widgery said there would have been no deaths if there had not been an illegal march, which had created "a highly dangerous situation".

We all recall that it was immediately clear that there were key problems and inconsistencies in this report. Principally, Lord Widgery found no conclusive proof that the dead or wounded had been shot while handling a firearm, yet he accepted the soldiers' testimony and concluded that the soldiers had been fired on first. He did admit that some of the soldiers' firing "bordered on the reckless".

As Bishop Edward Daly said, "What really made Bloody Sunday so obscene was the fact that people afterwards, at the highest level of British justice, justified it; I think that is the real obscenity". However, not all persons in authority followed the establishment line, as spelled out in Widgery. Major Hubert O'Neill, the Derry City Coroner, in a statement issued on 21 August 1973, said:

This Sunday became known as Bloody Sunday and bloody it was. It was quite unnecessary. It strikes me that the Army ran amok that day and shot without thinking what they were doing. They were shooting innocent people. These people may have been taking part in a march that was banned but that does not justify the troops coming in and firing live rounds indiscriminately. I would say without hesitation that it was sheer, unadulterated murder. It was murder.

People throughout the island campaigned for a new inquiry but they met with no response for many years. I commend the families for their campaign and also the Government here which, in 1997, submitted a detailed dossier of evidence to the UK to back demands for a new Bloody Sunday inquiry. That 178-page document incorporated an assessment of fresh information about the shootings, as well as a damning indictment of the Widgery report. Some of that dossier was based on the new book Eyewitness Bloody Sunday by Don Mullan, which pulled together many previously unconsidered statements. This dossier from the Irish Government, together with other factors, in 1998 convinced the new Labour government in Britain to establish the Saville inquiry.

Lord Saville and his two colleagues effectively demolished the Widgery report, finding that soldiers lied about their actions and falsely claimed to have been attacked. The report directly contradicts the findings of the Widgery report. Lord Widgery, in his summary of conclusions, wrote:

None of the deceased or wounded is proved to have been shot whilst handling a firearm or bomb. Some are wholly acquitted of complicity in such action; but there is a strong suspicion that some others had been firing weapons or handling bombs in the course of the afternoon and that yet others had been closely supporting them.

However, the Saville tribunal's principal conclusion is succinctly stated at Volume I, Chapter 4: "The immediate responsibility for the deaths and injuries on Bloody Sunday lies with those members of Support Company (of the Parachute Regiment) whose unjustifiable firing was the cause of those deaths and injuries."

Lord Saville can right the wrong done to the dead and the survivors of Bloody Sunday by the Widgery report. However, there were other consequences to the day which no report can right. Throughout Ireland the Bloody Sunday killings resulted in a dramatic increase in support for militant republicanism in general and the IRA in particular. The direct result was that many more families in Northern Ireland and throughout these islands suffered, as result of more and more acts of violence and counter-violence, from all sides. For the next three decades, the only politics in Northern Ireland was the politics of the last atrocity and the only common experience in an increasingly divided community was the pain and suffering of the bereaved and injured on all sides.

I hope and believe we have moved on, that we are, as the all-party motion states, in a new era of commitment to building peace and reconciliation on this island and between these islands. I welcome the statement made by the British Prime Minister, Mr. David Cameron. However, while his statement may help to bring healing to the families touched by the events of that day, many sensitivities remain. In particular, I recognise that righting one particular wrong done to one particular group is a sensitive issue when so many wrongs have been done to so many other innocent victims. Some people in the Unionist community have criticised the cost of the Saville inquiry and the extent of the media attention given to the killings on Bloody Sunday. They can point, accurately, to the contrast with so many major atrocities involving paramilitaries, which received much less attention.

I have no doubt but that part of the reason for this difference is the very fact that the Widgery report was so fundamentally flawed in its methodology, analysis and conclusions. It created doubts about the innocence of those killed and injured on Bloody Sunday, and imprinted those doubts about their innocence onto the public record. Bloody Sunday shaped our history for years to come. All of us have more work to do in developing a language and approach in which we can recognise and embrace the diverse origins and traditions of our people, and the achievements and sufferings of all traditions on this island, one in which we can recognise, in the words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.

Above all today, we remember those who died on Bloody Sunday, and the Taoiseach rightly put their names on the record of the House; those who suffered injury on Bloody Sunday; and those who suffered injury since, particularly the families. We reassert, as the Saville report has done, that they were innocent, that a terrible wrong was done and that we move forward on the basis of the content of the resolution we are agreeing in the House.

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