The Irish News
Jim Gibney
"Our priest was waving a white Babygro when he was shot dead. Your priest was waving a white handkerchief. He wasn't shot dead. The difference is your priest was in the eye of the international media."
That was how Alice Harper, whose father was one of the 11 people massacred in Ballymurphy over a three-day period in August 1971, contrasted the silence surrounding that killing spree in west Belfast and the public focus attached to the massacre on Bloody Sunday in Derry in January 1972. The priest shot dead in Ballymurphy, Fr Hugh Mullan, was going to the aid of a parishioner who was wounded. The priest with the white handkerchief was Fr Edward Daly, later bishop of Derry.
In the audience at last Friday's meeting in St Mary's University College in Belfast, organised by Relatives for Justice, was Willie Loughran, the brother of another victim of a mass murder - that of the New Lodge Six, shot dead by the British army and loyalists in February 1973.
The gathering listened to Mickey McKinney, a brother of one of those shot dead on Bloody Sunday, and Eamonn McCann, the chairman of the Bloody Sunday Trust, giving an update on the progress towards the long-awaited publication of the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday.
For 38 years the families of those shot dead and wounded have challenged and overcome many obstacles in their campaign for the truth, relying as it did primarily on the determination of the families and the popular support from nationalists and republicans.
A public inquiry into Bloody Sunday was a key demand of Sinn Fein during the negotiations with the British government from the outset.
It was this combined pressure that convinced British prime minister Tony Blair to establish the Saville inquiry.
Twelve years after the start of the inquiry and over five years after its ending the families of the dead and the injured still face obstacles. When will the inquiry's findings be made public and why is the British government trying to hide aspects of the report?
The British government has forced Judges Saville, Hoyt and Toohey to allow members of MI5, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Treasury solicitors to scrutinise their report before the families and the public have sight of it.
Originally the British government was press-ganging the inquiry judges to hand over their final report days in advance of its publication to allow it, at its leisure, to scrutinise it.
Saville rightly resisted this pressure and forced the British government to accept that those agencies would read the report in his office being watched by its authors - the judges.
The families and their supporters are outraged that the British government is imposing its armed agencies into an independent judicial investigation into the Bloody Sunday massacre with the intention of rewriting sections of the report.
This imposition is an affront to the search for the truth about Bloody Sunday and an insult to the dead and injured.
It is every bit as brazen as the actions of the British Paras on Bloody Sunday and the whitewash that was the Widgery Tribunal into the killings.
It is a flagrant abuse of power by the British government.
At the very point where this inquiry stands to gain the maximum confidence from the public that it is truly independent, its findings are being contaminated by the hand of those involved in the massacre: the British MoD - the Paras' employer - and MI5, whose intelligence aided and abetted the plan to kill.
Shaun Woodward, the British secretary of state, has told the families to expect to see what he bizarrely describes as 'redactions' in the inquiry report. For 'redactions' read 'censorship' because that is precisely what will happen.
Those parts of the findings that the British MoD and MI5 do not approve of will be censored from the document.
Eamonn McCann said this was akin to letting the 32-County Sovereignty Committee scrutinise and amend the report of a judicial inquiry into the Omagh massacre by the Real IRA.
The families of the murdered have already had Widgery's whitewash. They do no want a variation of Widgery, dressed up in Saville, authored by the pen of MI5 and the MoD.
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