Closure for 'Bloody Sunday' - 38 years later

DERRY - Shortly before 3pm local time, the marchers arrived in Guildhall Square singing We Shall Overcome.

Some entered the small walled space crying. Others bore giant banners carrying pictures of the 14 victims. But all of them were there because an hour later, some 38 years and fours months ago, the first victim of Bloody Sunday fell a kilometre away and no one on that day made it this far.

Yesterday, many of those who walked out of the Bogside to gather for the publication of the Saville Report outside the baroque Victorian splendour of Derry's Guildhall described the quiet, even uncertain, gathering as the literal end of a journey.

Following the route that the civil rights protesters tried to achieve on January 30, 1972, before the members of Support Company of 1 Para opened fire, the denizens of "Free Derry" entered the square with the expectation that Lord Saville's 12-year inquiry would deliver the vindication that had been denied.

Kay Duddy, the sister of Jackie Duddy, the 17-year-old who became the first victim of the shootings, summed up the sense of leaden anticipation that gripped the 5000 people who had crammed into the city centre.

She said: "We've waited so long for this and now we're finally here, my stomach is in knots. So many times we thought we were so close, and to think that soon we'll see it in black in white. I just hope I can get through the day."

Duddy recently donated the handkerchief soaked in her brother's blood - and waved by Father Edward Daly as a symbol of humane neutrality that became one of the defining images of the day - to a museum in Derry for a display commemorating the worst massacre of British citizens by their own soldiers since Peterloo.

But yesterday she claimed it back for 24 hours as a "comfort blanket" to be held when she, along with other relatives of the victims, received a copy of the inquiry findings before British Prime Minister David Cameron stood up before the House of Commons, some 600km away.

Shortly before Cameron stood up, several members of the families' group inside the Guildhall signalled to the crowds outside their approval of the report by making the thumbs-up sign and waving the front cover of a document whose exhaustiveness and cost had never been seen before in British legal history and, most likely, will not be seen again.

The reaction was instantaneous - an electrifying, almost telepathic, roar of vindication that encapsulated the way Bloody Sunday is entrenched in the folk memory of Derry, a compact undulating town of 90,000 citizens.

Dominic Martin, an IT manager who was born a week after the shootings at his family's home in the heart of Catholic Derry, had driven from his home in Belfast for a day that he saw as being "as close to a reckoning as we are going to get".

He said: "People thought the events of Bloody Sunday faded away for my generation and beyond. I give daily thanks that my kids have grown up not knowing the Troubles but as I grew up, we never forgot it.

"Bloody Sunday imbued everything. You knew someone whose mam or uncle Joe had marched that day. It's because of that that I'm here. For better or worse, Bloody Sunday soaked into every brick of this city. Whether Catholic or Protestant, you have at least three generations who have grown up in the shadow of its legacy. That's why telling the truth about it is so important."

The sprouting of newly minted buildings across Derry, from shopping centres to a five-star hotel peeping over the city walls is testimony to the peace dividend that has been reaped by its inhabitants.

If indeed it was the residents of the Bogside who overwhelmingly flocked to the square yesterday, they did so with a motivation that seemed to owe little to bitterness.

- INDEPENDENT