Kevin Myers: 'A society that remembers never escapes past'
The pictures of Barney McGuigan being murdered by a paratrooper in Derry 40 years ago are widely known. They show a brave and decent soul being ruthlessly gunned down as he sought to help another man. Less remembered is the heroic goodness shown by his widow not long afterwards.
Clearing a way on the kitchen floor, she told her son Charles to kneel below a picture of the Sacred Heart and to swear "that I would never do anything about my father's death that would bring shame on the name of the family ... I have honoured that promise to this day."
The above quote comes from Douglas Murray's superb analysis of the Saville Enquiry, published by Biteback publishing. Bloody Sunday remains the great towering atrocity in the popular memory of the Troubles -- so much so that despite the £200m (€239m) spent on Saville, and the very abject apology from British Prime Minister David Cameron, 'The Late Late Show' nonetheless felt compelled to revisit it a couple of weeks ago, as if it was some uniquely terrible event for which justice had still not been done.
If the measure of "injustice" is that the killers went free, then it is not uniquely terrible at all, for the killers went free for most killings, and spectacularly so for the Birmingham 21, the White Cross 10, the Enniskillen 11 and the 33 Dublin/Monaghan victims, and many other multiple atrocities. Moreover, White Cross was truly unique, for each one of the 10 Protestant victims was shot with a separate handgun in a simultaneous coup-de-grace requiring 10 IRA shooters. This is a crime so revoltingly detailed in its planning that it stands without equal in the Troubles. Can we expect to see a 'Late Late' special on this one day? Probably not. Meanwhile, the organisation that did White Cross is now in power in Northern Ireland, not least, because it has foresworn repeats of White Cross. What an election manifesto.
But of course, in time, seasoned killers often grow tired of slaughter, preferring next to mythologise their deeds. So, the Good Friday Agreement has now been followed by the usual selective memorialising from the Shinners, in which the apex is the abomination of Bloody Sunday, with the Widgery cover-up, and the army promotions that followed. Quite so. To name two: Mike Jackson, Para adjutant on the day, became a much-decorated and knighted head of the British army; and Soldier F, who had so studiedly butchered Barney McGuigan, went on to become a warrant officer.
This -- as Douglas Murray observes -- was scandalous. On the other hand, have not the Sinn Fein-IRA leaders in their own way been similarly honoured? And are they not as free of regret and remorse as the Bloody Sunday paras? Martin McGuinness even turned the Saville Enquiry into a burlesque in which he displayed his winsome sense of humour. When asked what the IRA's Green Book was, he replied: "I think it means the book is green."
Hilarious; so the solemn and sworn inquiry into the butchery of 14 men was turned into a platform for his wonderful sense of humour.
Douglas Murray observed that Bloody Sunday was the worst massacre of British citizens by British troops since Peterloo in 1819, when soldiers killed 15 demonstrators near Manchester. This is often said, but it is not quite true. This August will mark the 170th anniversary of a series of violent events in Staffordshire and Lancashire that, though they dwarfed both Peterloo and Bloody Sunday, have been completely forgotten.
In August 1842, there were widespread disturbances by disaffected miners in the Lancashire/Staffordshire area. The 72nd Highlanders -- in reality, a largely Irish battalion -- were hurried in from Ireland. In Preston, soldiers of the 72nd shot dead five demonstrators and wounded 15. In Salford, five men were shot. In Blackburn, six men were killed by the army, and in Halifax, four. In Stoke, another 10 protesters were shot dead. In all, at least 22 unarmed men and boys -- and more likely over 30 -- were killed by the army.
Soldiers heading north from London had to fix bayonets to protect themselves from angry crowds at Euston station. Meanwhile, Stafford and Salford jails contained some 1,200 prisoners, arrested during the disturbances: nearly as many as the number of Irish detainees transported to Britain after the 1916 Rising.
These events were then gradually forgotten, and so did not form part of a cycle of revenge and madness, as Bloody Sunday was. Indeed -- perhaps because no journalist was present to record the details -- you will barely find a reference to them in English history books, even though in scale and death toll they vastly exceeded the largely insignificant "risings" in 1848 and 1867, which remain central to Irish republican mythology. So perhaps the old adage -- that a society that forgets its history is doomed to relive it -- is actually all wrong: it is the society that "remembers", with all the distortions, exaggerations and selectivity to which the collective memory is prone, that is doomed never to escape the bloody clutches of the past.
