This is the most personal column I’ve ever written. Far from his six children, face down in the street on Bloody Sunday. My uncle Paddy’s last words were reportedly: “Don’t let me die on my own.” Which he did. It was an epiphany for me, aghast at the deaths, horrified by the paratroop regiment’s criminal behaviour, appalled at the Heath government’s insouciance, astonished at the Widgery tribunal’s whitewash, and, as a journalist, disgusted at the British media’s refusal to report the facts, let alone treat mass murder with appropriate outrage. For the bereaved, for the relatives of the wounded, for the people of Derry and for the entire population of the six counties. It was, truly, a watershed event.Īfter Bloody Sunday, everything changed. It is impossible to avoid the cliché about the effect of those murders. I WAS in a foreign country, known as Britain, when soldiers shot 26 unarmed people in Derry on the 30th January 1972, killing 13 of them that day. Review of On Bloody Sunday: A New History of the Day and its Aftermath by Julieann Campbell (Monoray, £16.99)
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