‘Seething fury if Bloody Sunday soldiers aren’t prosecuted’

THERE will be seething anger if a decision is taken not to prosecute the Bloody Sunday soldiers, a community activist has warned.

Eamonn McCann said he believes Northern Ireland’s Public Prosecution Service will announce on Thursday that soldiers will be prosecuted.

However, the trade unionist, journalist and former MLA said if the decision goes the other way, there will be ‘seething anger’ in Derry and across the nationalist community.

He added that many non-nationalists will also feel uneasy.

‘If they announce there are going to be prosecutions, I don’t think anyone in Derry will be surprised; you get sense of what’s happening and I don’t believe we would have been given such notice had a decision not been made to go forward with prosecutions,’ he said.

‘I have been covering this for a long time and I have no doubt that a decision to prosecute a number of the soldiers has been taken and that is what is going to be announced on Thursday. But if the prosecutions were to be abandoned or deferred at this stage I think there would be seething anger in this town, and seething anger across the nationalist population mainly.’

However, he added: ‘I think given the mountain of evidence which has been produced, given the conclusive nature of the evidence, I would say there are many people in this society who are not nationalists at all that would feel at the very least uneasy about what happened on Bloody Sunday.’

Mr McCann described Bloody Sunday as ‘different’ to other atrocities in Northern Ireland’s past. ‘Bloody Sunday was men in uniform representing the British state coming into this area and shooting down our friends and neighbours,’ he said.

Bloody Sunday unfolded in the Bogside area of Derry on January 30, 1972. Of the 28 unarmed civilians shot by the British army, 14 died.