‘This is not about revenge. This is about getting justice’
“WE FELT like we were being stabbed in the heart all over again,” said Gerry Duddy quietly after learning just one soldier will stand trial for the carnage of Bloody Sunday. “We always said that a victory for one family in securing a prosecution would be a success for all, but right now it’s very hard to come to terms with what has just happened.”
Gerry is the brother of 17-year-old Jackie Duddy, who was the first to die on Bloody Sunday. It is he who is immortalised in the now infamous, heartbreaking images of a dying young man being carried through the streets of Derry, led by Father Edward Daly waving a bloodied handkerchief.
“For 47 years we have fought for justice,” said Duddy. “I will never accept there’s not enough evidence to convict my brother’s murderer. I was with Jackie that day and I still get flashbacks; we will battle on and pursue these soldiers through the courts until they are all called to account.”
Beside him, Bridget Nash held aloft a picture of her brother, William Nash, cradling a guitar in his arm. He was 19 when he was shot in the chest as he neared a barricade on one of the darkest days in Northern Ireland’s history.
“I am gutted by today’s news,” she said. “I’m not a political person and I came down here saying ‘whatever the outcome, this is the end of the road for me’. But I feel so let down by this terrible betrayal I’m fighting on.”
Theirs is the language of conflict, yet for those families who did not see charges brought today there has been no display of anger, no call to arms. This decision will not play well in the nationalist community of Bogside but there will be no return to violence, assured Jean Hegarty, whose younger brother Kevin Mcelhinney was shot on Bloody Sunday.
“Those days are over,” she said. “Londonderry has changed. This is not about revenge. This is about justice being done and being seen to be done. We want the soldiers who killed our relatives to be tried; if someone takes a life they must face the consequences. And if they were following orders from above then the person who gave those orders must be brought to trial.”
Earlier this week the families spoke of managing their expectations. Yet the news from the Public Prosecution Service was met with anguished gasps of disbelief and disappointment.
This was not the verdict the grieving families of the Bloody Sunday victims had hoped for. Gathered together in a hotel, relatives were left reeling when they learned that just one soldier, known only as Soldier F, was to be charged. But they conducted themselves with customary restraint. “From the start the families have behaved with great dignity and reserve,” says Julieann Campbell, author of the award-winning Setting the Truth Free: The Inside Story of the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign.
“They have set the tone and created a consensus among themselves about the way to move forward and get results – other people in Londonderry respect this is a personal journey only they can make.”
The day began with a sombre march through the Catholic Bogside area of the city, where the Museum of Free Derry occupies the site where the Bloody Sunday events took place.
As they moved past the “people’s gallery” of Republican murals painted on gable ends, family representatives held up laminated photographs of their loved ones, each bearing a name. Behind them campaigners carried a banner emblazoned with the words Towards Justice. They walked in near silence apart from a pause when they sang We Shall Overcome, the anthem their fathers, grandfathers, brothers and uncles had sung on Jan 30 1972.
Yesterday, at a press conference in Londonderry’s Guildhall, the families sat impassively before the world’s press cameras. “This verdict doesn’t alter the fact that all the soldiers that day were guilty and that the authorities didn’t do a proper investigation,” says Ms Hegarty. “Nobody should be immune from prosecution just because they wear a uniform. We will just have to keep going until we achieve justice.”
Londonderry may have been dramatically transformed since 1972, but for Jean Hegarty and many of the other Bloody Sunday families nothing has changed at all.