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CHAPTER 1
Campaign
GERALDINE DOHERTY
I don't remember Bloody Sunday. I wasn't born. But I can remember from my very early days my mother talking about Gerald, ordering a wreath around January time and saying, 'It's for your Uncle Gerald.' I suppose I was about eight when I started going down to the memorial with my mum on the anniversary morning. It was always raining. Sometimes the priest would come, sometimes it would just have been the families and we would stand around and say the rosary and then talk for a bit and go home.
When I started being allowed to go on the marches, I was always at the front, me or my mum carrying the photo of Gerald. I always walked along not looking at people, but just holding the photo in front of me. I felt proud. I felt he was looking down, looking after me.
After a while, I asked questions about him: who he was, what he was like, who he hung around with, what he did. I looked at all the photos of him. I still always see him in the denim jacket and trousers that he was killed in.
I never realised how bad Bloody Sunday was until I saw the TV film. My mum told me but I didn't realise. She was looking out from the flat and she said all she could see was the people's feet hitting the ground running, and then she heard the shouts and the screams. She was living in Rossville Street at the time, above the undertakers.
By the time I was 18 or 19, the families were getting together and I started going to the meetings, every Tuesday night up in West End Park. I really enjoyed sitting around with my mum and the other families, trying to work out how to get a new inquiry, organising to go around doors with a petition, thinking up protests. There would have been Micky McKinney, John Kelly, George Downey, Eileen Doherty, Tony Doherty, Banty and Linda Nash, and me and my mum. That would have been nearly it. The biggest reason for going would have been to give my mum support, because she was on her own. But the more I went the more I got to know and the more interested I was.
I was shocked when Derry people didn't support us. I remember a woman at one door saying to me, 'Get away you murdering Bs, youse killed my son.' She thought we were the IRA. We had doors slammed in our face and people turning away and telling us it was a hopeless case. But I turned my feet and walked on to the next door. I ignored the bad and battered on.
Then Patricia Coyle came on board. She was with Madden & Finucane at the time. We put everything we had together and she took it all away and sorted it out. I remember thinking at that that there was hope. And I remember us all being called to a hotel about a film that was being made, and I thought, 'This is good, this is really hopeful, this is going somewhere.' That's the way we went on.
It was the same hotel, the Trinity on Strand Road, that we were called to and given what Tony Blair was going to say in the House of Commons agreeing to the Inquiry. We got that before he made the announcement. We all went out and marched up the Strand Road into the Guildhall Square to let the people of Derry know that it had happened, that we'd got the Inquiry.
JOHN KELLY
The families met once a year at the commemoration and went away again. We didn't know each other. I knew very little about the other families until the campaign began. Then people became close and started recalling stories of Bloody Sunday. Every family has a story, but in reality they're all the same. They all carried the same pain. I wasn't even in the room when I was elected chairman of the campaign. I went a message and when I came back I was chairman. I accepted because it was doing something for Mickey, for my mother, for my father and all the family and all the other families.
I had never had the experience of even chairing a meeting before. I wouldn't have known if I was doing the right thing. But I always remembered, and I still do, to say a prayer beforehand – 'Mickey, give me the strength to get through this, and make sure it will work out OK.' Before I go out to a meeting I've looked at a painting of Mickey which I have in the house, 32 years old, painted by Jimmy McCartney, an old man who lived in Bloomfield. I would look and see whether he's smiling at me, and I'd say, 'Are we going to do all right today?'
I'm not a religious person – I would go to mass now and again – but I think that wee bit of prayer helped me to get through all the difficulties, all the problems that arose with directions we were going in. Maybe other families did the same thing. I don't know.
Maybe I didn't look after him well enough that day. I remember speaking to him before the march and saying, 'Look if anything happens get off sides,' realising that he never took part in a march before in his life, never took part in a riot. He was training to be a sewing machine mechanic and spent most of the week in Belfast at the Tech. He came home on Fridays, was going out with his girlfriend, rearing his pigeons, then going back to Belfast on Sunday night. So he had no time. Plus he had no interest in politics at all. I had no interest in politics. I took part in the marches but I wasn't a political thinker. I suppose it turned into a debt: 'He ain't heavy, he's my brother'. I'm carrying Mickey and trying to achieve something for him.
The first meeting we had was in Pilot's Row. We had tried it before three or four times, but nothing came out of it. I don't know what it was then, maybe a spark from the 20th anniversary. I looked around me and saw a lot of individuals – there were 30 or 40 there – and I said to myself, 'Maybe there is a chance this time.' Then we had a formal meeting in the Pat Finucane Centre and sat down and elected officers. There were 10 or 15 at that.
One of the reasons it worked was that everybody had involvement, not just certain people. We met every Tuesday night, hail rain or snow, apart from Christmas. I always looked forward to those meetings, because we had a task to achieve, even if we didn't know how we were going to do it. It was ordinary people doing this thing together. I'm a toolmaker by trade, Tony Doherty is a joiner, Mickey is a butcher, Gerry Duddy is a plasterer, and Linda, Mary Doherty and Geraldine were housewives. I have always felt those campaigning days were the best days. We bounced off one another. 'Let's go to Dublin, Prince Charlie's in Dublin, let's protest against him.' Going to see the four leaders of the main churches, approaching politicians, John Hume, Derry City Council, whoever we could think of. We realised we were going to have our ups and downs, but we were going to get on with it. At times, you felt really down. People you thought would come on board backed away. A lot of people thought we were Republicans, Sinn Feiners and all that sort of stuff. We have had to break down barriers and say, 'Look, I have my personal views, but I'm not here as a Shinner or an SDLP man or whatever, I'm the brother of someone who was murdered on Bloody Sunday.' We had to work on that for a long time. And I remember somebody coming to me and saying, 'I wonder can you help me, I've a daughter who's looking for a flat, can you do anything for her?' Jesus, Missus ...
You had your laughs, and you had your anger when people ignored you. But I enjoyed those days. I always made sure I was free for the meetings. Even my wife would say, 'Are you not going to the meeting?' I enjoyed looking around to see who would turn up and then getting the minutes out. I remember sitting at the Inquiry and somebody saying, 'Ah, I wish we could get back to the campaign days,' and I said, 'Aye.'
It was a lot of work, too. We travelled everywhere, met a lot of people. We went to England, travelled to America, Capitol Hill and the White House. That was after Don Mullan came on board. He wrote the book. We got great success from it. It was Don who mainly organised for us to go to America to lobby. We went to Boston, the coldest place I've ever felt in my life. The families then marched in the St Patrick's Day parade in New York. It was the AOH [Ancient Order of Hibernians] that looked after us.
The point of the book was to spread the word and to try and pull on board as many as we could. But we had the likes of the President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, who refused to meet the families, although eventually she did agree to meet some. A few of us said to tell her to stick her invitation up her arse.
When things developed into the bigger group, different viewpoints and disagreements could creep in, and animosity as well. I found that very annoying because this wasn't about us, but about our Mickey and Gerry McKinney, Paddy Doherty, Jim Wray, Mickey Bridge and so on. It was easy for people with the best will in the world to lose sight of that. At times I had to re-address things, I'd say, 'What the fuck is going on here?' But we are still together, I don't look upon it as the Bloody Sunday families, it's the Bloody Sunday Family, maybe strained at times, but still together. We had our difficulties, but remain strong and determined in our quest for truth and justice.
EILEEN GREEN
Tony was nine when his father was murdered. He was 18 when he went to prison for four years. So he was 22 when he came out in 1985 and started talking about Bloody Sunday.
I was working in the shirt factory at the time and I remember him saying one day, 'Do the women you work with ever talk about Bloody Sunday? Do they think the Brits have just got away with it?' A while later, he talked to me about whether we could get the families together and find out their thoughts on what could be done. I helped him to get addresses. I knew where Ida McKinney lived, and Betty Walker, and a couple of the others. Then Tony got the Sinn Fein centre in Cable Street for a meeting. I remember Betty Walker and her mother and Mary Donaghy, plus Mr Wray and Mr Kelly, and myself and Tony. I think that was the first meeting. That's how we started.
Then we thought maybe we would get more people meeting somewhere else. Some people that might have felt a bit intimidated in a Sinn Fein office. So we got a place in Sackville Street, and it just built up from there. We didn't have a name at that point.
Sinn Fein had kept the march going from the second or third anniversary, but as things began to move on Tony said he'd ask Sinn Fein to let the families do the march, which they did. With the changeover, it all broadened out. It went from a few hundred every year to thousands.
I think one of the reasons Tony took on that role was that his father was his hero. He must have been thinking a lot on it when he was inside. By the time he came out, he was determined. He never got sidetracked. He was serious. Something would come up and you'd ask him and he'd say, 'I need a day to think about that.' Then he'd come back to you.
At that time, Tony didn't have a job. He worked away on Bloody Sunday all the time. He was a great analyser. We would get a letter from John Major and Tony would say, 'Don't think this means what it looks like, because here is what he's really saying.' I was working full time and I had the other children, but anything that Tony asked me to do, I did it.
Starting to make a weekend of the anniversary was a big step forward for us all. It was important to set up the Bloody Sunday lecture. Those were the best Friday nights I ever had. You think you know everything about Bloody Sunday because you have thought about it so much for so long. But when you hear it put together from different points of view, then you see it all on a better background. Tony worked to make sure the lecture was right, that everybody who went could learn something from it. It all helped us deal with whatever came at us from any direction.
I think the first day I really started believing was the day Tony Blair was elected. Coming up to that election, I wasn't well. I was in the house all the time and I watched all the coverage. I would be interested in stuff like that anyway. I remember seeing him with his own family and it just clicked in me that here was a guy who might listen. I remembered Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus. He was arrested and exiled to the Seychelles for supporting independence. It took a change to a Labour government to turn things around and have Makarios brought back home. I had that in my head. That was the first time I ever said to people that I thought we were actually going to get the Inquiry. Blair seemed an honest man with family feelings that we could get through to. Of course, I am not talking about Tony Blair now. I am talking about Tony Blair then.
The night it was announced we were all in the Trinity Hotel. I just cried. We had been on the road so long and now the word of a lord chief justice was being overturned. History was being overturned.
The only politicians actually interested from the start were Sinn Fein. Every time they were in 10 Downing Street, Bloody Sunday was mentioned. I think there were other politicians who did become interested once we had the Inquiry but, I mean, it was too late then.
JIMMY DUDDY
All the families were very open minded in the beginning. There were differences, all right. But then they found that a space developed so that everybody could be courteous enough, even if they weren't friends. The common objective was the gel that kept everybody together. My father had been doing a great job from the start representing my uncle. I felt a certain amount of envy of the bond the families had developed before I came in at the time the Inquiry started.
We were lucky in the sense that Johnny died a couple of months after Bloody Sunday. Although it was tragic and hard for us to watch him go, we were the lucky ones of the 14 families. The other 13 didn't get to say goodbye. It was hard to see a 59-year-old man fade away so quickly. He always reminded me of Tommy Cooper. He had that presence about him, a jolly big man. That's how I remember him. That's the picture I kept in my mind as we worked towards the Inquiry.
Compared to the ten of the victims under 20, so you could say that a 59-year-old had had a good life. That shielded us to a certain degree. But the grief was still the same. Johnny and Margaret had no children of their own and were a big part of my family's life. Over the years, some members of some other families had nervous breakdowns. A lot of people had to help each other through to come out the other end. That's how the real bond developed.
I think Blair became prime minister with a lot of things on his mind that he wanted to put right and the Bloody Sunday action was one of them. He announced the Inquiry and that brought great joy. But then the Brits brought all these law cases that had to be fought. The British establishment and military were always trying to change the boundaries and the goal posts. We'd got the Inquiry, but now they wanted to get it their own way. All throughout, they were to show that they wanted it narrower and narrower.
BERNARD GILMOUR
I was at the very start of the campaign. We went everywhere. Meetings were steady, every Tuesday or Wednesday, and contacts with the Irish Government, etc. were regular. That went on for seven years before Blair agreed to an inquiry. We elected individuals to speak for us, John Kelly and Mickey Bridge, for example. They weren't to think of themselves as any better than us. They were doing this for us and that was it.
I don't think I thought about it much in political terms until the hearings started. My feeling was more basic. Everybody in Derry felt with the families. You would see it during the marches, the way we'd be recognised. Everybody knew sooner or later something would have to be done.
TERESA MCGOWAN
My husband was wounded. The families that had people murdered were maybe feeling far worse than I was. Some of them had been working in it long before we came into it. When we did join in, I saw people I knew – if not the person themselves, I knew their mothers, fathers, families. It amazed me. You just heard about the 'Bloody Sunday Families', but when I realised I knew them actually as families, it really was a shock. How could all this have gone on and me not know who they were? Of course, we hadn't been involved.
Danny never went back to work after Bloody Sunday, and I was out working. He was glad when the Inquiry was announced but he always thought it would be another Widgery. I attended the hearings for Danny. It amazed me how some of the others had learned so much about it. It was mainly through talking to them that I gained my knowledge. They were powerful, those people. They never gave in; never let their loved ones down. It opened my eyes to things I can't explain. Danny, he just wanted it all blocked out of his mind. Danny was very protective of his family. If he came in, he would ask where they all were. He questioned them, used to wait at night for them to come in. He'd say, 'Don't you go down there, don't get involved, don't know nothing.'
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Bloody Sunday Inquiry"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Eamonn McCann.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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