The Problem of Time

QUESTIONING OF SOLDIER O, DAY 336

LORD SAVILLE: 

A VERY SUBSTANTIAL NUMBER OF SHOTS WERE F IRED WITHIN A VERY SHORT DISTANCE OF YOU AND A NUMBER OF PEOPLE WERE KILLED AND A NUMBER OF PEOPLE WERE WOUNDED, AGAIN WITHIN A VERY SHORT DISTANCE OF YOU—

DO YOU HAVE NO RECOLLECTION AT ALL?

 

SOLDIER O: 

NO, SIR, 

IT HAS ALL FADED AND GONE.

QUESTIONING OF SOLDIER L, DAY 381 :

Q: 

AND THE NIGHTMARES THAT YOU HAVE, ARE THOSE RECURRENT NIGHTMARES?

A: 

YES, YES.

Q: 

DO THEY DISTORT REALITY FOR YOU?

A: 

I DO NOT THINK THEY DISTORT IT, THEY BRING IT OUT MORE VISIBLY, 

DETAILS I MISSED BEFORE, YOU KNOW, SOMETIMES SEEM MORE VIVID.

“During the vast Inquiry some of the riddles of Bloody Sunday were finally answered. 

And plenty more were raised.

This whole search for The truth had a disadvantage : 

The Problem of Time. 

Hearings for the Inquiry started almost three decades after the events of 1972. 

The Report finally came almost four decades after the day. 

A more thorough effort to get to The Truth could not be imagined. 

Yet thirty years on is no time to start getting to The Truth. 

A single, disturbing example relating to the Death of Barney McGuigan may demonstrate The Problem.

In her Saville evidence a woman who was a married mother of four in 1972 testified that the morning after Bloody Sunday a group of children were playing by the place where McGuigan had been shot. 

A small boy had been picking bullets out of the nearby wall. 

He came to her, she said, because he had found something “stuck to the wall." 

‘When I looked I saw that it was part of an eyelid. 

It was stuck on the side, about half a yard down from the top of the seat. 

I realised that it must have come from somebody who had been shot and so I put it into a matchbox. 

Later I gave the matchbox to A Priest who said that he would make sure that it was buried. 

I do not know the name of  The Priest.’

This might only provide one last grim detail of the shooting of Barney McGuigan. 

But even on this relatively simple and certainly memorable detail about one of the victims there is no agreement over What Had Happened or When.

Seamus Carlin testified that on the day of the march itself, after the bodies had been taken away, he saw a blue civil rights banner on the floor steeped in McGuigan’s blood, and that on top of that banner was A Matchbox. 

He testified, 

‘Someone gave me The Matchbox which contained Barney McGuigan’s lower eyelid. 

I took it away and gave it to My Brother who asked A Priest what to do with it. 

The Priest told him to put it on The Ground.’

John Patrick Friel testified that after the shooting (when The Body itself may or may not have still been there, he was not sure) ‘someone pointed out to me that Bernard McGuigan’s eyelid was stuck to the wall of Block 2. 

It was about four or five feet above the pavement, directly below the kitchen window of our flat. 

I had simply never seen anything like it. 

I will stand over this statement until the day I die. 

I definitely saw this but I am still confused as to the exact time. 

It is possible that Barney McGuigan’s body had already been removed from the spot where he died. 

This could have been shortly after my first sight of his covered body or it may even have been the next day.’

Noel Millar said that immediately after the shooting finished, and before the body was covered, ‘I could see the body of the man whom I had seen fall, whom I know to be Barney McGuigan. 

He was not covered by anything at this time. 

Someone drew my attention to the eyelid and eyelash which was stuck to the gable end wall at about head height. 

Someone asked whether anyone had a matchbox. 

I did so I lifted the eyelid off the wall with a matchstick, put it in the matchbox and placed it near Barney McGuigan’s head, on the ground.’

James Patrick McCafferty, who spent the day itself trying to tune in to army radio on the airwaves, testified that he went back down to the Bogside the day after Bloody Sunday and there ‘noticed about five feet up the wall on my right (the gable end) north wall of Block 2 of the Rossville Flats that there was a perfectly formed eyelid complete with eyelashes stuck to the wall. 

There was not a tear in the eyelid; it was so perfect.

‘The eyelid was stuck to the wall about five feet up and approximately halfway along the wall. I cannot recall precisely how far but believe it may have been a little further towards the car park end of the wall… Blood was splattered all around it.

‘I was drawn to the eyelid on the wall, I could hardly believe what I was seeing. 

A small crowd gathered around and some body got a matchbox out and put the eyelid in it. 

Personally I did not think that was the right thing to do, but we did not know what else to do. 

The box was placed on the ground on the civil rights banner which had been used the previous day but which was now saturated with blood and on the floor near the barricade… 

Since then I have learnt that the bullet that killed Mr Bernard McGuigan, the father of my school friend Charlie McGuigan, came out of his eye. 

From this I concluded that the eyelid that I found must have been Mr Bernard McGuigan’s eyelid. 

Although I have talked to Charlie about that day, I did not tell him what I saw.’

The story has a number of other variants from numerous other sources. 

Some claimed to have taken the eyelid down themselves. 

Others claimed that they were with the person who did but name different people. 

One said her daddy took it down, others a friend. 

For some it happened straight after the shooting, for others the next morning, some late the next day. 

Others claimed that they saw two eyelids. 

No two stories match and if you named all the number of people who claimed to have been the person or to have been with the person who did this small act, the list would run to more than twenty.

Were any of these people wrong? Certainly. 

Possibly all of them. 

But were they lying? Almost certainly not. 

They were Saying What They Remembered.

Perhaps one of them was the person who placed the eyelid by the body. Or perhaps whoever it was that carried out this small, stunned act of kindness has been dead for years. 

In any case very many people transferred something they had either seen or heard about and took it into their own memory. 

When The Call went out for those with evidence about the day to come forward, the day itself was a long way back in memory.

In the intervening years some people embellished or invented small parts of what they did on that day. Some consciously. Some entirely unconsciously. 

Some must have come to the Inquiry and decided that they were not willing to backtrack on a story they had been telling for years. 

Others may have told the story so often in pubs and at gatherings that the invented or elaborated memory had become a real one – as accurate a description of what was in their mind’s eye as anything that they actually saw. 

Still others may never have intended to mislead anyone. 

Some witnesses admitted that they feared their memory might have become contaminated over the years by images they saw subsequently on film or television.

If The Truth of what happened on Bloody Sunday was already messy, over the course of decades it became far messier. 

Memories had amalgamated, shifted and in some cases been remade. 

And of course for some, who had never had any intention to mislead, the subconscious and indeed the conscience played a consoling trick.

There were many people who had helped those who were dying. But under the circumstances not only was there little they could do; for most people, like the Knights of Malta first-aid volunteer tending to McGuigan, there was nothing they could do even when they wanted to. 

The guilt of those who saw neighbours, family friends and community figures killed before them, and the knowledge that at a central point in their own lives as well as in the life of their city they could not save somebody, meant that their consciences consoled them with facts – even created ones.

One man who was with a local priest who went to the aid of a dying boy said with rare candour, ‘I had the normal human instinct to stay and see what I could do to help, but another part of me was telling me to get away to safety as soon as I could. 

I think that one of the reasons that Father Daly is so remembered from that day is that he stayed with Jack Duddy while he died, and did not think about his own safety. 

I wanted to get away.’ 

That is a perfectly normal instinct. But it is a rare one to express. Extraordinary acts of bravery by ordinary people were carried out that day, Barney McGuigan’s efforts to aid a dying man among them. But most people are not heroes and have to find ways to comfort themselves in the meantime.

The case of McGuigan’s eyelid is just one relatively unimportant example. But it is a reminder of something crucial about this search for justice. Even during everyday incidents, people come up with wildly different versions of what they have seen. Place people amid deeply traumatic events, with crowds fleeing down narrow lanes, bodies lying in familiar streets and shots ricocheting in all directions, then try to recreate what people think they saw three decades later, and arriving at a truth becomes, if not impossible, then certainly extremely hard.

Yet this was exactly the task that Lord Saville and his Inquiry had been set. It was their task to sift through the evidence. It would take twelve years to try to find the complex and upsetting truths about what had happened in the space of a few minutes, one day in 1972.”

Excerpt From

Bloody Sunday

Douglas Murray