Jude Collins

Monday 14 June 2010

Yesteryear and tomorrow


BRIDE END, DONEGAL - MARCH 16: A road sign points the way to Derry on March 16, 2010 in Bridge End, Ireland. The Bloody Sunday Inquiry chaired by Lord Saville was established in 1998 to look at the shooting dead of 14 civil rights marchers by the British Army in Derry, Northern Ireland on January 30, 1972. Lord Saville and his fellow judges have spoken to 921 witnesses during the longest legal proceedings in British and Irish history. The report is due to be sent to the Government by the end of March 2010. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)
Have you heard about the satirical Israeli video, where the  Gaza supply ship people are portrayed as terrorists pretending to be peace people? It seems the Israeli government energetically promoted it, sending it to key people throughout the world before saying, ooops, we shouldn’t have done that, it’s not an official Israeli video,  oh gosh,  how careless of us. 

When I heard about it, I thought of the energetic way the British government sent its version of Bloody Sunday around the world 38 years ago. I was living in Canada at the time and a local columnist was a Belfast man called Shaun Herron, who it later emerged had loyalist paramilitary connections.  Herron didn’t mention this at the time but he did mention again and  again in the days following Bloody Sunday that he had trusted links within the British secret service and that he knew for a fact that the people shot by the British army HAD been carrying weapons at the time. I remember writing in protest to his newspaper, the Winnipeg Free Press, and being denounced by him as typical of a certain type of shrew-like Irishwoman (the sad little man had assumed from my first name that I was female).  The British, with all the centuries-old assurance of which they are capable, always aim to impress on the world their desired version of events. Perhaps tomorrow’s release of the Saville Report will change all that but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you. 

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