The Differences Between Saville And Hillsborough

By AM Friday, September 28, 2012

Share Tweet Share Share Email

A piece from Derry socialist and journalist Eamonn McCann which appeared in the Derry Journal on the 18th of September

One of the differences between the Hillsborough Report and the Bloody Sunday Report is that the Independent Panel which probed the deaths of the 96 Liverpool supporters placed the immediate blame where it belonged - on the most senior police officers on the spot at the time.

In contrast, Saville loaded all of the blame for the Derry massacre onto a single supposedly undisciplined officer and a bunch of squaddies. No responsibility was ascribed to General Robert Ford, for example, second in command of British forces in the North, the man who had drafted the First Paras into Derry to "police" the civil rights demonstration, the top officer on the killing ground as the horror unfolded.

The Hillsborough Report deals head-on with the cover-up of the slaughter and the propaganda operation then mounted by the South Yorkshire police, Tory politicians and low-life elements of the press. It identifies the occasion of the launch of the campaign against the victims - a meeting in a Sheffield restaurant four days after the event, attended by a number of senior South Yorkshire police officers, including chief constable Peter Wright.

The Hillsborough panel traces the notorious front-page Sun story blaming the fans for their own misfortune to a Sheffield news agency and points a finger at the agency's sources - the secretary of the South Yorkshire police federation, four senior members of the force and local Tory MP Irvine Patnick.
Saville had before him all the evidence needed to identify the authors of the cover-up of Bloody Sunday killings and the smear campaign against the victims. He had the phoney 'shot-list', drafted within hours of the smoke clearing from Rossville Street, in the handwriting of Captain Mike Jackson. He knew that the lies about the dead and wounded having been armed were first broadcast just after midnight on Bloody Sunday by Lt. Col. Harry Dallzel-Payne, and that an account of the massacre exonerating the soldiers and damning the victims was then distributed around the world on the instruction of Tory defence minister Lord Balniel.

But none of these individuals were even rapped lightly on the knuckles in Saville's report.
Saville gave us a ringing declaration of the innocence of all of the Bloody Sunday victims - understandably sparking feelings of vindication and joyous relief - while managing to avoid any conclusion damaging to the British Army, the Parachute Regiment or senior politicians. It was for this reason, as some of us pointed out at the time, that David Cameron was able to feel at ease delivering his apology.

If Saville had drawn the logical conclusion from the evidence on the role of Mike Jackson, for example, Cameron would not have been able implicitly or otherwise to suggest that the actions of the paras had been entirely unrepresentative of British Army or Parachute Regiment behaviour and would never have been condoned by any authoritative figure.

Jackson was to rise rapidly through the ranks after Bloody Sunday. By 2003, he had become Britain's top soldier, the Chief of the General Staff. Had Saville put Jackson in the frame, Cameron would not have beenable to dismiss the killings and the cover-up as an aberration.

Cameron couldn't have disowned Jackson. But he didn't have to, thanks to Saville.

The reason this aspect of Bloody Sunday hasn't become the subject of serious controversy is that that wouldn't suit the political establishment, new or old, Irish or British. Saville's report, Cameron's reaction to it, and the response to Cameron of various Northern Ireland political leaders, have been incorporated into the official narrative of events that all those who matter can feel comfortable with.
Which leads me to mention yet again the curious incident in the corridor outside the Guildhall main hall on the day of publication of Saville's report: within minutes of my having read out a statement on the report for the approval by the families, a senior official of the Northern Ireland Office confronted me at about six inches range to say that my remarks were out of order. She explained: 'Everybody was agreed this was to be a day of reconciliation.'

I have on a number of occasions wondered aloud or in print whom she could have meant by "everybody" and how "everybody" could have agreed on a response to a report if nobody had been briefed beforehand on what it would say.