Tuesday 15 June 2010

The Bloody Sunday Report

Lord Saville’s Report is finally published today, after 12 years. Weighing in at some 5,000 pages it is hoped, by the British government, to be a definitive statement and a marked step up from the Widgery Triburnal. Bloody Sunday, on 30 January 1972, over 38 years ago, projected the ‘troubles’ to a new level but now most of the protagonists co-exist in the same coalition and many among the population in Northern Ireland prosper. Simon Hughes mentioned today [The Daily Politics, BBC2] that it is hoped it will serve a similar healing role to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Mandela and Archbishop Tutu supported. It is a procedure that could be helpful with Anglo-Chinese history in the context of the nineteenth-century Opium Wars, an issue that this author adjudges is also unfinished business.

Contributor: Tom Wells. Sempringham [ehistory.org.uk] eLearning Office.