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.