Bloody Sunday Inquiry

Lord Lloyd of Berwick Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lloyd of Berwick]

My Lords, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, will forgive me if I do not follow him in considering whether there should be an inquiry into the Brighton catastrophe.

It is clearly right that today we should be holding this debate on what happened on Bloody Sunday. We owe it to those who were killed and injured. In a sense, there is nothing today that we can add to what the inquiry said in the last paragraph of its overall assessment:

“Bloody Sunday was a tragedy for the bereaved and the wounded, and a catastrophe for the people of Northern Ireland”.

Those words were repeated by the Prime Minister at the end of his Statement on 15 June. I was privileged to hear that Statement and, just as there is nothing to add factually to what is contained in the Saville report, there is little, if anything, to add by way of comment to what the Prime Minister said in that remarkable Statement. I shall never forget it: it was heard in absolute silence. My noble and right reverend friend Lord Eames, if I remember correctly, was sitting beside me. As we heard it, he described the atmosphere as sombre, as indeed it was. However, at the end of that Statement, the Prime Minister said that it was time to move on, and so it is. The great merit of the Saville report is that we can now do just that.

It is easy enough to say—as many have, although not I think today—that the inquiry took too long and cost too much. I noticed that the noble Lord, Lord Shutt of Greetland, did not say that in his opening remarks and I am very grateful to him. He drew attention to the length of time and the cost but did not say that it was too long or cost too much. I am grateful for that because the task that the tribunal set itself was truly gigantic. This was an inquest into the deaths of 13 members of the public. They were not all killed together by a bomb. In one sense, it would have been much easier if that had been so, but they were killed by 13 separate shots fired by 13 different soldiers. Therefore, this was not just one inquest; it was 13 separate inquests into 13 separate deaths. The tribunal was determined to get to the bottom of each death and surely it was right to try. It has, in fact, succeeded in doing so to an extent that I find astonishing.

One of the tribunal’s difficulties was that there were a huge number of potential eye witnesses to what happened in the crowd that day. Obviously the tribunal had to listen to all those who had something to say. Therefore, I am not at all surprised that the tribunal took some five or six years out of the total length simply to hear the evidence before reconstructing, on the basis of that evidence, what happened.

There was another reason why the Saville inquiry may have thought it right to take as long as it did. There had been a previous inquiry, which has been referred to often this afternoon, by Lord Widgery, the Lord Chief Justice. The Saville inquiry referred to it in a single, rather dismissive sentence in the first paragraph of its report and never alluded to it again. The reason, of course, was that the Widgery inquiry was wholly inadequate, as we can now see, and indeed was a significant cause of subsequent unrest. The Saville inquiry was determined not to make that mistake; nor did it.

Here, I echo very much the important point made by my noble and right reverend friend Lord Eames when he said that one cannot say, as the Prime Minister did, that there should be an end to such open-ended inquiries. As my noble and right reverend friend asked—and I ask the same question—what is the alternative? If it takes 12 years to get to the bottom of what happened on Bloody Sunday, we must simply take 12 years. You cannot set up an inquiry of this kind and then cut it short by some arbitrary time limit. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Carswell, indicated that a special rule might be thought more applicable in Northern Ireland. Nevertheless, he accepted that it is time to move on there. If the Saville inquiry means that we can move on, as I believe it does, then surely, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, said, the money that we spent on it was worth while.

That brings me to my last point. We have spoken of the expenditure of money, but there was also a human cost to which I should refer. I pay tribute to the three members of the tribunal. They all bore a huge burden over many years. However, the main burden undoubtedly fell on the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville. I was very glad to hear what the noble Lord, Lord Bew, said about the enormous skill with which the noble and learned Lord conducted the inquiry.

What I now have to say about him may sound like an obituary, but I can assure the House that the noble and learned Lord is still alive. He was one of the youngest judges ever to be made a Law Lord. He had hardly settled in when he was asked to undertake this inquiry. Many Law Lords might have refused. No doubt the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, thought that the inquiry would be finished within two years, which was the estimate given by someone, though heaven knows on what conceivable basis that can have been formulated. I know that the noble and learned Lord was looking forward greatly to returning to his ordinary work in the House of Lords; in fact he was longing to come back. So he had no conceivable incentive, if anyone should suggest it, to prolong the inquiry—quite the opposite.

I have no doubt that, at the end, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, undertook the inquiry because he regarded it as his duty to do so. The fact that it took 12 years meant that, to his great cost, it was too late for him to return to his ordinary work in the House of Lords. At least he has the consolation of knowing that, like Othello, he has done the state some service, and for that we should all be profoundly grateful.