Adrian Dunbar is to lead a commemorative event to mark the 50th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry.
The Line of Duty actor will host a weekend of talks, walks and reflections evoking what Tony Doherty described as the years “beyond the silence” from the army, police and Westminster that families faced after the killing of 13 innocent civilians by British soldiers in 1972.
Doherty, chair of the Bloody Sunday Trust, was nine when his father was killed while taking part in a civil rights protest 50 years ago. “It is a sort of recognition of the hurt, but it’s also a recognition of the resilience of the city and the families over the years,” he said.
He and other members of the trust have been appealing to all communities to attend or participate in events, including a walk of remembrance at 9.15am on Sunday. The programme of events is designed to mark how the city has moved beyond the killings, which have left an indelible stain on British and Irish history, he said.
Participants will include the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who will give the annual address to mark the event, and the president of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, who will make pre-recorded remarks.
Doherty’s father, Patrick, was 32 when he was shot dead leaving six children behind, the youngest six months old. He had gone out to march with his wife, Eileen, who came back home a widow.
Soldiers from the Parachute Regiment had shot 100 times into the crowds, killing 13 people and wounding 15.
No one has been tried for the killings despite the 12-year Saville inquiry, which rejected the commanding officer’s claim they had acted in self-defence. Lord Saville told the BBC’s Peter Taylor last week that Bloody Sunday was a “catastrophe” that had set back peace by decades.
Doherty said no one should have to wait 50 years for justice, and that along with the other families and victims of the Troubles he would continue to fight for prosecutions even in the face of proposed legislation to offer an amnesty to any soldiers or police officers involved in historical killings in Northern Ireland.
“The ability to attain justice in any society is an absolute core value that should be ingrained in how society functions,” he said. “These things never close. Bloody Sunday and my personal experience will always be here. The issue of justice is still very, very core. It’s sort of feeling citizenship and equal citizenship and equality before the law. And we’ve never felt that.”
He said Derry had healed significantly since 1972 and praised the local Democratic Unionist party councillors, the local mayor and members of the legislative assembly for engagement and bridge-building. “They say things about what is going in Derry that you would rarely find outside the city,” he said. “They have a better feeling for the genuine emphasis towards sustaining reconciliation, because reconciliation isn’t an event, it is a process.”
There is an evolving recognition in Northern Ireland of the inter-generational trauma that children and grandchildren of victims of the Troubles can inherit from the locked-in experiences of living the aftermath.
Doherty speaks with regret about his childhood. “I have no specific memory of the killing, but when I was growing up I was always known as ‘Paddy Doherty’s son who was murdered in Bloody Sunday’. I liked the idea of being Tony Doherty from Derry. I sort of quietly resented that. You knew it very, very deeply and very, very clearly that Bloody Sunday was part of my identity, but it sort of, in a sense, robbed me of my own identity as a human being.”
He has hopes for his own two children, who are 25 and 16. “I think among our extended families, there is a great sense of pride about what people like myself, of my age [at the time] could have achieved in the face of great adversity,” he said.
“There may be an element of trauma within that which has yet to sort of reveal itself but, for the most part, it registers as a sense of pride in the Derry community and what it has had to deal with over the years.”
