Bloody Sunday 50: We’ll stand with families until end of the line - Colum Eastwood

The world knows what happened on the streets of Derry on January 30, 1972.

Faced with peaceful civil rights demonstrators standing against institutional discrimination which had denied them, their parents and their children the same opportunities in housing, voting and jobs that others had, the British Army responded by indiscriminately murdering 14 unarmed men and children.

Fourteen people, six of them children, went out without so much as a stone in their hands to demonstrate their strong and peaceful opposition to the oppression visited upon our communities by a state steeped in sectarianism and they didn’t come home.

The world knows now what the people of our city have known for 50 years – that they were absolutely innocent - because of the limitless dignity, decency and integrity that the families of the Bloody Sunday victims have demonstrated during their long march for truth.

As a former member of the Bloody Sunday Trust and the Mayor of Derry during the publication of the Saville report, I have been proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with the families. Like every one in our city, I have been inspired by their campaign for truth and justice and I have been awestruck at their courage.

Ordinary people who had their worlds turned upside down by the savagery of the British Army and who then had the names of their loved ones blackened by a propaganda campaign and were portrayed as criminals by the apparatus of the British State. To mount the campaign that they have fought, to walk the road they have travelled and to face down a state determined to conceal the truth demands strength that most of us could never imagine.

And it wasn’t limited to the Widgery Tribunal. The fight to get soldiers to account for their actions, the fight to get the police to investigate, the fight to get the Public Prosecution Service to take a case, they have been fighting for 50 years straight.

Not only did they face down the state, they have done it while reaching out to others who have suffered similar injustice. The bond of friendship that exists between the Bloody Sunday families and the families of Ballymurphy and all those who are fighting for truth or acknowledgement for what happened to their loved ones is an example of the healing power that justice and the fight for justice has in our society.

The truth is that, in Derry, the Bloody Sunday families feel like part of our own family. And, while they have undone the damage of the whitewash at Widgery, the campaign is not over yet.

And, now with clear plans to prevent the investigation or prosecution of historic offences, this British Government is launching a full scale assault on victims and survivors across our society.

It is my firm belief that the British Government, much like paramilitaries, will never give up the truth voluntarily. They will never provide justice to those they have wronged without a fight.

The people of Derry have stood with the Bloody Sunday families on every step of their long march toward justice; we’re with them today and we’ll be with them until the end of the line.

50 years on, we have come so far but we’re not done yet. In the words of the Civil Rights Movement – we shall overcome.