Bloody Sunday 50th anniversary:‘That was the 15th murder victim of Bloody Sunday - the murder of the truth’

John recalls, “I remember the day very clearly. It is embedded in my memory. I come from a big family - nine sisters and two brothers at the time, Michael was one of them. I remember Michael asking my mother for permission to go on the march. She didn’t want him to go but my sisters and I persuaded her to let him. I met him for the last time at the march itself and I explained to him, ‘if anything happens, go home’. He went and joined his friends and I went and joined mine. Michael was never on a march before, this was his first.

“Everyone was in great form, as we moved along, people were singing ‘we shall overcome’ and laughing and talking to each other - there was no feeling of fear or anything whatsoever. Everyone was delighted at the fact the march was so big and getting bigger. I remember when we got close to the bottom of William Street, before we hit Rossville Street, looking over at the General Post Office, that was the first time I seen the red berets.

“The march was initially supposed to end at the Guildhall but there were roadblocks, barricades, all over the place. So the march was turned to Rossville Street. I believe if we had have reached the Guildhall there would have been no deaths that day. I remember standing at the riot and it was like an everyday event. People were used to the riots at that time. I decided to go into the Bogside to Free Derry Corner where the organisers took the march for the speeches. I came walking over Chamberland Street and I met Barney McGuigan. I knew him because he used to give me a lift to work in the morning in the Waterside. I talked to him for a couple of minutes and then we left him. 15 minutes later Barney was dead.

“Someone shouted ‘The paras are moving in’ and that’s where I was when the shooting started, I was at the Rossville Flats. I decided to run because in those days, if you were arrested at a riot you went to jail for 6 months. I didn’t know where the shots were coming from and I didn’t know where they were going but I knew who was shooting them. I was right in the middle of it but didn’t see anyone being shot. Michael was shot about 40 or 50 yards from me and I didn’t see it.

“The shooting was continuous, we thought it lasted for an eternity. It did stop eventually and we went over to a group of people who were standing together. When we reached them, we seen they were surrounding a body. It was Gerry McKinney. As we were watching people give medical aid to Gerry, someone behind me shouted my name and it was my brother in law, James Downey, who told me that Michael had been shot. They were carrying Michael out of a house so I ran to help. The ambulance pulled up just outside Glenfada Park so we placed him in the ambulance with, I think, Gerry McKinney and Joe Mahon, two other victims. The ambulance took off down Rossville Street. The paras stopped the ambulance and I shouted out the window to tell them to let us go so we could get to the hospital.

“I remember getting to the hospital and laying him down on a trolley and a doctor and a nurse coming along to check him. They looked at me to tell me he was dead. I said to check him again to make sure. They did and they told me again he was dead. Somehow or other the word got back to my parents’ house that Michael had been shot so we were waiting for my father to come across from Creggan to the hospital. I can still see him walking down the corridor of the emergency department along with my sister and when they got to us I told him Michael was dead. I still remember him sliding down the wall crying.

“The house was jam packed full of people. I can still see my mother sitting to the left hand side of the fireplace in her armchair. She was sitting in hope because she was told Michael had been shot but he was okay, he was only shot in the ankle. But when we told her, the cries of her. She never got over Michael’s death.

“My mother was a very religious woman, she never left the chapel. But she started going to the cemetery every day then. This one day, there was snow on the ground and she was walking towards the cemetery. A woman approached her and said, ‘Mrs Kelly, where are you going with the blanket under your arm?’ And she said, ‘Michael will be cold. I’m taking it up to his grave to keep him warm.’ My parents were completely devastated by Michael’s death. My mother suffered terribly. She remembered nothing for 5 years and we thought we were going to lose her. But thank God she survived and she was there for the start of the second inquiry, but she never seen the end.

“She died in 2004 and she was bedridden because she took strokes and that. I would go up to her and she would ask me what’s going on with the inquiry. We knew she was coming to her end so this day I went up to her and told her, ‘Ma, they were all declared innocent.’ She went to her grave thinking that Michael had been declared innocent. I told a lie but it became the truth.

“My father dealt with it differently. When he died, we found a wallpaper sample book. Within it was newspaper clippings that he had kept. We didn’t know about this, he did it privately on his own. That’s how it was. The majority of the families didn’t attend the Widgery inquiry because we knew that it was going to be a cover-up. We didn’t expect any different. Our people were innocent and everyone knew that. That was the 15th murder victim of Bloody Sunday - the murder of the truth.”

The families were determined that the truth be told. It took time, but eventually it emerged.

John adds: “We started the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign in 1992 on the 20th anniversary. Nothing was really done prior to that, the families met once a year, had a ceremony and a march and that was it.

“We had no idea what we were doing, we had to learn as we went along. But we had three demands. The first was the declaration of innocence of our people. The second was the repudiation of Widgery and the third was the prosecution of the killers and those who planned it. So we set out on that campaign with those three demands.

“One thing about the campaign was it was totally non-political. That was the most important decision we ever made. We took over the march from Sinn Féin who had organised it for all those years before. Without Sinn Féin organising the march there never would have been one to begin with. We introduced a few different things and from just a march, it was a weekend. Bloody Sunday was in the background but we had to bring it to the thoughts of people again. On the 25th anniversary, five years after we took over, 40,000 people walked in that march.

“That was a major statement to the British government of what we were trying to do and were achieving. The next year we got the announcement of the new inquiry. Tony Blair announced that on January 29 1998. That in itself was a piece of history.

“It was the first time ever there was two inquiries into the same event. We thought the inquiry would take maybe a year or two. Twelve and a half years it took.

“We got it on the 15th of June 2010. It was a Tory government then that gave the results and we were surprised by the way they dealt with it. And he apologised. That day, thousands of people were in the Guildhall Square and it was a beautiful sunny day.

“David Cameron announced it, said it was unjustifiable and then he apologised. That in itself was an historical event. It was the first time the British ever apologised for their wrong doing in Ireland over the centuries. Secondly, you had a nationalist/ republican crowd actually applauding a prime minister! You’ll never see that again! That was incredible. That was a great day for us. A great day for the families. A great day for Derry. A great day for Ireland.

“We proved the innocence of our people through a lot of hard work and we tore Widgery up in the Guildhall Square, me and Jean Hegarty.

“Nearly 12 years later we haven’t received justice for our people. We’re not finished. We still have to complete the third demand, the prosecution of the soldiers.”

Bloody Sunday and the efforts to cover up the truth of what happened on the streets of Derry had repercussions and may even have extended the Troubles.

As John Kelly pointed out: “The reaction to Widgery was that hundreds of young people decided to join the IRA after Bloody Sunday, because of what they saw on the streets. Widgery told lies. But what had happened on the day itself, it changed the course of the Troubles. If you look at the figures, on the year of 1972, I think 467 people lost their lives on all sides. I maintain that if Bloody Sunday hadn’t have happened, there would be so many more people walking this earth.

“The paras carried the deaths on Bloody Sunday but they also carried hundreds of other deaths in the reaction. I remember a guy I was talking to who joined the IRA. He told me that 10 of them went to join the IRA after Bloody Sunday and when they went in to talk to the guy who did the enrolling, he told them to go away and come back in a few days.

Out of those 10, only three came back. How many did join? How many went to their deaths? How many ended up spending years incarcerated in jail because of what happened that day?

“It was a natural reaction to witnessing the murder of innocent people on our streets. If the right thing had have happened at that time, that might have had a major effect on the Troubles. But we all know...Widgery caused the end of a lot of lives too by the lies that he told.”

John Kelly was the chair of the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign that fought for truth for the victims and their families. They are still fighting for soldiers to be convicted of the murders they committed on that day.

“We will never give up on getting justice,” he says.

“The only thing I want is for my generation to bring closure to this. I don’t want to see my children or my grandchildren having to carry on the campaign the way we did over all those years. I would like to see it come to an end with the right result and the prosecutions when myself and others are still alive to see it.”

Reflecting on the campaign that led to the Saville Inquiry, John said, “We were a group of people that didn’t have a clue what we were doing. It was a learning curve. The way we planned things was off the cuff and on our feet. We always asked people for ideas.

“Some of the ideas were incredibly funny and people laughed at each other but the families came together as a unit and supported each other through all those years. If an idea came onto the table, we all discussed it. So in terms of doing something different, I don’t think so. It was all new to us and it worked. We were the ordinary people from Creggan, the Bog, Shantallow, all over the place who decided to do this campaign. Ordinary people who took on the British establishment and beat them.

“We got a second enquiry that cost £195 million. We are still in the process of hopefully succeeding in prosecutions. When we started, we never could have seen that. It was impossible. People even said to us at the start, ‘you are off your heads! You are mad! You will get nowhere with this.’ Because that was the norm. But we decided we would have a go at it.

“I’m very proud. I’m proud of what we have achieved and I’m proud of the people who did it. I’m very proud of the fact that we brought it to where we are today, what we achieved, through the sheer hard work and determination of the families and the people from all backgrounds who supported us. I can always say, at least I did my best and I did it for Michael. I did it for everyone who died or was injured that day. It was never about me. It was always about Michael and the suffering my mother and father went through after losing him.

“January is a month I detest, more so over the years. The memories come flooding back and I have to retrace the day itself. The horror and the pain that went with it. I’ll be glad to see the back of January, especially this year, the 50th anniversary.”