TA chaplain’s Afghanistan experience comes home
For the first time, a Protestant clergyman has taken part in the annual Bloody Sunday memorial event in Londonderry, the News Letter reports, 31 January 2011 .
Fourteen people lost their lives on January 30, 1972 when British paratroopers opened fire on a civil rights march in Londonderry’s Bogside area. Yesterday morning at the Bloody Sunday memorial in the city, over 400 people gathered for an ecumenical service, which was addressed by the Rev Dr David Latimer, from First Presbyterian Church Londonderry.
Speaking to the News Letter afterwards he said that a tour of duty he did in Afghanistan in 2008 as a Territorial Army padre had underlined his belief that war is “evil”. He added: “I stood beside 58 bodybags in Afghanistan and it convinced me more than ever that in Northern Ireland we are travelling on the right path, that talking around the table is always preferable to violence.
“Last June Lord Saville acquitted the dead of Bloody Sunday and it was as though a cloud has lifted and is drifting away,” he said.
“I detect a door opening and since March I have been networking in the Brandywell and Bogside areas with nationalists and republicans. We want peace and we don’t want to go back to the past.
“I am also very conscious of the hurting Protestants in my church as far away as Claudy and eventually I want to bring them together with hurting nationalists to deal with the past in sensitive ways.”
Yesterday at the Bloody Sunday memorial he expressed thanks for the invitation to speak. “Our new church is opening in May and I invited people to attend, saying I was reserving seats for my nationalist and Catholic and republican neighbours,” he said.
Martin McGuinness and John Hume attended the memorial event yesterday, although no politicians spoke.
Fr Michael Canny and Anglican Rev David Jenkins, who has been travelling from England for nine years to attend the event, addressed those who had gathered. A wreath was laid for each of the dead and there was a minute’s silence.
In a platform in today’s News Letter, East Londonderry DUP MP Gregory Campbell said: “Thankfully we have moved beyond the self defeating violence that brought heartache and misery to so many”. However he also attacked “revisionists” who he said try to suggest that the violence which cursed Northern Ireland for some 30 years started with Bloody Sunday.
“In the two and a half years that preceded that day (Bloody Sunday], over one hundred people were murdered across Northern Ireland,” he said.
Yesterday afternoon thousands of people began what was being mooted as the last Bloody Sunday march in Londonderry.
But Kate Nash, whose brother William was killed, told the BBC the decision to end the march was “very premature”.
Some who want to continue it planned to break off from the parade yesterday and go to the “Free Derry” corner. But Tony Doherty, whose father Paddy was also killed, said “the vast majority” of the families felt that after the exoneration of their relatives and a formal apology by Prime Minister David Cameron, “it was now time for us all to consider moving on”.