Republican News · Thursday 31 January 2002

Dramatising Bloody Sunday

BY FERN LANE

Where McGovern absolutely excelled was in his portrayal of the unbearable pain of the families, much of it, one suspects, still not fully articulated even after all this time

As the slow, difficult process of establishing the truth of the events of Bloody Sunday grinds on in Derry's Guildhall, and one week after the television showing of Paul Greengrass's mesmerising drama, Bloody Sunday, Jimmy McGovern's film, Sunday, was given its British television airing by Channel 4 on Monday evening.

McGovern's piece took a very different form to Greengrass's; rather than the very tight 24-hour timeframe of the latter, Sunday covered a period, sometimes in breathless leaps, from 1968 to the conclusion of the Widgery Tribunal, and for that reason offered a greater sense of the political context which Bloody Sunday, for all its brilliance, seemed to lack.

As a piece of film-making, Sunday really took off after we had watched, newly incredulous, newly enraged, as Major General Robert Ford, played by Christopher Eccleston, briefed the press after the killings, smooth and self-assured. Like Tim Piggot-Smith in Bloody Sunday, he embodied the insouciant arrogance of an officer class used to fighting colonial wars and utterly convinced of its own superiority.

In Bloody Sunday, Greengrass succeeded in coaxing some astonishingly subtle and convincing performances from both his actors and from the former British soldiers who played the members of the Parachute Regiment. That they agreed to take part in the film (travelling to Derry, incidentally, in perfect safety and being treated with nothing but courtesy), and allowed themselves to be shown, not as the heroes of popular British imagination, but rather as racist, unthinking and murderous thugs, was curious and slightly unnerving. But their very inability to act - in the traditional sense of the word - gave the film its disturbing sense of authenticity, particularly the presence of Frank Mann, former member of the Scots Guards, in the role of Leiutenant-Colonel Derek Wilford. His veneer of cool, utterly detached professionalism in dealing with the unruly natives became incrementally less convincing as he searched for justification of the actions of the men under his command.

In comparison (and perhaps the comparison is a little unfair) McGovern's Paras felt too highly individualised and somewhat over-acted, their speeches a little too well crafted. McGovern's ability to write exquisitely structured, almost poetic dialogue was misplaced here. Your average British squaddie rarely speaks in grammatically perfect, complete sentences, particularly in moments of extreme tension.

In an interview about his role in Bloody Sunday, Frank Mann said that although still a staunch defender of the British Army and rather sympathetic to Wilford, he took part in Greengrass's film out of a sense that Bloody Sunday was a "cock-up" on the part of the army which needed "sorting out". Mann, who as a soldier spent three years in the Six Counties, said: "You've got to remember that the Parachute Regiment had been on a very long tour in Northern Ireland, almost 18 months. They were about to go home. A situation developed whereby the soldiers were so psyched up that it was almost inevitable that they were going to cross the line. I think that's what happened. As I understand it, there was a real element of wind-up that came all the way from Downing Street. The message was: sort this out.

"If the wind-up has been sufficient and some of the guys get out of hand, it isn't their fault is it? It's a bit like if you say to a bunch of kids, 'Here's some really powerful motorbikes. When you've finished your beers, go and have some fun on them.' When the shit really hits the fan, to pass the buck down and down and down so that you end up saying to the soldiers, 'We think you might have committed murder' - that's ridiculous. Paul Greengrass and I differ about this. But I don't think it's right."

In the week when it was revealed that former British soldiers who took part in the Malvinas conflict and who have since committed suicide now outnumber those who were actually killed in action, Mann's psychological insights, together with Bloody Sunday itself, illustrated what the British Army can and does do to its members. Unlike McGovern, Greengrass's Paras were merely uniforms, virtually indistinguishable from one another, both in character and appearance, dehumanised, stripped of their individuality and morality but stretched to their tensile limit. This process enables them in turn to dehumanise those identified as the enemy and thus fire without compunction into a terrified, unarmed and fleeing crowd who they see not as individual human beings but as an undifferentiated mass of lesser creatures. The Derry people are, as one tells another who appears to be vacillating, "all trouble makers, mate."

Where McGovern absolutely excelled, however, was in his portrayal of the unbearable pain of the families, much of it, one suspects, still not fully articulated even after all this time. John Young's mother, her serene, beautiful face frozen in grief - and fear for her surviving children - was outstandingly played by Brid Brennan. Ciaran McMenamin's breakdown as Leo Young at his brother's funeral was both difficult and moving to watch.

McGovern is also a master of tiny, seemingly insignificant detail used to devastating emotional effect; the flapping sole of John Young's shoe; bored, uninterested RUC officers nonchalantly smoking outside the Altnagelvin hospital morgue; Alex Nash having to ask the Special Branch man interrogating him in his hospital bed to get out of the way so that he could see his son's funeral on television; the army recruitment advertisement on the television in a Derry at the very moment that that army is engaged in the slaughter of civilians.

After the film, Channel 4 conducted a studio debate with an invited audience and a panel. The panel consisted, variously, of Mark Durkan, Michael Kelly, Eamon McCann, Anthony Farrar-Hockley (who seemed to have come disguised as Toad of Toad Hall), Kathryn Johnston (author, together with her husband Liam Clarke, of the humorous work Martin McGuinness: From Guns to Government), an academic Niall Ó Dochartaigh and unionist Willie Frazer, who complained about the cost of the Saville inquiry.

The British members of the audience, the - wait for it - 'neutrals', appeared to be in a mild state of shock and offered very few coherent opinions either about the film or the events themselves, apart from venturing that it was "a bit anti-British". For a population raised on Andy McNabb et al and accustomed to viewing the Paras as heroes, accepting them as murderous psychopaths requires a difficult and huge intellectual and emotional leap. They will perhaps have been helped on their way by the bizarre utterings of Farrar-Hockley, who played the role of the bumbling, ignorant, upper-class military type to perfection.

As for those unionists and British conservatives currently complaining loudly about the cost of the Saville inquiry, they will no doubt remain characteristically sullen and unmoved by McGovern's drama (that is, if they bothered to watch it). But every time they complain they ought to be reminded of the untold, numberless billions which have been wasted by successive British governments since partition fighting a dirty, unjust and ignominious war and to support a unionist regime so vile and sectarian that it finally collapsed under the weight of its own wilful, criminal incompetence and dismal political corruption. Just think of all the schools and hospitals that could have been built with that money.

As both these excellent films demonstrate, the cost of the Saville inquiry is one of the very few examples in the Six Counties of British money well and honourably spent.