Bloody Sunday inquiry in 'elaborate relocation'

The grand Methodist Hall is inquiry's new home

By Kevin Connolly At the Bloody Sunday Inquiry in London

When they built the Methodist Central Hall in the years before World War I they probably saw it as a place to which seekers of truth and justice would come.

A fund raised when a million Methodists gave a guinea each to mark the centenary of the death of John Wesley, paid for the building which remains one of the warmest in central London.

Decorated in a homely style known as Viennese baroque - the hall offers a refreshing break from the Gothic pomposity which surrounds it in Westminster.

Its deep basements provided one of the largest air-raid shelters in London during World War II, and when the United Nations General Assembly was established just afterwards, it held its inaugural meeting there.

Military witnesses

Now it is to be the London base of the inquiry headed by Lord Saville of Newdigate into the events of Bloody Sunday - that grim afternoon in 1972 when 13 Catholic men were shot dead by the British army during a civil rights march.

Bloody Sunday is of course a private agony for the city of Londonderry, as well as one of the most significant events of the modern Troubles in Ireland.

It was always intended that the Saville Inquiry should be held, in public, in the city.

Re-location was forced on Lord Saville because some of the 300 or so military witnesses argued that they would be in danger if they were forced to return to Derry to testify.

It has been an extraordinarily elaborate operation, involving moving not just technical and legal staff, but also some members of the victims' families.

Lord Saville: Began work on inquiry nearly four years ago

The live transcription system, the computer programme which provides a virtual reality model of the Bogside as it was 30 years ago, the volumes of online witness statements - all have been precisely recreated in London.

The tribunal may well spend as much as a year in Westminster and the move has added £15m to a bill which will come in at something between £120m and £200m.

For all the technology deployed, the first day of the hearings in Westminster brought a sharp reminder that Lord Saville will in the end have to rely on what his witnesses remember - or say they remember.

First to take the stand, seated before the computer terminal which displays photographs and documents, was General Sir Frank Kitson, an army commander in Northern Ireland in 1972 who is also a veteran of operations in Kenya, Cyprus and Malaya.

Fatal shots

He spent much of the day being invited to comment on contemporary newspaper reports, extracts from histories of the period, or intelligence documents from the time.

Sometimes he said he could not remember the details, sometimes he commented in general terms, or explained the general circumstances of the time in his own words.

Sir Frank, although a key man in the command structure at the time, was not even in Northern Ireland on the day in question - and could not remember even whether he had heard about it on the day.

It will be some weeks before we hear from the soldiers who fired the fatal shots on the day.

That is the testimony for which the families are waiting.

Costly exercise

The decision to conduct an investigation into how and why British paratroopers shot dead 14 un-armed men in disturbances after a civil rights march in Derry was a concession offered by the British Government to nationalist Ireland during the negotiation of the peace process.

It is unlikely that Tony Blair realised how long and costly the whole business would be, although it is clear that Lord Saville's intention is to be so breathtakingly comprehensive that it will be impossible to accuse him of applying 'Whitehall whitewash'.

In all, the process of finding answers will take perhaps six years and in a bitterly divided society like Northern Ireland, it is highly unlikely that it will be accepted as the final word on the matter.

There are demands for inquiries into plenty of other issues in Northern Ireland, not least the accusations that members of the security forces colluded with the loyalist terrorists who killed the Catholic lawyer Pat Finucane in 1989.

We will have to wait until the end of Saville before we know for sure, but it is possible the length and the cost of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry may make further such tribunals in the future much less likely.