Trouble is that "Bloody Sunday" is a very well-made TV drama and so is doubly effective as IRA propaganda. It was obviously made to sell into the USA and to stir up anti-British feeling there - which, according to today's Torygraph, it has well succeeded in doing. You can hardly blame Granada when the Saville Inquiry itself is an outrageously expensive charade aimed at promoting "El Presidente's" Peace Process, throwing the British Army's honour to the wolves. At 30 years' range it is absurd to expect any public Inquiry to arrive at "the truth" (whatever that is) and meanwhile people like M. Mansfield QC enrich themselves at our expense. Ivan Cooper's cringe-making oration towards the end of the programme even dredged up the Amritsar incident of the '20s. Well, historians of integrity have not yet accepted Attenborough's account of that day.
For me, recent events at Holy Cross school marked some sort of watershed. The Army was deployed to NI in numbers in 1969 to protect the rights of the Catholic minority and prevent any further ethnic cleansing, but the Catholics thought that promotion of the Nationalist agenda was part of the deal. 30 years, 3000 lives and umpteen billions of taxpayers money later (let us not forget that NI has the best public housing, state schools and hospitals in the UK) we saw our soldiers being pelted with petrol bombs (and allegedly being fired on) by both sides. For my money, cancel the Saville farce and give a short-notice deadline to pull the Army out. Let them sort themselves out with government expenditure reduced to average UK "per capita" levels. <img src="frown.gif" border="0">
[ 23 January 2002: Message edited by: Flatus Veteranus ]</p>