A self-fulfilling prophesy of war

Rating: 8/10 (6 February 2011)

The partition of Ireland, though contested, is defensible; the subsequent neglect by the British government of the rights of northern Catholics is not. Nor is the shooting, on what has been termed "Bloody Sunday", of unarmed protesters objecting to the absence of these rights. Moreover, these events disastrously but understandably strengthened the roots that the I.R.A. was able to put down in the Catholic community. An initial enquiry vindicated the soldiers; but many felt this a whitewash, and Paul Greengrass's film shows an alternative version of events, based on extensive research. What we see, messily and unmelodramatically, is not a clean fight between good and evil - the demonstration was certainly hostile and not entirely peaceable - but a grotesque tragedy resulting from a self-fulfilling belief on the part of the army that they were already at war. The verdict might be incompetence rather than murder; but when the incompetence is itself premeditated, the difference is a fine one. To make a film effectively endorsing one of Irisah Republicanism's more potent claims was a brave move by I.T.V.; but a more recent enquiry has largely confirmed its accuracy.