Veteran British journalists Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson

DATE January 29, 2002 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson discuss their book
"Those Are Real Bullets," which re-examines events of the day
known as Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Tomorrow marks the 30th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the day in which British
paratroopers opened fire on a Catholic civil rights march in Derry, Northern
Ireland, killing 13 unarmed people and wounding 14 others. It marked a
turning point in the escalation of the conflict, inspiring many outraged
Catholics to join the IRA. The day after Bloody Sunday, my guests British
journalist Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson were sent to Derry as part of a
team of reporters investigating what happened for The Sunday Times of London.

In April of 1972, the official British government's report was released,
saying that the military fired in self-defense or in the defense of others.
Shortly after, The Sunday Times published its investigation finding that the
military's use of violence was out of all proportion to what it faced and
reckless in the extreme.

Reporters Pringle and Jacobson have returned to Derry over the years,
continuing to report on the conflict. Their book "Those Are Real Bullets"
will be published in paperback in March. Meanwhile, they've become part of
the story. A new inquiry into Bloody Sunday was opened by the Tony Blair
government. The Sunday Times complied with a request to turn over their
reporters' notes without first asking for the reporters' permission, as we'll
discuss later. But let's start with the story of Bloody Sunday.

Let's go back 30 years. What was the state of the troubles just before Bloody
Sunday?

Mr. PETER PRINGLE (Co-author, "Those Are Real Bullets: Bloody Sunday, Derry,
1972"): Well, basically what you had was the end of the peaceful civil rights
movements, the marches, which had started in 1968. They were basically about
housing discrimination, job discrimination, school discrimination.

GROSS: Against Catholics.

Mr. PRINGLE: Against Catholics, yes. And, you know, those marches drew on
the civil rights movement to a large extent in the United States, and it led
on to some violent demonstrations with the rearming of the IRA. And when you
reached, let's see, about six months before Bloody Sunday was another turning
point, which was the beginning of so-called internment. And this was the
point at which the British army rounded up all the 300 or so believed suspects
of the IRA--most of them were older members--and put them in jail and held
them there without due process and...

GROSS: And at this point, the British army was becoming like the police force
in Northern Ireland.

Mr. PHILIP JACOBSON (Co-author, "Those Are Real Bullets: Bloody Sunday,
Derry, 1972"): Well, it had effectively replaced the police force. The RUC,
the Royal Ulster Constabulary, was not able to venture into any of the no-go
zones. Those were in the Catholic heartlands in the ghettos of Belfast and
Derry. If they did, they required a huge army escort. The Catholics had
essentially refused to recognize the authority of the police. The army were
then dragged slowly and, as it now is very clear from memorandums, very
unwillingly in the role of policing a civilian society, for which the army was
completely untrained, and a society which increasingly resented its presence,
having once welcomed it with cups of tea as liberators of the Catholic
community.

GROSS: Now you point out that the army that was policing Northern Ireland had
actually cut its teeth on counterinsurgency campaigns in the jungles of Borneo
and Malaya, in the deserts of Oman when, you know, England was at the end of
its period as a colonial power. And now they were enforcing the law on fellow
Britons. What impact do you think they had on their approach to enforcing the
law?

Mr. JACOBSON: Well, it was completely unknown territory as far as British
army was concerned. First of all, one has to remember they were doing it not
live on television but in front of a British audience, that every evening
British television viewers on the mainland saw what was happening in the
streets of Belfast and Londonderry. They heard interviews with generals
trying to explain why British troops could be seen battening and teargassing
British citizens. And the army was completely unequipped for this. You've
got to remember that it was an army that was largely--apart from
counterinsurgency and distant colonies where nobody took a great deal of
interest, it was an army trained to fight the Russians in Europe as part of
NATO. So you were putting soldiers in trained for the battlefield, armed with
battlefield weapons, into a situation that they had no experience of, really
no training for. And the inevitable happened, that frictions between army and
civilians very quickly developed. And then they were caught up in an
increasing spiral of violence on both sides.

GROSS: What was the initial march about on January 30th, 1972?

Mr. PRINGLE: It was an anti-internment march. It was against the picking up
mostly in the middle of the night of suspected IRA members and interning them
without trial. And during that six months from the middle of 1971 until
January '72 was a time when those interned, as we discovered on The Sunday
Times Insight Team, were being very roughly treated indeed inside the jails of
Northern Ireland. And, indeed, they were undergoing torture to the extent of
what Amnesty International would call torture. And we discovered that. We
uncovered it. We wrote about it. And it was an increasingly unpopular move
by the army, and increasingly they had marches against it to the extent that
all marches by the time Bloody Sunday came along were banned. And this was an
illegal march which had been planned by the Northern Ireland civil rights
movement. And the army knew about it. The army had forewarning of it.
Everybody knew about it. And they decided that they would stop this march,
stop the marches going to the center of Derry to the Guildhall to make their
speeches, and the rest, of course, is history.

GROSS: So the British army knew that this march was going to happen. The
army was worried about it. What were some of the controversies and
disagreements within the army about how to proceed, what the army should do
for its strategy during the march?

Mr. JACOBSON: The local commander in Derry, a brigadier who had two regiments
under his command who were very experienced in Derry--they knew the highways
and the byways of the Catholic areas, in particular Bogside--the commander, it
becomes clear as you read material particularly recently developed by Saville,
had great misgivings about attempting to stop the marches by force if
necessary. But he was under orders from his superior officer, who was the
general in charge of Northern Ireland. And gradually, one sees a plan
emerging by which the march will be stopped and the maximum number of rioters,
who were described as young Derry hooligans--these were seasoned teen-age
rioters who turned out most afternoons to pelt the army with bricks and
stones--there would be--a circled scoop-up operation would be conducted to net
as many of these people as possible and get them off the street. The army was
talking about 300, perhaps a maximum of 300, who would be arrested and charged
and hopefully imprisoned.

GROSS: The teen-age stone throwers who you mentioned--they were considered
troublemakers and they were dangerous, they were a threat to the army, but
they weren't members of the IRA. So why were the stone throwers considered
that important by the military?

Mr. PRINGLE: The problem for the army was that every single afternoon, as
Phil said, around about 3 or 4:00, or when school came out, they would gather
at a place called Aggro Corner. And Aggro Corner was kind of the entrance to
the Bogside and the entrance to the no-go area, the free area that had been
declared free Derry by the people of Derry. And inside that area it was
almost impossible for the troops to go on patrol without being sniped at,
fired at by the IRA. And what happened was that that free Derry area became a
sort of haven for these young Derry hooligans who every now and again, you
know, strayed into the center of town, the IRA strayed into the center of
town, and this was a great embarrassment for the British government. And
Whitehall and the then-Prime Minister Ted Heath decided that this
embarrassment was enough, and they had to do something about it. And as Phil
said, it was tricky to know what to do. You know, the young stone throwers
were only throwing stones, and perhaps nail bombs and petrol bombs every now
and again, but it wasn't a concentrated lethal force. But they were providing
cover for IRA snipers. So the army felt that it had to do something about
these stone throwers.

GROSS: Now you described how the march on Bloody Sunday started off as a
civil rights march to specifically protest the internment of IRA leaders,
leaders who were apparently being tortured during their internment. How did
the civil rights march ending up turning into a riot?

Mr. PRINGLE: The march began, as it were, at the top of the hill in the
Creggan Estate and came down into the Bogside. And the army's idea was that
it should be contained within the Bogside area. And so they had barriers at
various points of entry into the Bogside. And the one barrier which was
important was the one which stopped the marchers going towards the Guildhall,
which is in the center of the city where they were going to have their
speeches and their rally. And when the marchers got down to this particular
barrier, which was at the bottom of a street called Williams Street, they
found this barricade of barbed wire and armored cars and troops in riot gear
all ready to fire CS gas and rubber bullets.

GROSS: CS gas is tear gas.

Mr. PRINGLE: Yes. And this was nothing unusual in itself. I mean, it had
been--you know, they had experienced this kind of rioting before. The troops
had experienced it. The rioters had been in situations where CS gas had been
hurled at them. But what they tried to do, what the marchers tried to do and
the civil rights organizers of the march, when they saw these barriers, they
tried to turn the marchers back into the Bogside, stop them going down
Williams Street, but they failed. And in the lead were many of the so-called
Derry young hooligans who every day had been pelting the army with stones at
Aggro Corner. And they got to the barrier first and very quickly it became
clear that this was going to turn nasty. And they started picking up stones
and then they picked up larger chunks of concrete and iron bars, etc., and
started hurling them at the troops. And the troops, who were not paratroopers
manning the barrier, decided that they had to retaliate, so they started
firing rubber bullets and tear gas, and eventually it turned into a full-scale
riot.

GROSS: And how did the paratroopers with the actual rifles move in?

Mr. JACOBSON: Well, the paratroops had been designated to be the force, the
scoop-up force. They were the toughest of the troops around. They regarded
themselves as elite troops. In Belfast they had a fearsome reputation for
busting up riots with maximum violence, though not firearms. And they had
been distributed at two or three points on the basis of a plan, which soon
started to come apart, that they would be able to surround the rioters and
drive them towards a holding area, where they could all be picked up and
arrested. However, the plan, which was thrown together at very short notice,
proved to be pretty well ineffectual in the circumstances.

So what we had was the paratroop commander, Colonel Wilford, making up his
tactics pretty much on the hop as the situation developed, and it developed
very quickly. The paratroopers were themself very hyped up. It's clear from
some of the contemporary testimony from members of the paratroop regiment,
that they believed that they had been sent down to do a job that the other
army regiments couldn't do, and that they were going to do it and demonstrate
how tough they were and with one bound, so to speak, clean up the Derry
problem.

GROSS: Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson are the authors of a book about
Bloody Sunday called "Those Are Real Bullets." We'll talk more after a break.
This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Tomorrow is the 30th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. My guests, British
journalists Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson, are the authors of a book about
it called "Those Are Real Bullets."

Have you been able to find out if there was an order given at any one point to
go ahead and open fire?

Mr. PRINGLE: Well, who fired the first shot, of course, is one of the great
mysteries that we hope that Lord Saville will be able to unravel.

GROSS: Do you mean which side, or...

Mr. PRINGLE: Yeah. Because shots were fired from both sides. And the total,
if one was to look at it like that, is something like 108 shots from the
paratroopers to the dozen-plus, maybe up to 30, 40, from the IRA. But what is
quite clear is that all the shots--most of the shots fired by the paratroopers
were fired before most of the shots fired by the IRA. Then the question is,
who fired the first shot? They mystery is that as they came down Williams
Street and before they got to this barrier, and before the rioting really
started, there were three shots from the army and one shot from the IRA.

The three shots from the army were said to be by the soldiers in testimony at
the original inquiry, were aimed at two of the marchers who were said to have
been throwing nail bombs or some kind of explosive bomb, homemade bomb, at the
paratroopers, who were simply sitting and waiting for the order to go in and
arrest them. The two who were hit by these three shots were a 15-year-old boy
and a 59-year-old man. Neither, according to the eyewitness accounts, not
only of those who were on the march, but independent observers in the sense of
media--and there were a lot of media there--saw any nail bombs, heard any nail
bombs. And so it is assumed that those from the testimony, one could infer
that they were mistaken. The paratroopers who fired at them were mistaken.
They were both wounded in the leg.

GROSS: You tell the story in your book about Bloody Sunday of several of the
people who were killed by British paratroopers. Tell us the story of Barney
McGuigan.

Mr. PRINGLE: Well, this comes almost at the end of the shooting. Just to put
you in the picture here, the actual shooting itself took place in an area
about the size of a football field. Basically what happened is that the
paratroopers rushed in, the marchers fled, as did the young hooligans. And
some of them got behind barricades; they got behind low walls; they got behind
little side streets, and the paratroopers chased them into this area the size
of a football pitch. And by the time they got almost to the other end of the
pitch, as it were, if you can imagine that, few of the marchers were still
there. And that's when the last of the killings happened.

And in the particular case of Barney McGuigan, he was a 41-year-old father of
six, an unemployed painter. He saw one of the wounded, or one of those who
was trying to crawl away--run away or crawl away from the oncoming
paratroopers. And this particular person--the other person, was--name was
Paddy Doherty--he was actually crawling at the time that he was shot from
behind. The bullet entered his buttock, came up into his chest and killed
him. But before he died, he was crying out for help. And Barney McGuigan was
taking cover behind a telephone box--one of those red telephone boxes that you
remember from Britain. And he was saying to the others, `I can't stand this.
I can't stand this. I have to go to the aid of Paddy Doherty. I have to go
and help him. I have to bring him in--out of the open and into some cover.'
And they all said, `No, no, no. You mustn't go out. You mustn't go out.
They'll shoot you.' And he said, `They won't shoot me if I wave a white
handkerchief.' So he took out his hanky. He put it above his head. He
started to wave it. And he went out, took from the cover of the telephone box
towards the dying Paddy Doherty. And as he came out from cover, he was shot
in the back of the head and he died instantly.

GROSS: One woman was shot on Bloody Sunday. What was her story?

Mr. JACOBSON: Well, this was Peggy Derry, who was, I think, a mother of 16...

Mr. PRINGLE: Fourteen, I think.

Mr. JACOBSON: ...14, yes--who was caught in the main area to which marchers
were retreating when the paratroopers first came into the enclave. She was
quite unmistakably a woman. She was dressed in skirt and I think she had
boots with high heels on. She was shot in the leg, a wound that almost took
her leg off. And this was at quite close range. And while she was on the
ground, her testimony records, she begged the paratrooper not to kill her,
because he had taken aim at her again, because she was the mother of 14. He
didn't shoot. And she was subsequently carried away to some houses nearby
where medics from the Knights of Malta organization, which is an organization
that used to go out on riot days to treat what were usually small-scale
injuries--cuts, bruises and bumps. Desperately tried to staunch the bleeding.
They were able just about to do that, although her leg was in a terrible mess,
and she was subsequently evacuated to hospital.

GROSS: So are these two people whose stories you just told us fairly typical
of the people who were shot on Bloody Sunday?

Mr. PRINGLE: You have a cross section here. You have some of the
stone-throwing youths. Some who had been involved in stone throwing were
killed. Say half a dozen of those maybe. And then you have others who were
literally running away from the advancing paratroopers. One was a worker at
the local newspaper. He was a compositor. And he was taking pictures with
his cinecamera. He was killed. Another one was a businessman who happened to
be coming out from an alleyway at the opposite end to where a paratrooper was
advancing. And the paratrooper simply shot him. There's absolutely no doubt
that he had never had anything to do with the IRA and had not been involved in
the rioting. So it wasn't only those who were in the forefront, as it were,
only those who were the object of the paratroopers' task, which was to go and
arrest the young hooligans, but it was others as well.

GROSS: Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson are the authors of a book about
Bloody Sunday called "Those Are Real Bullets." They'll be back in the second
half of the show. I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: Coming up, more on Bloody Sunday. We continue our conversation with
journalists Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson. And Maureen Corrigan reviews
"Gone," the debut novel by Martin Roper.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Tomorrow is the 30th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the day that British troops
opened fire on a Catholic civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland,
killing 13 people and wounding 14. My guests, journalists Peter Pringle and
Philip Jacobson, were part of a team of reporters from The Sunday Times of
London which investigated what happened. They've returned to Derry several
times over the years. Their recent book about Bloody Sunday, called "Those
Are Real Bullets," will be published in paperback in March.

You were both sent by The Sunday Times of London to Derry to investigate what
happened on Bloody Sunday, and I think you were sent virtually, like the day
after, yeah?

Mr. JACOBSON: Yes, that's correct. Peter arrived before me, but the Insight
Team, as run then by the editor of the papers, Harold Evans, had a brief,
really, to descend on any incident that seemed worth closer investigation.

GROSS: Peter, describe to us what Derry looked like, and what the emotional
state of Derry was when you arrived just after Bloody Sunday.

Mr. PRINGLE: Well, people were in shock, in great shock, wandering around,
not knowing even then exactly how many people had been killed and wounded. It
took some time to get the precise figures out. It took an even longer time to
understand how many people had been arrested. Some 50-odd people were
arrested, and they were processed, so many families didn't know where their
loved ones were. But the overall feeling was: How could they have possibly
done this? How could the army have come in--paratroopers or not--how could
they have shot these people, killed these people, many of whom everybody knew
were totally innocent, and the others, if they had been involved in rioting,
it was to be throwing stones, or bricks, or chunks of concrete or iron bars.
It was not have a gun, or even to throw a nail bomb or a petrol bomb.

GROSS: Philip, do you feel that the investigation that you did brought you
any closer to being able to answer those questions? How did the British army
end up opening fire, and also, how did they choose their targets? Why were
the people who were shot, shot? Why those people?

Mr. JACOBSON: Well, yes, I do. I think in the circumstances, we did a
reasonably thorough job, with a great deal of analysis. We were able to
demonstrate that four or possibly five paratroopers fired all the killing
shots, and probably all the shots that wounded people. We were able to narrow
that down to a small unit, a subunit of the paratroop regiment that had been
particularly involved, and from there, we were able, basically by analyzing
the type of wound and a great deal of cross-examination of witnesses--we did
all our own interviews, again, with people who had given statements, so that
there was original material--and step by step, I think Peter would agree, we
arrived at the conclusion that discipline had broken down on the ground, and a
number of paratroopers had fired to kill at unarmed people.

GROSS: And why, do you think?

Mr. JACOBSON: My own theory is that, as I said, discipline broke down on the
ground. The men were hyped up--as I'd said previously, this is an elite
regiment, designed for smash operations, as they used to call it. I think
that once the events took control of the situation, a number of these people,
their training, their discipline, or possibly a blood lust occurred, and they
opened fire in--even Widgery concluded that their conduct, in some cases,
bordered on the reckless. Well, I would say it bordered on the murderous.

GROSS: What were some of the challenges you found, trying to reconstruct what
happened, when you got to Derry shortly after Bloody Sunday?

Mr. PRINGLE: Well, we had tremendous advantage in that the event had been
extremely well-covered by the media. There were television pictures. There
were lots of still pictures. There were radio reports. So we first of all
started by gathering all those, and then we were helped by the civil rights
movement itself, who took statements from as many of the eyewitnesses as they
could. And as Phil said, then we interviewed those people. We were able to
find some of the wounded still in hospital. We were able to go and interview
the IRA officers, command.

And then we were particularly helped by an extraordinary event, which was that
a radio ham, a man who owned a television and radio repair shop, used to spend
his Saturday afternoons recording British army radio messages on some of his
radios that he'd built himself. And it was his hobby. And on this particular
day he recorded an absolute full recording of the time that the paratroopers
drove into the city to the time they started shooting to the time they ended
shooting. The tapes went for something like, in that case, three or four
hours. And we were able to get hold of those tapes and we transcribed them
and we were able to piece together from those tapes the exact movements of the
army at any particular given minute. And, of course, when it came down to the
precise killing time, which was only about 20 minutes, the shooting time, we
were able to pinpoint--from knowing where the bodies were, as it were, we were
able to find out which units came into the area at what particular time.

GROSS: What was the tone of the voices on those tapes?

Mr. PRINGLE: It was very British army, very matter-of-fact, as one would
expect, very unruffled and very chilling to listen to it in retrospect.

GROSS: Phil, I believe that the British government issued a ban against
reporting on Bloody Sunday. Could you describe what that ban was?

Mr. JACOBSON: Well, the immediate aftermath of Bloody Sunday, there was some
debate and some disagreement as to whether the appointment of Lord Widgery to
head the first tribunal would invoke the ...(unintelligible) law in Britain
that's been extremely effective over the centuries almost in limiting media
freedom. In our own case our editor, Harold Evans, decided that it would
probably be counterproductive to go ahead and publish on the first Sunday
afterwards, A, because we didn't have the bulk of material that we were
looking for, and B, because it would almost inevitably draw enormous hostility
down on the head of The Sunday Times and make our job more difficult in the
field.

GROSS: So what was the strategy you used?

Mr. JACOBSON: Well, we simply went ahead and our instructions from Harold
Evans were when you've got enough, tell me and we'll publish as soon as
Widgery is published. And we published the first Sunday after the Widgery
report came out. As Peter said, it was a counterinvestigation. And I think,
in retrospect, that we undermined Lord Widgery's conclusions very thoroughly.

GROSS: Compare your conclusions and his.

Mr. PRINGLE: Well, he concluded that the British army had been under fire,
that the paratroopers had fired only at legitimate targets--that is, people
with weapons or bombs--that discipline at all times had remained. He went out
of his way to praise the discipline of the parachute regiment. And he went
out of his way to impugn the evidence of eyewitnesses, of civilians who'd been
on the march.

Ours was exactly the reverse. We looked very closely into the conduct of the
parachute regiment. We laid great store on eyewitness testimony from people
that we believed to be truly impartial and trustworthy. And we arrived at a
conclusion which was more or less diametrically different from Lord Widgery's
in that we believed that the first shots had been fired by the paratroopers,
that there had been some IRA response. But in general the response was
grotesquely out of proportion.

GROSS: Of all the people who were arrested on Bloody Sunday, were any of them
actually brought to trial and convicted?

Mr. PRINGLE: No.

Mr. JACOBSON: Not a single person. Not one.

GROSS: How many people were arrested?

Mr. JACOBSON: Approximately 50. The police processed all the charges and put
them before the director of public prosecutions for Northern Ireland. It was
decided that in none of those cases would the evidence stand up and all the
cases were dropped.

GROSS: My guests are journalists Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson, authors
of a book about Bloody Sunday called "Those Are Real Bullets." We'll talk
more after our break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guests are journalist Peter Pringle and
Philip Jacobson. They're authors of the book "Those Are Real Bullets: Bloody
Sunday, Derry, 1972."

Wednesday, tomorrow, is the 30th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when the
British army shot 27 Catholics during a civil rights march in Derry. Five
were shot in the back; 13 died.

In April of 1972, just a few months after Bloody Sunday, the British
government released a report saying that the soldiers fired in self-defense or
in defense of others who were threatened, and that the soldiers only fired at
identified targets, at gunmen and at bombers. But in 1974, the government
acknowledged that everyone who was killed in Bloody Sunday was actually
innocent. And then Tony Blair recently authorized a new investigation. That
report hasn't been released yet. What was behind Tony Blair's authorization
of the new investigation into Bloody Sunday?

Mr. PRINGLE: Well, I think what happened was that, don't forget, we were in
the middle of the peace process, as it's called. And although this is an
unstated thing by Tony Blair's government, what happened was that they wanted
to push that along as far as possible. And an open wound in the peace process
was Bloody Sunday. And so in order to get over that, they ordered a new
investigation. It was long overdue. Nobody knew where it was going to go.
Nobody knew if they could actually get at the truth. Nobody knew how much
money was going to be spent. As it turns out, there is a sort of open budget
to this. It's already been going on for more than two years. They've spent
more than 50 million pounds, $75 million, and they're likely to spend double
that before they finish, for another two years.

GROSS: Now you're both actually a part of the story now. Why don't you
explain how you are kind of unwilling participants in the British government's
reinvestigation of Bloody Sunday?

Mr. JACOBSON: It all began when Peter and myself were notified individually
by the inquiry, which is headed by Lord Saville, a high court judge, that our
material, the material we'd gathered during our investigation, our original
investigation, which had been left with The Sunday Times archive, had been
handed over en masse to the inquiry, which meant that they had all our raw
notes, the reports, the inquiries, the analysis that we carried out on the
ground. And it really developed from there. We were told quite early on that
we would be required as witnesses. There was a subtext that we could be
subpoenaed if necessary, although so far exchanges have been fairly polite.
But just in these last couple of days Peter and myself have received what
amounts to a final instruction from Lord Saville that we will be required to
give evidence and we will be--cross-examined is not quite the right word. We
will be examined on the reports, the testimony, the analysis that we did at
that time.

GROSS: Will you go along with that?

Mr. JACOBSON: Yes, subject to certain conditions. I think Peter would agree
that we made our position very clear at the beginning that we would not give
names of people that we'd interviewed under guarantees of anonymity unless we
were released by those persons concerned.

GROSS: I'm wondering, since you've done so many interviews of so many
different people on each side involved with Bloody Sunday, have you found that
in trying to investigate what happened that what people tell you is sometimes
self-serving, that, you know, people will put this spin on their story that
makes their side look best, whether they're part of the paramilitary or part
of the IRA or, you know, a peaceful marcher in the civil rights march?

Mr. PRINGLE: Well, of course, that does happen in situations like this, but
Insight was a fairly sophisticated and extremely experienced group of
journalists. And in our initial interviews we took enormous care to
cross-check. We had a large chart into the wall of our hotel where we could
identify that marcher A was here and so marcher B at this point. Marcher C
then joined them. And we were able to construct a skeleton, really, a fairly
complete skeleton, of who was where at what time. Photographs were extremely
helpful to us because people could--it's such a small community that if you
showed one photograph to a couple of people in the pub, they'd probably be
able to identify 70 percent of the people there that are shown in it.

We did as well as we could at the time. I think the problem is now, going
back as we did for our book, we find that memory plays tricks. Some people
have changed their statements. Some people have genuinely forgotten what
happened and have told Saville they can't remember. And some people, it has
to be said, can't recall ever having spoken to The Sunday Times Insight Team.
That's, I think, quite normal, and it's something that Saville is having to
get to grips with.

GROSS: What impact has covering Bloody Sunday had on your lives?

Mr. JACOBSON: Gee. I think, for myself, going back was a extraordinary
experience, not only just to go over my notebooks again but to go back and to
see those same people 30 years later in not all that much better position than
they were before, quite frankly. The British army is still there. There has
been a tremendous ghastly record of bombings and shootings since that time.
The unemployment rate is down, but it's still high, much higher than the rest
of United Kingdom. They don't have much money. They still live in exactly
the same houses, which are not well put together. They still have not much
prospect of change in their lives. But their spirit, and this is what really
stunned me, is indomitable. Under this regime they have a fortitude which
always stunned me. I saw it then in 1972, and it was still there when we went
back after all that time.

GROSS: Philip, what about you? What would you say has been the impact of
covering Bloody Sunday on your life?

Mr. PRINGLE: On my life? Well, I stayed as an Insight reporter for some time
after that and then became a kind of roving foreign correspondent, which
involved, inevitably, covering wars and disasters. But as Peter says, the
intensity of Bloody Sunday in Derry, which is a tiny city in the Catholic
community, was simply a part of the--I don't think I've ever been involved in
such a claustrophobic story where everywhere you turned you met somebody who
had been involved, who had lost a loved one, who had seen something terrible
on that day.

GROSS: I'm wondering if Bloody Sunday affected the way you each see your own
government, the British government?

Mr. JACOBSON: Well, I certainly have no doubt that Bloody Sunday represents a
huge blot on the record of British justice and, by extension, the government
of the day. We now know from Cabinet papers that have only recently been
cleared for publication that Mr. Ted Heath, the prime minister, was determined
to present the army's actions in the best possible light, and he made that
very clear to Lord Widgery in appointing him. His words were to the effect
that `We're fighting a propaganda war here as well as a military war, and you
should always remember that.' Now that is not the role of a prime minister
intent on an impartial inquiry. Mr. Blair, by contrast, though he might well
regret the time and expense involved in Saville by now, Mr. Blair went into
it, I think, in a better spirit, saying, `Find out what you can. Spend what
is necessary. Take whatever time you require to produce your report and come
up with the truth.'

GROSS: Now do you think that your conclusions are going to lead this new
report to a very different final conclusion than the original report?

Mr. JACOBSON: Well, I sincerely hope so because, immodestly perhaps, I think
that The Sunday Times Insight Team, with the material available at that time
and in the time limit that we imposed upon ourselves, got it as nearly right
as it was possible to do. Saville, obviously, with his huge resources,
immense financing and open time limit has been able to gather a great deal
more information, much of it extremely valuable and a lot of it, I think, very
damaging to the Ministry of Defense's case. And in my personal view, if he
fails to come up with a judgement that flies straight in the face of the
Widgery inquiry, the original inquiry, then certainly the people of Derry, the
Catholic community of Derry, will believe that he has failed them, that
British justice has failed them again.

GROSS: So what's at stake here?

Mr. PRINGLE: A belief in British justice by citizens of the United Kingdom,
but also, to a degree, the peace process, although I don't think even an
adverse verdict, adverse findings from Lord Saville, will have any effect on
the level of violence. But there is a huge question of confidence here that
Catholics have a come a very long way from 1972. But if Saville fails to meet
their expectations, which are very high, then I feel that the Northern Ireland
troubles will be open-ended again.

GROSS: Well, I want to thank you both very much for talking with us.

Mr. PRINGLE: Thank you.

Mr. JACOBSON: Thank you.

GROSS: Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson are the authors of a recent book
about Bloody Sunday called "Those Are Real Bullets." It will be published in
paperback in March. Tomorrow is the 30th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.

Coming up, Maureen Corrigan reviews "Gone," the debut novel by Irish writer
Martin Roper. This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: Martin Roper's newly published novel "Gone"
TERRY GROSS, host:

Martin Roper is an Irish writer whose newly published first novel "Gone" was
excerpted a couple of months ago in The New Yorker. Book critic Maureen
Corrigan says The New Yorker must have been very selective in choosing what
parts of this novel to use.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN:

After I finished Martin Roper's new much-ballyhooed debut novel called "Gone,"
I came to the realization that even as seasoned as I am, I'm still a gal who
can be snookered by a smooth opening line or two. "Gone" makes readers a lot
of promises at the beginning: to take us into realms of emotion we've never
experienced in quite that way before, to speak startling phrases into our
ears. But then, about halfway through the story, things get stale. By the
time it ends, "Gone" is just going through the motions. It left me feeling
cheap, used and wistful for a reason to believe in the novel I once thought it
was.

The first-person narrator of "Gone" goes by his first name, Stephen, and he's
a young man in Dublin who has contempt for his father, the Catholic Church and
Ireland in general. Sound familiar? That's part of the deceptive initial
thrill of "Gone." It revisits the blasted terrain of James Joyce land and
inventively updates the place.

Stephen's beloved younger sister, Ruth(ph), is in a hospice dying of cancer.
And in the first few pages of the novel, he's rushing to her bedside to say
goodbye. Here's how Stephen begins his story.

`I put the telephone down and know Ruth is in the last moments of her life.
There have been telephone calls before at odd hours, but never at 4 in the
morning. I dress quickly and run out onto an empty Tivoli Road. It is dark
and raining so heavily I am soaked by the time I get to where the car should
be parked. I can't find it on the road. City of stolen cars. God is testing
me. That is what Ruth will say. And I try not to get angry, but it is too
late. I am shaking with rage.'

The most compelling feature of "Gone," indeed the one that it sustains
throughout its entire narrative, is that staccato rhythm of its present-tense
sentences. Stephen is always biting off words and muttering phrases under his
breath. After Ruth dies and Stephen and his father spend money they don't
have on her funeral, we understand more about his background. Stephen's
mother abandoned the family when he and Ruth were kids. His father is a house
painter, and Stephen himself works in a factory spray painting TV consoles.
He's married to a woman named Ursula, who's a couple of rungs above him on the
class ladder. She writes free-lance pieces for a Dublin newspaper. Together,
they're renovating a house in a shabby section of the city and they're being
harassed nightly by a gang of resentful neighborhood kids who spit at them and
throw rocks through the windows. The kids' meanness and Stephen's passivity
in the face of it, hasten the downfall of his and Ursula's already wobbly
marriage. Stephen takes flight and moves to New York City.

So far, so good. "Gone" is atmospheric and offers some fresh takes on people
and situations. For instance, when a friend confesses her own marital
troubles to Stephen, he thinks to himself, `I feel I am getting old. Learning
to know that sharing such intimacy is not intimacy. It's nothing but a slide
into collusion.'

But literarily speaking, Stephen's relocation to New York is a disaster.
There he meets an older woman named Holfy, who reads like an homage to the
late Nico from The Velvet Underground. She's a photographer, originally from
Iceland. Now she lives in a hip West Village studio and she awakens him to
the delights of avant-garde art and sadomasochistic sex. Good erotica is a
challenge to write. It's got to be compelling but teasing. Too solemn and it
gives the reader the giggles. Roper's erotic descriptions are way too solemn
to be taken seriously. Holfy, for example, is given to making Nietzschean
comments about pain being the pathway to purity in sex.

After she brazenly engages in a lesbian dalliance before his eyes, Stephen
abandons Holfy for a soul-searching journey through the heart of American
highway cliches. Then he travels to Wales to confront his long-lost mother
about deserting the family. That's when I finally caught on, that all the
women in this novel fall into that old virgin/whore, either/or bin.

"Gone" itself breaks up into two very different kinds of novels. The first
half is well worth the read. The second is an embarrassing fictional fling I'd
just rather forget.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She
reviewed the new novel "Gone," by Martin Roper.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
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