Thursday, November 06, 2008

Lord Saville's Bloody Sunday report delayed again

The Times reports that the report of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry’s will not be published until late next year:

The controversial inquiry into the killings of 13 unarmed Catholic civilians during an illegal civil right parade in Londonderry in January 1972 has cost more than £181 million to date, the most expensive legal tribunal in British history.

It concluded gathering evidence four years ago, since when Lord Saville has been writing his report based upon 2,500 witness statements, 160 volumes of evidence, containing an estimated 20-30 million words, plus 121 audio tapes and 110 video tapes.

Lord Saville had previously indicated that his report would be published in February of this year.

As this blog exclusively revealed last summer, Lord Saville is the nephew of the children's writer Malcolm Saville. Today's news only underlines the truth of later remarks from Calder's Comfort Farm:

Lord Saville would do well to study his uncle’s methods. Take 1950. In that year Malcolm published The Adventure of the Life-Boat Service - a tribute to “this wonderful and typical British institution”.

He also published The Master of Maryknoll - an exciting tale of a stolen violin set in the hills above Ludlow. He published The Flying Fish Adventure, which was set in Marazion in Cornwall. And he published The Sign of the Alpine Rose, set in the Austrian Tyrol.

If Lord Saville has shown anything like that industry he would have produced his report years ago and we could have spent the £180m on ginger beer.

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