I was standing in Guildhall Square in Derry yesterday with 12,000 people listening to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s apology for the killings of 14 innocent people on the Bloody Sunday parade of January 30 1972.
Judging by the rapturous applause from the crowd, most were as surprised as I was by the frankness of the statement. I have always understood that, whatever the lip service paid to law and order, the army was effectively immune. So this contradicted that understanding.
However, my prejudices about the army are grounded in experience during the early Troubles of witnessing the bullying manner and thuggery of the Parachute Regiment in particular and other regiments too.
I never had any doubt that the dead of Bloody Sunday were murdered, and I believe that many civilians were murdered by soldiers in Ballymurphy and Springhill and other areas.
Mr Cameron was conceding that the paras who killed on Bloody Sunday had disgraced the army and their country but insisting there would be no other open ended enquiries and that he believed the record of the army in Northern Ireland was a proud one. His concession is limited.
Perhaps he is allowing that the killers of Bloody Sunday will be the scapegoats for Britain’s excesses during the Troubles. And if the Republican community is of a mind to offer similar scapegoats, he appears to be hinting that the head of Martin McGuinness would be welcome.
http://malachi.podcastpeople.com/redirect/media/39069malachi-o-doherty-39069mp3
Malachi O'Doherty 
Do you really believe republicans would offer a scapegoat? What in their history could possibly lead you to believe this is a possibility?
No, obviously not. But the moral economy has shifted. No previous prime minister during the peace process has hinted at a willingness to embarrass Martin McGuinness and at the same time had the potential to wound him on his own ground.
I think that even people who vote for Sinn Fein may begin to note that the evasiveness of the Sinn Fein leadership contrasts with Cameron’s frankness, and that there is no space left for whataboutery if the Brits are coming clean. Indeed, Cameron may set up a reverse whataboutery in which old enemies come under an onus to prove their willingness to be candid and apologetic.
And if, as I suspect, we see the army accepting Saville and shitting on the heads of a few of the psychos in the Parachute regiment, joy on the streets of Derry and west Belfast will be unconfined and people may feel more free to drop the old conceits, like the pretence that Gerry was never in the IRA.
And even if it doesn’t work that way, Cameron may feel that the more shame the army takes, the more he is obliged to assuage them by balancing the blame and being frank about the IRA / Sinn Fein relationship in a way that no PM since Thatcher has.
Restitution to the families!