In a lifetime as a journalist, Peter Taylor has spent his career searching for the answer to a single question.
His introduction to Ireland was Derry on the evening of January 30th, 1972; only hours earlier, 13 people had been killed when members of the British army’s Parachute Regiment opened fire on anti-internment marchers in the city’s Bogside, with a 14th dying later.
“I felt guilty that my soldiers – me being a Brit – appeared to have been responsible for what appeared to be a massacre, and I felt guilty that I, as a young, 30-year-old journalist, was so ignorant.
“I thought, I’d better find out, and I spent the next 50 years. It was a seminal moment for me.”
READ MORE
Taylor had found his calling; in the years that followed, his quest to understand what had happened, and why, made the BBC journalist, to quote this newspaper, “by far the most knowledgeable British – or Irish – television reporter on Northern Irish affairs”.
He has won many awards for his work, including Journalist of the Year and Lifetime Achievements Awards from both BAFTA and the Royal Television Society.
He revealed Derry businessman Brendan Duddy as the intermediary between the IRA and the British government in 2008’s The Secret Peacemaker, while his most recent documentary – and accompanying book – tells the previously untold story of Operation Chiffon, a top-secret British intelligence operation aimed at bringing the IRA’s armed campaign to an end.
[ ‘Secret peacemaker’ Brendan Duddy ‘risked life for peace’Opens in new window ]
[ Brendan Duddy: From chip-shop owner to secret peacemakerOpens in new window ]
Yet it might have begun so differently. In 1972 Taylor was working for Thames Television’s This Week programme when instinct told him “there was likely to be trouble on the march, given what had happened at Magilligan [the week before], when the Paras had laid into the civil right marchers.”
He suggested they cover it; a plan for three camera crews – one with the British army, one with the marchers and another roaming free – was “all set to go” until the union “vetoed its members going because Thames Television wouldn’t agree to pay danger money”.
They might have had footage “of everything”, concedes Taylor with a groan of regret. “That was one of the great what-ifs, and I was so pissed off, angry, and that was just one of those things.”
At home in London that Sunday afternoon, he heard what had happened on the news and immediately joined “the long queue of journalists on a flight to Belfast”.
“I actually arrived in Derry on the night of the killings … I think I stayed in a B&B, and I remember going to bed that night nervous in case a sniper would hit me through the window. It just shows how alien my mindset was.”
The next morning, he went to the Bogside. “That’s where I saw the wreaths and the blood relatively fresh on the ground, and knocked on doors.
“I was welcomed, rather than excoriated, as a visiting Brit. I always remember that.”
This week he was welcomed back to Derry yet again, as a guest of the city’s féile. He has visited old friends, including the Duddy family, and enjoyed chance meetings with everyone from Eamonn McCann to the Undertones’ Mickey Bradley.
“It’s nostalgic, it’s invigorating, it’s sad, it brings back memories, it’s great to see how things have changed.”
Taylor points out that the hotel terrace where he is speaking to The Irish Times “used to be the Brits’ barracks, Ebrington Barracks … and here we are on a beautiful sunny morning, people out, relaxing, running, lots of tourists. Normality. It’s beautiful.”
“Yet just over there, in the Bogside and in the Fountain, are huge bonfires,” he says. Sectarianism “is still there … it has never gone away”.
But compared with the Derry he first knew in 1972, the “transformation is phenomenal, and it’s the peace dividend, the result of [the] Good Friday [Belfast Agreement], and we must never forget what we all went through … and we have to protect it. It’s not over.
“People forget how we got to Good Friday, and how precious it is, and we forget that at our peril, and in the end, those historical knots have to be untied, and something has to emerge which transforms the nature of the Irish State, Irish society.
“And unionists, loyalists, have to be party to it, that’s the key thing.”
With the caveat that “there’s no such thing as historical inevitability”, he believes “if you look at the history of Ireland, the division of Ireland, there is a certain inevitability that in the end, at some stage, further down the road and all those qualifications, in the next 20, 30 years there is likely to be some form of unity.”
In the meantime, “an awful lot of work has to be done … I don’t think the work has been done on our side, the British side, that is being done on the Irish side, and both sides need to work together to try and work out a formula that would work and be acceptable.
“It has to be engagement, dialogue, intimate discussions between the two governments” and reassurance “that all that is dear to unionists and loyalists is still there, and the traditions on both sides have to be respected”.
“The big obstacle to that is sectarianism … but despite that, the effort has to be made, because I think there is no other solution.”
More than 50 years on, many questions remain, not least for Taylor himself. After all his searching, has he found his answer? “Not to my satisfaction yet, because there are still too many unknowns and too much has to happen.”
The next programme he wants to make “would be a realistic analysis of what the possibility of a united Ireland is, in whatever form it may be – and that will be the thing to consider”.
Yet he is all too aware of how journalism is “under threat” from multiple challenges from disinformation and claims of “fake news” to a “desperate” shortage of resources.
He compares how he was able to report first-hand from Bogside in the immediate aftermath of Bloody Sunday to the situation now in Gaza, “where [BBC correspondent] Jeremy Bowen and his colleagues are not allowed, The Irish Times is not allowed to have access.”
A journalist’s job “is to report accurately, as independently as one can and, in particular, to get up the closest to the truth of what the situation is like”.
“I want to hear from Jeremy Bowen or John Simpson or whoever in one of the food distribution centres saying, I believe that what has happened here is true, and it’s difficult to find a word other than genocide to describe it.”
In Derry, Taylor did get up close; he is respected as one who listened, who gave people a voice, and who told their story.
“At my talk, I got two or three cards and notes from people, just saying, ‘thank you’. I got the ‘thank you’ many times from people, who just said, ‘thank you, for all you’ve done’.
“That means a huge – it means so much. It means more than anything.”
