TV REVIEW/Shane Hegarty: Somewhere - among the testimonies and the fabrications and the soldiers with numbers instead of names - lie the truths about Bloody Sunday. Some time next year, the Saville Inquiry will have mined as close to them as it can, will report back and hope that it is enough to bring a sort of closure on events. Television, however, doesn't have the patience to wait that long, so this week saw the first of two competing dramas about the 1972 massacre in Derry.
In writer and director Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday, there were often broad hints, if not always a firm commitment. The immediate cover-up, compounded by the Widgery Report, sowed doubts about who exactly fired first. In this drama, we did not see where the first shots came from. Nor could it directly point the finger at who ordered the actions of One Para that day, although it suggested that Maj Gen Ford's orders may have come from as high up as Edward Heath's government, a theory consistently propounded by the IRA.
The full actions of the Provos on that day may be clarified soon, or could remain partially protected under the reputations of those involved. Greengrass showed them skulking about on the day of the protest, but showed any attempt to fire back being thwarted by people fearful of the consequences of shooting at soldiers already running rampant against unarmed civilians.
There are moments of that day when guesswork is redundant. When the soldiers stepped forward and began shooting into a crowd of retreating civilians. When a soldier executed Jim Wray, shooting him twice in the back at close range as he lay wounded on the ground. When another shot Barney McGuigan as he scuttled, white handkerchief raised high, to the aid of Paddy Doherty. No attempt to tarnish these truths could keep them from re-emerging. Not the systematic lying of the British soldiers. Not the skewed judgment of Lord Widgery. Not the refusal of successive British governments to allow a second tribunal. Not even the subsequent, disastrous butchery of the IRA, who - perversely - owed so much to that day.
It was here that Bloody Sunday the drama succeeded most. Ultimately, it was on a technical level that it was at its most extraordinary. The documentary style was expert and unrelenting: action eavesdropped upon from a distance; scenes coming in snatches; dialogue sometimes only half-heard; the soundtrack of the constantly ringing unanswered phones and the squawking of army radios. The colours were filthy and urban. The monotony of grey, black, brown punctuated only by the camouflage green and burgundy berets of the Paras and the faded blue of youths' denim.
The shock of the massacre came not so much because it followed a steady build-up of a relationship with the victims, but in the veracity of its portrayal. Wrenching, deliberately confused, the camera hid behind pillars with the protesters, aimed down the barrel with the soldiers. Gunshots were heard, victims seen only after they'd hit the ground. The camera caught in the heart of battle is a fashionable device; here it abetted reality, not entertainment.
Which is not to say that Bloody Sunday didn't need to serve the needs of drama too. In march organiser and Protestant local MP Ivan Cooper (an impressive James Nesbitt), the film-makers found a character through which the story could be told in straightforward terms. There is no doubt that he possessed a genuine goodness, that could be magnified and contrasted with the cold, military blood-lust of commander of the land forces Maj- Gen Ford (Tim Pigott-Smith). The film opened with contrasting press conferences. Cooper insisted it would be a great day for civil rights; Ford was already pre-emptively blaming the protesters for any bloodshed.
Both were followed as they rallied their people, Cooper touring the community, acknowledged by all, insisting that this should be a peaceful march, breaking up trouble, joining in choruses of We Shall Overcome. Ford, meanwhile, rallied his own people, readying them for action, replacing any hypotheticals about whether the army would be involved in a battle with a stern insistence that they absolutely would. The inevitability of the eventual violence hung over every moment of the film. Greengrass illustrated that it was just as inevitable on the day itself.
Bloody Sunday focused on another contrast, too - that between two groups of psyched-up youths: one in denim and long hair, lobbing stones at another with blacked-up faces and weapons. The soldiers were pumped up, spoiling for a fight just like the kids on the estate. They were being actively encouraged to release that tension, to "make the company proud", to leave a mark before the end of their tour of duty. The acting of those playing the soldiers was crucial to the realism.
That each actor was himself an ex-soldier often brought things to a point where drama was indistinguishable from documentary. This, it was felt, was a way to guarantee an honest portrayal of the squaddie. It was frightening to see how naturally they summoned hatred and adrenaline-injected boasts.
On Monday night, Channel 4 will show its version of that day. Written by Jimmy McGovern, Sunday apparently deals (as his drama generally does), with the victim. In Greengrass's drama, it is Cooper who is the predominant conduit for our horror. He is the innocent fighting against the inevitable, who must then be a witness, reacting with incredulity followed by anger. Bloody Sunday followed only one victim, Gerry Donaghy, played by Declan Duddy with all the sullen frustration of youth and its instinctive, casual disregard for the wisdom of its elders. From his waking moments of that day until his pointless, undignified death, he was the lens through which we saw the naïve, chest-beating bravado of the stone-throwers transmuting, by the day's end, into those same young men lining up to join the IRA. Not Donaghy, however.
Shot and bleeding to death, Donaghy was being ferried to hospital in a car when it was stopped at an army roadblock and the driver and front seat passenger were hauled out and arrested. Donaghy, dead in the back seat, was searched by soldiers, who then planted nail-bombs in his pockets. It became a stark metaphor for the victims of Bloody Sunday. Murdered pointlessly. Their names blackened in death.
How different Irish history could have been. Whether or not the Nazis were ever serious about invading Ireland during the second World War, the famous Operation Green indicates that plans were at an advanced level; bridgeheads had been decided upon, and 4,000 Irish Jews had been identified for export and extermination. The IRA - fundamentally anti-democratic and blinded to Nazi dangers by its anti-Englishness - would provide the welcoming party.
As seamrog and swastica pointed out, though, the Nazis found this land an odd-shaped nut to crack. Successive agents foundered on either the rocks of the west coast or the bars of the capital. One mission lasted only eight hours, after the newly arrived agent drank too much and asked two locals directions to the nearest IRA branch. The two locals, it turned out, were plain-clothes gardaí. Another agent, a man called Preetz, spent two months here drinking and contracting VD from prostitutes before his arrest. Three agents dropped here en route to England were arrested, because in those days Ireland didn't see too many men of Indian origin in silk suits and straw hats. Their mission lasted two hours.
Only agent Oskar Pfaus learnt a way to the Irish heart. Landing with no contacts or addresses, his first port of call was a church, where, like an impatient angler, he attempted to lure the Irish with a large set of rosary beads. He quickly learnt that the pub was a better venue. There he propped up the bar, buying drinks for the locals and cursing the English. "God damn the English," he yelled to no one and everyone. The regulars hushed him, admonishing him for taking the Lord's name in vain. "OK, then. Blast the English!" He found his IRA men.
Seamróg and Swastica was also the story of two men: Sean Russell, chief of staff of the IRA, and Frank Ryan, who had fought with the socialists in the Spanish civil war, only to end up as a leading Nazi agent. Both were rescued from exile by the Germans - Russell from the US, Ryan from a Spanish jail cell - and recruited to act as agents in their home country. Yet neither ever saw Ireland again. Russell died on U-65 as it brought the two to Ireland to begin working on the ground. The sub turned around with Ryan still aboard. He died in Germany in 1944, shouting orders from his deathbed to imaginary Spanish comrades.
The Germans, crushed by the attack on Russia, had long given up on Ireland. It will always be one of the great "what ifs" of Irish history, though not the only one.