31.01.2002

Victim support

Jimmy McGovern - Sunday - Channel Four, January 28

Jimmy McGovern's Sunday, focusing on the events of January 30 1972, was always going to be in the shadow of Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday, televised a week earlier. Greengrass not only had the advantage of the first showing, but a clearly higher budget, more engaging hand-held camera work and a distinct edge in casting - Britain's currently most popular Irish actor, James Nesbitt, and the superbly plummy Tim Pigott-Smith versus the lesser known trio of Christopher Eccleston, Ciaran McMenaman and Brid Brennan. And, though the pieces shared the same 'docu drama' format as well as subject matter, they were very different products. Whilst Bloody Sunday is political drama, revolving around the class and state forces, organisations and politicians who were the players, Sunday has much more of the flavour of victim support. True, it is more direct in its indictment of the senior British army commander and the prime minister. Major-general Ford (Eccleston) is portrayed dictating a memorandum recommending the shooting, following due warnings, "of numbers of the Derry young hooligans" and we see Tory PM Edward Heath in a fireside tête-à -tête with Justice Widgery, arranging the whitewash inquiry into the massacre. However, the film's real purpose is clearly to amplify the voices calling for individual justice. In a post-showing discussion on Channel 4, the writer explained that he made the film from a family perspective. His intention was to reveal the extent of grief and to contrast the truth about the victims with the British state's lies that they were all gunmen and nail-bombers. Liverpudlian McGovern, whose previous work has included Hillsborough, a dramatisation of the fight for justice by the families of the 96 Liverpool football fans killed in the appalling tragedy at the Sheffield stadium, had earlier assured The Independent of his non-partisan stance. He is a patriotic Englishman, he insisted, "but Bloody Sunday was a British tragedy - the Irish suffered, but the tragedy was ours "¦ I love my country when it is at its best, when it upholds truth and justice. In the case of Bloody Sunday, it spat on those principles and became unworthy of my love" (January 20). Sunday centres around one family in particular - that of 17-year-old coal delivery man John Young. John gives us a briefing on the background to the civil rights march that is to become the scene of the massacre in which he loses his life. In the Orange statelet of Northern Ireland, he reminds us, voting was based on property holding. Whilst a protestant businessman could thus wield six votes, a family of six working class catholics might have one. There is discrimination against catholics too in employment and in housing allocation. When the population rises against oppression, they are brutally attacked by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and its auxiliary forces. The Bogside and Creggan estates in Derry erupt and drive out the police. The British state sends in its army to regain control. The Irish Republican Army grows in strength and increasingly mounts attacks on the British and Orange forces. There are riots every day. The state introduces internment without trial. In response, the people of Bogside and Creggan impose a no-go area for state forces: Free Derry. Despite his appreciation of politics though, John is non-political. The bulk of his free time activity is spent on the pull. Unlike the young militants in Greengrass's film, John attends the march for the craic. McGovern spent four years preparing and researching his film and the events portrayed coincide with those dramatised in Bloody Sunday. When the march veers away from the British army roadblock, a group - a very small one in McGovern's version - separates off to confront the troops. Stones are thrown. First water cannon and then plastic bullets are used in response. Then the Paratroopers begin firing live rounds and the casualties and fatalities start occurring. Two IRA gunmen prepare to fire back, but are shown being driven away by the crowd. The full horror of the massacre and the blatancy of the targeting of unarmed civilians is reserved, though, for intercutting into the later scenes from the Widgery tribunal. John Young's elder brother Leo (McMenaman) goes looking for him after the shooting starts, but is diverted into driving another seriously injured teenager, Gerry Donaghey, to hospital. In this incident, also covered by Greengrass, Leo is forced out of the car by British soldiers, arrested and interrogated, while young Gerry is left to die. At the mass funeral, Moira Young (Brennan) turns on her mother, who has pronounced that she forgives the British soldier who killed John. Mrs Young has refused to openly display her grief - under pressure, she explains that, if she breaks down, this would ensure her remaining sons join the IRA. She does not want to lose any more of them. Her tactics appear to work. Leo, a father of a young family himself, is persuaded to wait for the outcome of the Widgery inquiry, at which he is a witness. If this brings justice for John, he will not enlist, he promises. Widgery delivers his whitewash faithfully. Ford tells him that the Paras only fired at gunmen. Widgery duly finds, despite the lack of material evidence, that the soldiers have told the truth and that, at least some of the men killed were engaged in firing guns or throwing bombs. Some of the British soldiers' firing did border on the reckless, he concedes, but ultimate responsibility must lie with those who organised the illegal march and created a highly dangerous situation. Ford attends Buckingham Palace to be decorated by the queen, whilst Leo, despite further pressure from his wife, turns up at another ceremony - the swearing in of recruits to the Provisional IRA. But the film ends in the only way appropriate to McGovern's perspective and to the cult of victimhood. Leo is unable to go through with the enlistment and returns to his family. Nor does he turn to any other form of political resistance -instead he takes up John's vacated job on the coal round. McGovern portrays graphically the way in which the workers are is treated like shit by our rulers and their state forces, but there is no hint of the working class transforming itself through taking up a fight for political power. In this sense, he is a faithfully depicts the temporary despair and depoliticisation of our class. Derek Hunter