A Matter of Minutes: Legacy of Bloody Sunday
by Joanne O'Brien
Wolfhound Press 2002

Last week marked the 30th anniversary of the tragic events of Bloody Sunday but the intensity of interest, horror and debate surrounding that fateful day has not yet abated.

A new book which resonates with the heart-wrenching stories and voices of witnesses or those still grieving was published last week.

A Matter of Minutes by photographer Joanne O’Brien paints a stark and stunning picture of bravery, endurance and survival over three decades.

Joanne is an Irish photojournalist whose work has been published internationally. Specialising in social documentary and portraiture her work encompasses a wide range of social and cultural issues.

A Matter of Minutes captures the experiences of 33 people whose lives were changed forever by the events of Bloody Sunday. The book is a poignant testimony to those who were murdered by British paratroopers on that fateful afternoon and at times can make for difficult reading.

For example, Floyd Gilmour died last year – he was only 53 years old. Before his death he told of how the family of eight children discovered that their youngest brother Hugh had been shot dead on Sunday January 30, 1972.

“We went over to the hospital still hoping against hope that it wasn’t true because we hadn’t seen Hugh then,” he recalled. “I didn’t go into the morgue to identify the body – my brother and sister went in. They said afterwards there were so many there, and they had to go around them all. He was the very last.

“They knew him by his hands before they even lifted the sheet because he worked in the tyre company and his nails were usually black.
“He was only 17 and, being the youngest the only one left in the house, it made things doubly hard. If anything, it made it harder to live with than people might realise.

“My mother, even until she died – which was 16 years after the event – would still sit and cry. It just broke her heart – the day that they shot my brother, they killed her. She was still there for us, but within herself she just died. We convinced her to move house. For her to get to the shops she would have to keep passing the spot were Hugh lay, you see.”

According to eyewitnesses, Jim Wray was finished off by a paratrooper as he lay on the ground wounded.

“At 18, it’s very difficult looking at your relative in the coffin – that somebody could be so full of life and crack and all of a sudden it’s not there, there’s just a shell.” explains Jim’s brother Liam. “And when you think about it – if you do think about it – you realise you wouldn’t want anybody else to expereince that... you just didn’t want to do it to anybody else.”
Patrick McDaid was one of the lucky ones, being seriously wounded on Bloody Sunday. There is no ambiguity about the event of the day as far as he is concerned.

“It was mass murder. That fellow (Jackie Duddy) running past me had nothing in his hands. He made a break for it first and got killed. The paratroopers on the TV afterwards were saying they picked specific targets. I could be dead now and I’d have been classed a gunman. That split second I bent saved my life.

“I’ll wait and see about the Inquiry. Are they going to call Widgery a liar or will they try to gloss over it? It’s the British inquiry into themselves again.”

This article appeared on the Irelandclick.com web site on February 7, 2002.

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