A city moving on

The report said that there was a breakdown in discipline and that none of the people shot posed any threat.

Unionist reaction to the 190m inquiry's report yesterday was mixed, with unionist political leaders warning that there must be no hierarchy of victims and that soldiers should not be pursued through the courts while republican paramilitaries remained untouched.

However in a gesture of sympathy three prominent Protestant church leaders said last night that they will today make a presentation to the Bloody Sunday families in the Bogside where the 1972 shootings happened that left 14 dead.

Bishop Ken Good, the Church of Ireland Bishop of Derry and Raphoe, Moderator of the Presbyterian Church Rev Dr Norman Hamilton and President of the Methodist Church Rev Paul Kingston will meet members of the families at the Bloody Sunday Memorial in Rossville Street this morning (Wednesday).

Bishop Good said he understood others had lost loved ones and felt the same energy had not gone into reviewing the circumstances of their death.

But he added: I am of the view that at the heart of this Inquiry there is a pastoral and a human dimension which must be taken seriously by us all, primarily for reasons of justice, but also because of the potential for a significant step forward in our dealings with one another which this Report now offers."

Yesterday the Prime Minister David Cameron said it would not honour all those security force members who served with distinction in Northern Ireland to hide the truth of what happened on Bloody Sunday.

Speaking in the House of Commons, Mr Cameron also said that the inquiry found that the present Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness was present on Bloody Sunday and was "probably armed with a sub machine gun" but the report said he did not do anything that justified soldiers opening fire.

DUP MP Gregory Campbell said he was "glad that it (report) is out, glad that is over and it is now time to move on."

He added that whilst the report reached conclusions in "unambiguous and unequivocal terms" about the actions of the soldiers on Bloody Sunday, "there was much more ambiguity surrounding the role of Martin McGuinness on the day."

He also said that he viewed as "highly regrettable" that the abridged version of the Saville Report did not mention the context in which Bloody Sunday took place.

"There were two young police men killed in the vicinity of the march just three days before. Whilst the Prime Minister referred to this, Saville didn't."

The DUP man also said that if the prosecutions of soldiers were to follow the launch of the report then the army personnel involved would need to "form an orderly queue behind Martin McGuinness."

UUP councillor, Mary Hamilton said there would never be an inquiry into the Claudy bombs which killed nine people the same year and injured many others- including her - adding: "The IRA carried out that atrocity but now we have senior republicans in government. They have been loud in calling for the truth about Bloody Sunday; will they now help others learn the truth by telling what they know about Claudy and other mass murders carried out by the IRA?"

Community worker at St Columb's Park House, Brian Dougherty told the Sentinel that the wider community was happy with the report.

He said: "I think there is a general consensus from within the community that they are happy with the report. The worst case scenario was that people were left in the middle ground where no one would have been happy. Looking at the feedback and political commentary so far indicates that everybody is prepared to move on and that the Protestant community can now move on too.

"The work we had done within the Protestant Unionist and Loyalist community prior to the launch of Saville indicated that whilst there were gripes about the cost of the inquiry and so on, that almost to a man everyone wanted to see justice for the Bloody Sunday families."