Campbell calls for Bloody Sunday costs to be 'itemised' at report launch

EAST Londonderry MP Gregory Campbell has called on the government to publish a complete breakdown of the costs of the Saville Inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday in Londonderry.

The inquiry, initiated in 1998, will finally publish its findings on June 15. To date the investigation has cost in the region of 190 million from the public purse. The inquiry is also the longest of its type in British legal history.

Mr Campbell has said that the publication of the report should be accompanied by complete details of the cost of the inquiry.

The report centres on the killings of thirteen people in the Bogside by the Parachute Regiment as they took part in a civil rights demonstration on January 30, 1972.

Gregory Campbell said: "The Saville inquiry has been ongoing now for 12 years and during that time it has swallowed up many tens of millions of pounds of scare public funds.

"There will be many people who will be highly sceptical that the report is likely to ever satisfy some of those who have seen this entire process as simply a mechanism to rewrite the history of what happened in Londonderry on that day and punish the soldiers who were sent to respond to the violence and murders which had been happening in the area at that time."

The announcement of the long awaited publication date, almost six years after the inquiry concluded taking evidence from over 900 people, came after Mr Campbell had tabled a parliamentary question asking for a publication date and for the full costs to be released into the public domain.

"I had recently tabled a parliamentary question to the new secretary of state (Owen Patterson) asking for him to give a date on the publication of the Saville report and I am glad that he has now given a date for this to occur.

"However, I have also asked that alongside the final publication of the document, which has taken 12 years to produce, that there is the full publication of all the costs associated with this extremely lengthy exercise.

"When this entire process is looked back upon it is likely that the conclusion that most people will draw is that the only real beneficiaries have been lawyers who have earned huge fees from the public purse."

Mr Campbell also claimed that there were people who were setting out a long list of preconditions if they are to judge the report as a success.

This, he said, reinforced the view in some quarters that the only purpose of the Saville inquiry was to "put soldiers in the dick and seek to punish them for what happened."

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