OPINION: Bloody Sunday apology was a long time coming

Rory Fitzgerald is an Irish journalist and a lawyer.

The word "sorry" has never cost so much.

On Jan. 30, 1972, British paratroopers opened fire on unarmed civilians during a civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland. Fourteen were killed, seven of them teenagers.

Only now, in 2010, have the events of that winter's day been put to rest, with the publication this week of the Saville Inquiry's Report. The inquiry was set in motion by Tony Blair in 1998. After 12 years, 30 million words of testimony and £191 million, it finds what everyone here in Ireland already knew.

"On balance," it says, the British soldiers fired first, on unarmed civilians. "In no case was any warning given" and none of the soldiers "fired in response to attacks or threatened attacks." The soldiers later "put forward false accounts in order to seek to justify their firing."

The findings also confirm that many of those shot were fleeing the troops or assisting the wounded. On Tuesday, Prime Minister David Cameron told a hushed British House of Commons: "What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. . . . The government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of our armed forces and for that, on behalf of the government - and indeed our country - I am deeply sorry."

Bloody Sunday was the spark that ignited a fire in Northern Ireland that was to burn out of control through the subsequent decades of murder and sectarian hatred.

An initial report from the British government in 1972 only added fuel to the fire: It whitewashed events and disparaged the dead, accusing the victims of firing weapons or handling bombs, heaping insult on top of grief. These false conclusions were based in part on faulty forensic evidence.

Many have already derided the inquiry as a pointless waste of time and money. Yet its true value may not lie so much in the report itself, but in the reaction to it: In Derry, Northern Ireland, several families triumphantly quoted the report, joyful that it at last cleared the victims of the allegations that they had been gunmen or nail bombers.

At last, we have truth about Bloody Sunday. So what next? There is speculation that the soldiers involved in the killings will stand trial for murder. Yet vengeance is not what the relatives of the victims want.

Jean Hegarty, whose 17-year-old brother, Kevin McElhinney, was shot while crawling to safety, has said she wanted the trooper who killed him to explain his actions in court - but not be sent to prison. The peace process has seen the release of a huge number of convicted paramilitaries, she noted, saying: "I have no great desire to see a [now] 60-year-old man go to jail."

It is this beautiful, inspiring spirit of forgiveness in the face of injustice, suffering and death, this absence of hate and vengefulness, that are the stones upon which lasting peace will be built.

Perhaps the 14 people killed - and the 3,000 others killed in Northern Ireland's troubles, including 700 British soldiers - will not have died in vain, if the centuries-old scars of division are at last healed because their loved ones choose to forgive.

Even if the word "sorry" never cost so much, the forgiveness it has engendered is priceless. Northern Ireland's experience is now being offered as a template for conflict resolution throughout the world. The political agreements, treaties and power-sharing executives all played a role, but if there is one eternal lesson that the people of Derry can today offer the world, it is this:

The true fount of peace lies not in the machinations of politicians, but in the hearts of ordinary people: in the quiet dignity, humility and strength that is required to rise above the human desire for retribution that has always been the engine of human conflict. To somehow find the grace to forgive.