There was much tut-tutting in the Guildhall corridor at the story of the local lawyer who breezed into the Leonardo Lounge waving a cheque for £200,000, shouting, “How’s about this, then?”.
Inappropriate behaviour, it was generally agreed, from the leader of one of the Saville Inquiry’s legal teams. Then again, the man could hardly have been au fait with the etiquette.
There has never been a bonanza like this in these parts before. Not for lawyers, anyway. This is to take the cynical view, which at times seems to non-lawyers the only sensible view.
The second inquiry into the killing by paratroopers of 14 unarmed civil rights demonstrators and the wounding of 12 others in Derry in January 1972 has involved a massive deployment of reputed legal talent.
From the press gallery they make an impressive and, to some, scary sight, more than 50 barristers and 11 firms of solicitors in serried ranks across the Guildhall arena, all of them, so the theory goes, assisting the tribunal under Lord Saville of Newdigate to do what Lord Chief Justice Widgery failed to do 30 years ago — arrive at a version of the events of Bloody Sunday which citizens, in the first instance the citizens of Derry, can put their confidence in.
It is not possible to discuss the Inquiry without discussing its cost, if only because Unionist politicians here, cheered on by the Daily Mail and the The Daily Telegraph, maintain constant complaint about vast sums allegedly frittered away on an exercise as futile as it is politically unbalanced.
At regular intervals, a Unionist MP will ask the Northern Ireland Secretary for the running total of remuneration to the six teams representing the families of the dead, the wounded and the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association: spokespersons are put on stand-by to swoon with dismay at the extravagance of it all. Madden & Finucane for the bulk of the relatives — £4m and counting; Arthur Harvey QC heading for a personal half-million pounds and Michael Mansfield earning £300,000.
Then Kevin McNamara MP, as like as not, will retaliate with a PQ relating to the fees of the briefs for the soldiers and the MoD. Treasury Solicitors, £24m plus. Edwin Glasgow QC — such a quiet-spoken, deferential fellow, too — £2m on the meter by February. Sir Alan Green £693,733.48, no less.
In the corridors during recesses the multi-million-pound lawyers mingle with the Bloody Sunday families and other local attendees, some of whom by this stage, more than two years and 200 days into oral hearings, have as firm a grasp of the issues as anyone on the Inquiry floor.
And, a certain sense of communality can fitfully develop. Taking his leave of us last December, Edmund ‘Boots’ Lawson QC, for a number of the soldiers, surprised some with a touching farewell to the Bloody Sunday families whose genial teasing in the corridors he had enjoyed over the months.
Sir Alan has been observed in impish conversation with Bogsiders. At times, it takes an effort to call back to mind that what is being investigated here is, on one view, mass murder by the State; on any view a savage and tragic occurrence which sent shudders of violence down through the years.
For the most part, proceedings in the chamber take a quiet, even leisurely course, the legal teams elaborately courteous to one another, Saville and his colleagues — William Hoyt from Canada, John Toohey from Australia — intervening sparingly, most commonly to remind lawyers that there is no need to ask questions which have already been answered (some chaps on £2,000 a day appear to have huge difficulty with this notion) or to explain to witnesses that these are inquisitorial not adversarial proceedings.
And there, in the end, is the rub. In theory, all witnesses are the tribunal’s, not the soldiers’, nor the families’. The role of the lawyers is to help excavate the truth, not to prosecute or defend.
But underneath its restrained formality, the inquiry, inevitably, has something of the character of a criminal trial. The soldiers are being accused by the families of murder.
The verdict of the tribunal will have an incalculable and potentially destabilising impact on politics here. If steel has not clashed on steel in the lawyerly exchanges, it may be because all that has gone on in the Guildhall has merely been as prelude to the main event.
“The real business will not get underway until we get the Paras in the witness box,” growls one of the families’ QCs. On present schedule, that will happen at Central Hall, Westminster, London, beginning in September.
Whether there is any gentle teasing in the corridors there remains to be seen. One suspects not. Perhaps the lawyers, even the brash chap from Leonardo’s, are about to begin to earn their money.