[In the following essay, Newman analyses the use of phantoms in “Butcher's Dozen” to express Kinsella's outrage over the Bloody Sunday massacre and the unjust Widgery report.]

Thomas Kinsella wrote “Butcher’s Dozen: A Lesson for the Octave of Widgery” within a week of the report made by Britain’s Lord Chief Justice Widgery of his investigation into the deaths of thirteen civilians at the hands of the British army on 30 January 1972 in Derry, Northern Ireland. The poem was reissued in April 1992 to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Widgery’s report.

In the poem, phantoms represent the dead civilians and address a variety of national and cultural issues. The first phantom paraphrases the second line of the English nursery rhyme “Tom, Tom The Farmer’s Son” to establish a bitterly ironic tone. Savagely punned—“A pig came up, and away he ran” (Kinsella, line 20)—the pig of the children’s verse becomes the acronym by which the armored personnel carriers of the type deployed against the protestors are known. Also it is a “hooligan” (19) who runs away. A familiar word, to be sure, but in that it derives etymologically from the Irish family name Houlihan, it reflects the way that a long established anti-Irish bias on the part of the British has passed into day-to-day language. The inquiry failed to prove that the deceased had used firearms, and the ghost’s observation that a life was lost for nothing more than “throwing stones” (22) at soldiers emphasizes the overreaction of the British to the incident.

One can identify many of the victims by comparing the incidents alluded to in the poem to the report’s details. The “blighters three” (27) are John Pius Young, Michael McDaid, and William Noel Nash. As ghosts, they, even more so than the first phantom, function to reveal the scale of the carnage that day. It is when the reader crosses the barricade, following in the steps of the soldiers who attacked it, that the other corpses emerge: “Then from left and right they came, / More mangled corpses, bleeding, lame, / Holding their wounds” (30–32). To breach the barricade as we do is to cross into the underworld where the corpses remain identified with the places where they fell, and from which they speak for a justice that the Widgery tribunal would deny them.

The “bomber” (35) introduces a particularly contentious issue. Gerald Donaghy was shot in the abdomen and was taken to a house in the vicinity for a medical examination. When he was examined, he was searched for means of identification, and no firearms were found on him. He was finally pronounced dead by a medical officer at the “Regimental Aid Post of 1st. Battalion Royal Anglian Regiment” (Widgery 32). The officer failed to notice anything on the body, but while Donaghy lay dead in the car, four nail bombs were “found” in his pockets. The irony surfaces when the ghost speaks of bombs that “seemed to vanish where I fell” (Kinsella, line 38). The accusation of “planting” the bombs is implicit, but not so the judgement with which he concludes the episode, explicitly identifying the soldier’s conduct as “treacherous” (48).

Much of the forensic evidence presented to the tribunal rested on the results of the so-called “paraffin test” which, having demonstrated the presence of lead particles on the skin, was considered proof of a person having fired, or having been close to someone who fired, a weapon.

Kinsella questions the forensic evidence’s accuracy when one of three other ghosts asserts that “our mingled blood defiled us” (52). Eyewitness accounts speak of James Wray, and William and Gerard McKinney being shot and “thrown into the [armored personnel carrier] like raw meat” (Mullan 127). It is these three to whose “mingled blood” Kinsella refers. Widgery ignored the probable cause of their testing positive despite his admission that “No weapon was found” (29).

Whereas the ghosts’ earlier commentary concentrates on the day’s events, subsequent ghosts disclose the hypocrisy of convening an inquiry whose purpose was to exonerate British military excess. One of them asks, “Does it need recourse to law / To tell ten thousand what they saw?” (67–68). From his point of view, the inquiry should have been directed at unearthing the reasons for the murder of civilians, but he recognizes that the outcome of the tribunal was determined in advance. The verdict will do no more than justify to the British public that military action was necessary. Moreover, the tribunal will put the blame for the deaths on the deceased themselves: “Impartial justice has to find / We’d be alive and well today / If we had let them have their way” (78–80). According to the Widgery report:

There would have been no deaths in Londonderry on 30 January if those who organized the illegal march had not thereby created a highly dangerous situation in which a clash between demonstrators and the security forces was almost inevitable. (Widgery 38)

There is, however, an element of hope in the ghost’s apparent despair. The very details whose significance the members of the tribunal would try to change would be revealed as part of the process of rewriting history. And this is the inherent weakness in the British propaganda that the ghost identifies. For the pictorial evidence exists alongside the words of the tribunal, and those on the mainland who consider the events will not be deceived by the tribunal’s report:

Yet England, even as you lie,
You give the facts that you deny.
Spread the lie with all your power
—All that’s left; it’s turning sour.
.....Photographers who caught your stroke,
The priests that blessed our bodies, spoke
And wagged our blood in the world’s face.
The truth will out, to your disgrace.

(81–91)

Bloody Sunday and the Widgery report lie on a continuum created by the British policy of populating a Catholic country with Scottish Presbyterian settlers. The next ghost alludes to this, describing the legacy that arises from “A tangle of transplanted roots” (95) as “a bouillon of bitter Scotch” (105), punning again to describe the result of Britain’s interference as an “Irish stew” (107).

Following him, another phantom directly castigates the marchers of the Protestant Orange order whose politically sanctioned legitimacy defies the self-determination of “A people [that] rises from its past” (162). “Sashed and bowler-hatted, glum / Apprentices of fife and drum” (182–83), celebrating the victory of Protestant William of Orange over the Catholic James II in 1690, their annual parades can do nothing to help the country move forward. Rather, they keep it rooted in sectarianism as they “join / in one more battle by the Boyne” (193–194).

The final ghost concludes with an observation that shows the illogicality of grounding a political position in an appeal to pure nationalism. “We all are what we are, and that / is mongrel pure” (220–221), he says, ironically criticizing Irish nationalism as much as British imperialism as he argues, “What nation’s not / Where any stranger hung his hat / And seized a lover where she sat” (221–222).

“Butcher’s Dozen” demands that both Bloody Sunday and the subsequent tribunal’s conduct be rigorously reexamined. A minute of a meeting between Widgery and then British Prime Minister Edward Heath is illuminating and chilling. “It had to be remembered,” the minute records, “that we were in Northern Ireland fighting not only a military war but a propaganda war” (Mullan 28).

Works Cited

Kinsella, Thomas. “Butcher’s Dozen: A Lesson for the Octave of Widgery.” Dublin: Dolmen 1979.

Mullan, Don. Bloody Sunday: Massacre in Northern Ireland. Colorado: Roberts Rinehart, 1997.

Widgery, Lord Chief Justice. Inquiry into the Events on 30, January 1972 which led to Loss of Life in Connection with the Procession in Londonderry on that Day. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1972.