Why did the Saville Inquiry cost almost twenty times the 9/11 Commission? – Telegraph Blogs

Why did the Saville Inquiry cost almost twenty times the 9/11 Commission? – Telegraph Blogs




The Saville Inquiry sat for 12 years and cost almost £200 million (Photo: EPA)
While bar-room debaters argue over the guilt or innocence of British soldiers and related questions arising from the Saville Report, one overriding issue is being squeezed off the radar – as those responsible for this marathon investigation presumably hoped it would. The final Bloody Sunday outrage is the Saville Report itself.

Ken Clarke is not right about many things, but he was absolutely correct to describe the Saville Report as a “disaster”. Its length and expense have turned a tragedy into a farce. The Saville Inquiry into the deaths of 14 people sat for 12 years and cost £191.2m. The official inquiry into the 9/11 attack on America in which 2,995 people lost their lives lasted for 20 months, interviewed more than 1,200 witnesses in 10 countries, reviewed more than 2.5m pages of documentation and cost $15m.

Saville is the judicial equivalent of work practices at the Longbridge car plant in the heyday of Red Robbo. It was set up by Tony Blair as a sop to republicans during the Good Friday peace negotiations. The misconduct it has unearthed is disturbing; but could the truth not have been discovered in a much shorter time and for a fraction of the cost? The ground covered by the investigation was not much more complicated than the issues involved in multiple murder trials, which last for a few weeks at the most and cost a fraction of Saville.

The Inquiry, of course, has its apologists. Michael Mansfield, the left-wing QC who participated in the proceedings, claims that “it was imperative there should be, in the public interest, a full exploration of not just the circumstances of the shooting on the day, but also the background events which led to this situation”. For £191.2m it should have been possible to report the background events in Ireland in detail, back to the time of the Firbolgs. Mansfield’s bill for his participation in the tribunal came to £743,421.

The Northern Ireland Office has published the Saville balance sheet in detail: the legal costs accounted for £67,603,621 of the total. Roasts do not come more dripping than that. Eversheds law firm was paid £13m for taking witness statements. Counsel for the Inquiry, Christopher Clarke, was paid more than £4.4m. The Ministry of Defence’s bill for legal costs totalled £32,553,738, at a time when troops were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan without adequate equipment.

The usual suspects are indulging in the traditional beard-wagging, rhubarb-rhubarb self-congratulation about the exemplary capacity of British justice to unearth and confront the truth, however uncomfortable. By any objective standards, the stark reality is that this entire exercise could not be described as fully sane.