From Ireland-
HALF AN hour into talking to James Jones, the Anglican bishop of Liverpool, about his role as chair of the panel seeking to establish the truth about the Hillsborough disaster, a familiar thought intrudes.
It is, along with the other emotions Hillsborough has always provoked – horror, grief, shame, outrage – one which has only deepened in the years since, as English football has extravagantly rebuilt, hosting its FA Cup semi-finals now at plush, €863 million Wembley. The thought is disbelief.
That at a semi-final one sunny April in modern times, 96 people, mostly young, really did lose their lives. It will be a year since Andy Burnham, then the British minister for culture, media and sport, addressed the Hillsborough 20th anniversary memorial service. The attendance, 30,000, astonished everybody, and the nation witnessed his words of sympathy drowned out by cries for justice.
“When you saw that reaction,” Jones reflects, over a cup of tea at his comfortable Bishop’s Lodge in south Liverpool, “you realised this was a very, very deep wound in the body of this community. It suggested to me there were deep, unresolved questions which needed to be addressed.”
Burnham, with Maria Eagle, the junior justice minister, had called before the anniversary for all official documents relating to Hillsborough to be released, but he decided he should not stress that in his speech at the service. The crowd’s reaction, protesting that this government had done too little to resolve the unanswered questions over Hillsborough and accusations of a South Yorkshire police cover-up, in fact worked in Burnham’s favour. It powerfully demonstrated to Gordon Brown and his cabinet the resentment still burning in Liverpool, prompting them to respond.
More here-
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/sport/2010/0417/1224268541279.html
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