DonMullan.org

“There were several notable television documentaries, mainly from British channels, and some influential books and newspaper articles. Particularly important was the publication of Don Mullan’s book, Eyewitness Bloody Sunday, in 1997. This was a collection of eyewitness contemporaneous accounts of the events of Bloody Sunday that had been gathered by NICRA (Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association) and lain unnoticed for twenty-five years…”

– Bishop Edward Daly, ‘A Troubled See’

Eyewitness Bloody Sunday – The Truth  (Wolfhound Press, Dublin 1997; Robert Rinehard Publishers, USA 1997; Merlin Publishing, 3rd edition, 2002) was Mullan’s first investigative book which became a bestseller in Ireland and has been described as ‘politically influential’. It is officially credited as a major catalyst in the establishment of the longest running and most expensive public inquiry in British legal history – The Bloody Sunday (Saville) Inquiry. Don Mullan was a schoolboy witness to the tragic events of Bloody Sunday and vividly recalls the shooting dead of Michael Kelly.

Eyewitness Bloody Sunday was based on 100 of 700 eyewitness accounts of the Bloody Sunday massacre, including his own. The book was produced in collaboration with the Bloody Sunday families and wounded and the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign. Mullan has always stated that his work built on the work of others before him and that the main credit for the historic achievements of the Campaign was the Bloody Sunday families and wounded.

The book created a sensation when Don Mullan offered a plausible hypothesis that three of the Bloody Sunday dead were shot by a British Army sniper firing from the vicinity of the Derry Walls. A strong supporter of his hypothesis was Dr Raymond McClean, a local GP and former SDLP Mayor of Derry who initially set out to disprove Mullan’s theory but eventually concurred. Dr McClean had attended a number of post-mortems of the Bloody Sunday dead and had noted that the three whom Don Mullan suspected had been shot by a sniper, had almost identical 45% downward trajectory wounds.

After careful investigation, Mullan’s theory was seized upon by Britain’s Channel Four News who produced their first of a series of Bloody Sunday specials based on his hypothesis. The book was headlined in The New York Time World News section on the 30 January 1997, the 25th anniversary of the massacre, which recorded: “The atmosphere has been roiled in recent days by the province-wide debate on the new book [by] Mr. Mullan…”.

Don Mullan and Dr Raymond McClean later authored ‘Bloody Sunday: The Breglio Report’ (Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign 1997), based on an independent investigation carried out by a US based ballistics expert, Robert J. Breglio. Mullan had been directed to Breglio by his friend, former US Congressman Joseph Crowley (D-NY). Breglio made it clear from the outset that “I will call it as I see it.” Bluntly asserting his independence which is exactly what Mullan and Dr McClean wanted. Robert J. Breglio concluded that Michael McDaid, John Young and William Nash had been shot from the vicinity of the Derry Walls

Prior to the publication of Mullan’s book, Bloody Sunday was seen by the Irish establishment as having been hijacked by Sinn Fein and violent Republicanism and was, therefore, kept at arm length. However, Mullan’s humanitarian and human rights background created a space for the Irish Government to engage.

Mullan was contacted by officials at the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of An Taoiseach shortly after the publication of his book in January 1997 and for two years, in the lead-up to the new Bloody Sunday Inquiry, he was the conduit between the Irish Government and the Bloody Sunday families and wounded. During that period he played a key role in organising a number of visits to Dublin, Belfast and London, to meet British Secretary’s of State for Northern Ireland, Sir Patrick Mayhew and Mo Mowlan; Irish President Mary Robinson; and the first meeting ever between an Irish Taoiseach and the Bloody Sunday families and wounded.

A major outcome of the meeting with An Taoiseach John Bruton was the announcement that he would instruct Civil Servants to critically evaluate all of the new evidence coming forward, including Mullan’s theory of three victims having been shot from the vicinity of the Derry walls.

Mullan was entrusted by the Irish Government to read the penultimate draft of its dossier ‘Bloody Sunday and the Report of the Widgery Tribunal – The Irish Government’s Assessment of the New Material’. For two days in June 1997, he was given a room within the Department of Foreign Affairs and given privileged access to the highly sensitive dossier. His comments and observations were incorporated into the final draft which was presented to the new Labour Government of Prime Minister Tony Blair MP, in June 1997. The impact of Irish Government’s Report increased momentum towards persuading the British Government to establish a new Inquiry.

On the 30th January 1998, the 26th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, little more than a year after the publication of Eyewitness Bloody Sunday, the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, announced the setting up of a new Bloody Sunday Inquiry.

On 3 April 1998, the new Bloody Sunday Inquiry opened at the Guildhall in Derry. It became the longest running and most expensive Public Inquiry in British Legal History.

What was, in fact, the 2nd Bloody Sunday Inquiry, published its report on 15 June 2010. It concluded that all of the dead and wounded were innocent. A statement read on behalf of the Families and wounded declared: “The victims have been vindicated. The Parachute Regiment has been disgraced. The truth has been brought home at last. Widger’s great lie has been laid bare.”

The most remarkable and unexpected outcome was the statement made by the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, who, in accepting the findings of the Saville Report, described the brutal events of Bloody Sunday as ‘unjustified and unjustifiable’ before making an historic apology on behalf of the British Government. It was a moment of healing in the festering wound of British Colonialism in Ireland.

And it was not as if Mullan was a sentimentalist: this was a tenacious investigative journalist whose working life was intrinsically linked to the events and enquiry into Bloody Sunday in Derry. He was no stranger to fame and his ferocious work as a human rights campaigner took him into the company of global figures like Rosa Parks, Bill Clinton, Mick Jagger, even the Dalai Lama. But with Banks it was different. This was the person to whom Mullan had attached all his childhood ambition and fears growing up as a child in the Creggan, just as the nationalist movement in Derry was about to combust.

• Keith Duggan, Irish Times ‘Saving Grace during Troubled Times’

Over dinner at an Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan in 2004, Don Mullan told Irish actor, Gabriel Byrne, about the positive influence the great English goalkeeper, Gordon Banks, had on his growing up in war ravaged Northern Ireland. The story also included Mullan’s fondest memory of his father, who somehow managed to arrange for his teenage son to meet Gordon Banks just six weeks after Banks had pulled off what many consider the greatest save in World Cup history from Brazil’s Pelé during the 1970 Mexico World Cup.

Byrne listened attentively and at the end of the meal he encouraged Mullan to write a book about his experience. “That’s one of the most moving sports stories I have ever heard, Byrne told the Irish author and humanitarian.

And, so, in the lead-up to his 50th birthday, Mullan decided to write a boyhood memoir on how, his hero, the 1966 World Cup winning England goalkeeper, had filled his childhood and adolescence with the magic of dreams.

For the cover of the Irish edition of the book, a photograph of Gordon Banks in full flight was illustrated by the accomplished English sports artist, Alan Damms. “As a child, this picture filled me with awe,” Mullan says. “To me, it portrayed Banks as Superman!”

To Don Mullan, his boyhood memoir is important as it offers a unique insight into the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the Northern Ireland troubles:

“Derry’s Creggan Estate where I was born and grew up, was a peace loving community. Our neighbours were the most decent and caring one might ever wish to live amongst. Yet, in the 1970s many in our community turned to violence. The question is ‘Why?’ Was it because we had a genetic defect that made us prone to violence? Or, because we were violent by nature? Of course not! The root of violence is systemic injustice of which there was plenty in Northern Ireland.

“When I played for my street soccer team, I was the England goalkeeper. I wore a yellow top with three lions, blue shorts and white socks, the same colours worn by Gordon Banks when he played for England. No one ever told me I shouldn’t or that I was betraying Irish nationalism or republicanism or my nation. In fact, adults enjoyed my boyhood enthusiasm for Gordon Banks, a sportsman they too respected for his humility and decency, as well as his mastery of the art of goalkeeping. Indeed, many of the articles and photographs in my famous scrapbook were given to me by adults who knew about my boyish fantasy.”

Mullan’s memoir places the role of sport within the developing crisis, including his own struggle with violence in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday when he seriously considered following his best friend into the IRA. One fascinating insight is of an aggressive raid on his home by the British Army which ended with him holding court before several soldiers in which he had them agreeing that they too would be angry if the shoe was on the other foot and Irish soldiers were doing to them in England what they were doing to in Derry.

Don Mullan, did not follow the path of violence. He sought to achieve systemic change through non-violence.

His memoir was optioned by the BBC in 2006. It was also republished by the British publisher, Legend Press, in 2013, as “The Boy Who Wanted to Fly” with a foreword by Pelé and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

The book is currently being translated into Portuguese in Brazil and all royalties will be donated to Hospital Pequeno Principe (The Little Prince Hospital), Brazil’s largest pediatric hospital.

The foreword by Pelé and Tutu may be read by clicking here.

The following two reviews of Mullan’s memoir can be accessed by clicking:

Saving Grace during Troubled Times, Keith Duggan: The Irish Times

World Football Commentary.

A short 5 minute video produced for the launch of Mullan’s boyhood memoir is available here:

The political and journalist world can boast of very few heroes who compare with
Father Damien of Molokai. It is worthwhile to look for the source of such heroism.
– Mahatma Gandhi

The Prophesy of Robert Louis Stevenson – Damien of Molokai – The Leper Saint (a little book company, Dublin, 2009). This book was published to commemorate the canonization of Fr Damien on 11 October 2009 and the fulfillment of Robert Louis Stevenson’s prophesy.

Damien of Molokai, the leper priest, was ‘no saintly philanthropist’ according to a Rev. Hyde in 1889. Damien was, in Hyde’s words, ‘a coarse, dirty, headstrong bigot – not a pure man in his relations with women’, a man whose own leprosy was ‘due to his vices and carelessness’. Damning accusations.

In a powerfully impassioned response, Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and other great books, upholds Fr Damien and accuses his fellow Presbyterian of unjustly maligning a man of virtue and humanity who would one day, he prophesized, be canonized a saint.

Stevenson, in this virtually unknown text, composes a powerful work of evidence-based humanitarianism, about compassion, ecumenism and reconciliation, about human failings and the importance of justice.

The forward, introduction and afterword by Mullan, Burns and Drury highlight the relevance of Stevenson’s text, and the life and witness of Damien, for our times.

In his introduction to this book, Don Mullan writes:

“Children need heroes. My mother understood that. She understood that strong role models can inspire and motivate children to grow into respectful and caring citizens; citizens who try to make the world around them a better place; citizens who recognize that family extends beyond the confines of one’s home and includes the downtrodden and marginalized.

It was at my mother’s knee that I first learned of Fr Damien, the Belgian priest who died from leprosy on the island of Molokai. It was the early 1960s in Derry, Ireland, and I was only seven or eight years old. But the stories she told me of Fr Damien left a lasting impression…”

That impression might be seen in the causes and concerns that Mullan subsequently dedicated his life to.

Royalties to the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation.

On Easter Sunday 2001 the relics of St. Therese – a small casket containing a thighbone and foot bone – at the start of an eleven-week pilgrimage. Among those who turned out for the event was Don Mullan, a bestselling Irish author and media producer. Mullan had mixed feelings about the whole affair. Advanced publicity for the relic tour had promised the arrival of an anonymous “she” who would be bigger than U2 and draw larger crowds than Madonna. When the “she” turned out to be the bones of a nineteenth-century saint, Mullan and others wondered if the organisers had lost their minds. They were predicting that a million people might come out to see the reliquary as it made its way across the country.

As it turned out, the reliquary drew nearly three million people. And Mullan, who from childhood had a deep interest in St. Therese, was so impressed that he decided to do a book about those who came to pray before her earthly remains. The tour attracted devotees, of course, but also doubters and cynics, many of whom found themselves nevertheless strangely and profoundly moved. More than one hundred of them submitted their personal accounts and reflections. The resulting book, A Gift of Roses, disoriented Mullan’s previous readers. “I was gaining a reputation of a hard-nosed and impactful investigative journalist. Then I do a respectful book about a box of bones, and some saw me as losing my marbles,” he said.

What struck Mullan was not only the size of the crowds who came to see the relics but also the atmosphere of prayerful reverence. There was no triumphalism about this relic tour, he explained, no “bishop bandwagons” to proclaim victory over secularism – only thousands of people, whether the elderly, middle-aged couples, teenagers or young children, lining up to pay their quiet respect. They would wait for hours, often in pouring rain or cold wind, in order to stand in front of Therese’s reliquary for a few seconds. For many of them, St. Therese was a figure planted in their spiritual memory by their mothers.

From ‘The Vatican Prophecies: Investigating Supernatural Signs, Apparitions, and miracles in the Modern Age’, by John Thavis (New York Times bestselling author of ‘The Vatican Diaries’); Viking, New York, 2015.

In 2011, in advance of the visit to Ireland of the USA’s first African-American President, Barack Obama, Don Mullan re-published the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass – an American Slave to mark the historic occasion, in both softback and as a limited edition hardback.

The foreword to this edition was written by the President of Ireland, Her Excellency, Mary McAleese, with an epilogue by the Chief Executive of Concern Worldwide, Tom Arnold.

Mullan’s introduction charts key correspondence between Douglass and the head of the American Abolitionist Movement, William Lloyd Garrison, following his encounter with O’Connell one evening in September 1845.

Mullan demonstrates how Douglass’s thinking was influenced by O’Connell’s address that fateful evening. He argues that the greatest gift Ireland gave to Douglass wasn’t simply welcoming him as an equal human being, but the fact that having arrived as a single issue campaigner, Douglass departed a determined internationalist. For the rest of his life, Douglass fought, not just for the ending of slavery in America, but, like O’Connell and Ireland, for the oppressed worldwide.

Mullan’s 2011 edition of the Douglass Narrative was awarded a 2012 Nautilus Book Awards Silver Medal.

Mullan’s introduction to the edition may be accessed by clicking here.

This intriguing book explores the question of whether there is life after death, not through scientific or academic methodology, but by allowing people from around Ireland and the world to tell their stories of having been contacted by the living dead.

Such first-hand accounts are both compelling to those who already believe and challenging to those who are sceptics.

Contacted does not set out to prove or to proselytize. Each story is presented on its own, without commentary, thus allowing readers to make up their own minds. Such an approach gives breathing space to the reader who might wish to sit and reflect on a particular story.

How many emails have you deleted recently offering you inherited millions from a mystery relative, or the uncollected winnings from an unheard of lottery? Rather than press delete, Don Mullan decided to take the Scammers on at their own game…

As a result, welcome to the fantasy world of the saintly Nod and Catherine Nallum and their associates, Bart Ahern, Biggles and Fr Jonathan Ross; of Pastor Patricio, Supreme Head of the Church of Serendipity and his Parisian friends, and of the 3rd Marquess of Miserly-Scholes of Stoke-on-Trent and his PA/lover, Lady Sarah Macbeth…

As well as highlighting a very serious issue a recent study showed one million residents in the UK have been defrauded by internet scams, Don Mullan begins his quest to scam the scammers, with very memorable results.

Radio broadcaster, Claire Crofton, made a programme for BBC Radio 4 in October 2015. Crofton’s programme featured on BBC Radio 4’s Pick of the Week!

You may listen to the broadcast, including extracts from the book and an interview with Don Mullan, by clicking here.