Lord Saville is appearing before the NI Affairs Select Committee at Westminister The man who led the Bloody Sunday Inquiry has defended the length of time it took and the cost to the taxpayer.
Lord Saville told the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee at Westminster that he was not aware of anything that could or should have been done better.
He said that he was asked to conduct a “thorough” inquiry – and that meant it could not be done cheaply or quickly.
The inquiry was the longest running in British legal history and cost about £200m between 1998 and 2010.
Lord Saville, who was speaking publicly for the first time since the inquiry was published, said it had been “unique” and had taken a decade of his life, but expressed no regrets.
He also defended the length of time to write the report – almost five years.
He said: “One thousand pages a year to write – not too bad is it?”
In response to questions about the cost of lawyers during the inquiry – around £100m – he said lawyers were “expensive, very expensive”.
However, he said that the inquiry could have cut costs by buying a house in Derry, which could then have been sold for a profit when his team had finished their work.
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