Sunday Bloody Sunday

On a downbeat note, today sees the release of the Bloody Sunday report, by Lord Saville.


In case you're unfamiliar with the event, in 1972 the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association held a march in Derry, a largely Catholic/nationalist (not an exact fit, but no word covers it perfectly) city which was gerrymandered so that Catholics/nationalists were denied political representation and therefore access to social housing. The march was banned by the police but it went ahead.


The march was stopped by 1 Para, the hardest men of the British Army, who'd been wound up by most of their superiors (with one exception, a senior officer whose orders were ignored) to expect an IRA onslaught - quite the wrong group to send to a civilian event.

A further key issue, singled out yesterday by Lord Ramsbotham, Carver's military assistant at the time, was the way the paras were pumped by their commanding officers. "The Parachute Regiment has a certain ethos, not best suited to the delicate situation [in Derry at the time]," Ramsbotham told the Guardian.

He described the paras as "shock troops", told to "get in, and get in hard". 

Brigadier Andrew MacLennan, commander of British troops in the Derry region at the time, made it clear he was concerned about the decision to bring in the para "shock troops". He specifically ordered the paras not to get "sucked into the Bogside". His orders, those of the most senior British army commander with experience of Derry and its problems, were ignored. MacLennan was caught in a pincer movement by Ford and Wilford leading to a bloody battle that was to lead to hundreds of more deaths in the decades ahead.

In the face of limited stone-throwing by youths and two shots from a revolver, the Paras shot and killed 14 unarmed people, later planting bombs on some of them. The Army consistently claimed that it had been fired on and killed armed men.

One member of the Official IRA told the inquiry he fired one shot at soldiers after they had opened fire. A second said he fired a pistol after soldiers killed one of the marchers but was quickly told to stop.

General Sir Robert Ford, commander of land forces in Northern Ireland and Derek Wilford, commander of 1 Para:

Though [Ford] said he witnessed the scene on the day, he admitted under questioning by the Saville inquiry that he had no evidence for claiming in a report at the time that the soldiers had been fired upon. "I do not know why I wrote it that way," he said. "I had only a mental view. I saw nothing."

Wilford made similar inflammatory claims until, under questioning at the inquiry, he, too, admitted they were untrue. Admitting he had claimed he had seen a man with a carbine on the balcony of a Rossville flat, he was asked: "That was not true, was it?" Wilford replied: "Well, apparently not, no."

A paratrooper:

spoke at the Saville inquiry of a casual brutality among members of 1 Para, which he described as the army's "rottweiler". He said: "I had the distinct impression that this was a case of some soldiers realising this was an opportunity to fire their weapon and they did not want to miss the chance.

"There was no justification for a single shot I saw fired … the only threat was a large assembly of people and we were all experienced soldiers who had been through riot situations before."

The event became iconic, and led to queues of people enlisting in the Provisional IRA - the less socialist, more militant, successor to the Official IRA, which was widely seen as failing to protect its community. The war intensified, deaths mounted, the various sides reached a military stalemate.


Lord Widgery's 1970's inquiry was a whitewash - the strongest criticism was that some shots were fired 'recklessly'.


Tony Blair agreed to an inquiry while negotiating peace in Northern Ireland against the wishes of Unionist and Conservative politicians, who have never been able to criticise the armed forces for anything. We've seen activists, marchers, soldiers and politicians give evidence - some of it perjured or amnesiac. The security services have done their best to frustrate the inquiry, for example by destroying the army weapons used rather than handing them over as requested.


Now the report's due, the conservative media and politicians have two approaches: that the £200m cost was disgraceful, and that the soldiers are being treated unfairly if they're charged because the IRA aren't being prosecuted for whatever they did.


This is, of course, cant. Many IRA volunteers have done time. More to the point, they weren't active on Bloody Sunday. The soldiers should be held to a higher standard of behaviour because they were serving in an official capacity - they are the armed forces of the United Kingdom. The British claimed to be the rightful authority in Northern Ireland, yet unleashed the most violent armed men under its control onto peaceful demonstrators and refused to engage with their lawful and justified demands for equal treatment under the law - no wonder that people turned to armed resistance and refused to recognise a sectarian state.


Personally, I'd prosecute those who lied to the inquiry and those shown to have committed murder, such as the one who shot a wounded civilian in the back. The others are simply pawns of senior officers and politicians who saw Northern Ireland as a colonial rebellion to be put down with brute force rather than a mix of justified liberation demands and civil rights disgraces akin to the US Civil Rights movement. How else can one view the deployment of paratroopers on the streets of a Western European city against their own supposed people?


Today is a really big day - and yet we'll see the forces of reaction and colonialism dismiss the grief of those families and their desire to see justice done dismissed as an expensive waste of time.


Meanwhile, you can read the angriest poem in the world, by Thomas Kinsella, about these events and what they caused.