40 years on, Bloody Sunday's untold story

[caption id="attachment_69531" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Lord Hailsham was furious over Irish American interest."]

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This past weekend I was in Derry. Sinn Féin held the latest of our very successful Uniting Ireland conferences which drew a capacity crowd in the Millennium Forum.

Derry is a beautiful city, full of history and culture and art. And the people are great.

But for many people, particularly in the United States, the name Derry is synonymous with the terrible events that occurred there on January 30th 1972. On that day - exactly 40 years ago this week - British Paratroopers shot dead 14 civil rights marchers and wounded others in what has passed into history as Bloody Sunday.

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For the 39 years following that atrocity the families and the people of Derry campaigned for truth and justice for those who died and were injured. At great personal cost they organized and marched and lobbied.

In this they received invaluable support from Irish America. Noraid, the AOH, Clann na nGael and many others enthusiastically and relentlessly lobbied U.S. politicians. Irish people throughout the globe and Irish America in particular involved in the arts, academia and the labor movement supported the families.

Motions of support were passed in local and state legislatures and hearings were held in Washington. It was a long drawn out battle as successive British governments lied, opposed, and obstructed every effort by the families to get to the truth.

The British Widgery Inquiry had blamed the organizers of the march, the victims and the IRA. Widgery accused the dead of being "gunmen and bombers." According to the British, the Paras' actions were legal.

The Saville report, published in June 2010, finally binned that lie and established that the victims were innocent.

The Saville report was a vindication for the families who had campaigned for so long. It also concluded that the organizers of the march were not to blame for what happened. Saville decided that the IRA, or members of the IRA, had not taken any action that precipitated events.

Saville acknowledged that British soldiers fired the first shot and continued firing without any provocation. He dismissed any suggestion that soldiers acted out of panic or fear or confusion. Their actions were "unjustified and unjustifiable."

But Saville's conclusions are not the end of the matter. It is clear that the report tries very hard to limit blame for what happened to the soldiers on the ground who carried out the killings. In doing so, it seeks to exonerate their military and political masters.

And it is here that Saville fails. The report makes only a token nod towards the British Army command, and there is minimal criticism of the Para commander who was present in Derry.

The reality is that the Paras were acting within a political and military regime constructed by their political masters and by the top generals.

In the months before Bloody Sunday, a secret British cabinet committee dubbed "GEN42" had been discussing policy in the North. It was chaired by the British Prime Minister Ted Heath. It involved senior British army figures and senior politicians, including Quentin Hogg, aka Lord Hailsham.

In 1971, during an interview in which he was asked about U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy's interest in the North, Hailsham had banged the table with his fist and cried: "those Roman Catholic bastards. How dare they interfere!"

Over 20 years later, Michael Carver, who had been the British army's chief of the general staff, and was a member of GEN42 at that time, admitted that Heath had wanted soldiers to be able to shoot citizens irrespective of whether they were armed or not.

He claimed that Heath had been told by Hailsham, who as Lord Chancellor was the head of the British judiciary, that this was legal.

During a meeting of GEN42 on October 6, 1971 - four months before Bloody Sunday - it is reported that Heath said: "the first priority should be the defeat of the gunman by military means and that we would have to accept whatever political penalties were inevitable."

This was the political and military climate in which General Robert Ford, who was the British commander of land forces in the North of Ireland, wrote a memo after visiting Derry on January 7, 1972.

In his memo, Ford states that he is "coming to the conclusion that the minimum force necessary to achieve a restoration of law and order is to shoot selected ringleaders amongst the DYH (Derry young hooligans)."

In Derry, on January 30 1972, a senior correspondent from the London Times was standing next to Ford when paratroopers were ordered into the Bogside. Brian Cashinelle reported Ford was waving his swagger stick and shouting "Go on the Paras, go and get them, go on, go and get them."

However, in his report, Saville ring-fences blame around the small number of Paras who shot the marchers and attaches no blame to the generals and the politicians who made it happen.

That is a fault, especially when one considers the role of the British state in collusion, and in other similar atrocities like the Dublin and Monaghan bombings and the Ballymurphy Massacre.

Forty years on, the weekend's Uniting Ireland conference in Derry demonstrated the great resilience of the citizens of that fine city, and the work that is going on to unite and re-imagine a new Ireland.

It was also proof that British military policies - including the murders of Bloody Sunday - have failed. For that we give thanks to the Bloody Sunday families, and to everyone who supported them.

 

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