Bloody Sunday

On 30 January 1972, 14 civilians were shot dead by the British army. They had been taking part in a civil rights march in Derry, protesting against internment without trial. Lord Widgery was highly selective in the evidence he used in his official report on the matter—and some of the accounts he chose to include were highly suspect. The victims' families have campaigned for justice ever since. Their case is too strong to ignore any longer. By Eamonn McCann

The British government has two closely related problems in dealing with Bloody Sunday. The first has to do with political motivation and responsibility for the massacre, the second with the possibility that a subsequent cover-up was organised at the highest level within the British political and legal establishments.

The facts suggest as a likelihood that the military operation was approved in advance by representatives of both the Northern Ireland and British governments and mounted in order to shore up the Stormont administration headed by Mr Brian Faulkner and that, thereafter, the lord chief justice of England conspired for political reasons to conceal or distort the truth and thus to pervert the course of justice.

There are no foreseeable circumstances in which a British government would sanction an inquiry that it was aware might establish these likelihoods as fact. In other words, there is currently no possibility of the key demand of the families of the victims being met. Twenty-six years on, the Bloody Sunday issue is as far from resolution as ever.

Bloody Sunday was so hugely shocking at the time, and has echoed so distinctively and ominously down the years since, that it has come to be seen almost as an event on its own, as if having happened in isolation from the political context of its time. But the pressure that produced the spasm of evil around Rossville Street on 30 January 1972 had been generated from deep within the North's political system.

The parliament at Stormont, which the Unionist Party had dominated for 51 years, was beleagured from without and disintegrating from within. The specific likely purpose of the Bloody Sunday operation will have been to thwart the perceived threat to Stormont rule posed by what was happening in Derry.
The 30 January march was in opposition to internment without trial, which had been introduced by Mr Faulkner, home-affairs minister as well as prime minister, under Stormont's Special Powers Act the previous August. The march was illegal, all parades having also been banned in August. Mr Faulkner's extreme-unionist critics had welcomed internment but were angered that the blanket nature of the ban curtailed Orange processions, too.

Internment so enraged the Catholic working-class areas from which most internees were drawn that many—and some not for the first time—instantly became “no-go areas” for the RUC and British army. The largest and most obdurate was the 30,000-strong Bogside-Creggan district of Derry. The 30 January march was scheduled to begin in the Creggan and to weave through the Bogside before proceeding to Guildhall Square in the city centre. It promised to be the biggest in a series of marches that had begun on Christmas day with a demonstration from the outskirts of Belfast to the gates of the Long Kesh internment camp.

In the four weeks before Bloody Sunday, there were nine illegal anti-internment marches across the North. Mr Faulkner was constantly challenged on the issue by dissidents within his own party, such as William Craig, and by the Reverend Ian Paisley, of the recently formed Democratic Unionist Party. Internment, they complained, had not made the state more secure. The law was openly being flouted on a vast scale. If “drastic” action wasn't taken, warned Mr Craig on 16 January, “there will be determined loyalist action to sweep weak leadership away.”

On 22 January, an anti-internment march in Armagh was scattered by British soldiers firing CS gas and rubber bullets. On the same day, a march to a newly opened prison camp at Magilligan in Co Derry was beaten and kicked into disarray by soldiers, including men of the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment bussed in from near Belfast. Civil rights leaders complained about soldiers putting the boot in. But as far as Faulkner's far-right critics were concerned, he was still pussyfooting around.

As Armagh and Magilligan marchers nursed their bruises on the way home, the Grand Amalgamated Committee of the Orange Order, the Royal Black Preceptory and the Apprentice Boys of Derry was meeting in Lurgan.

Unimpressed by the security forces' performance earlier in the day, they issued a threat of Orange marches in defiance of the ban if a stop wasn't put to the anti-internment protests: “In the absence of a clear demonstration of [the ban's] effectiveness, the government can hardly expect our people to observe it.”
At Stormont the following Tuesday, 25 January, Ulster Unionist MPs Robert Mitchell and John Laird defied the party whip and voted for a motion jointly proposed by Mr Craig and Dr Paisley condemning the application of the ban to parades by the “loyal orders.” On the same evening, the Derry branch of the DUP called for action against the Bogside-Creggan—“The Queen's writ must run in all parts of our city”—and announced a “prayer meeting” in Guildhall Square at 3.00 p.m. the following Sunday to coincide with the scheduled arrival of the march.

The statement ended with a plea: “Where are the men at the top? Why are they so silent? What are they waiting for?”

The following evening, Mr Craig enthused a packed rally at the Apprentice Boys Hall in Derry, contemptuously contrasting the fumbling of Faulkner with the tough leadership that would have been forthcoming from true men like Edward Carson. Loyalists, he declared, “must find new leaders and go into action.” He announced a series of demonstrations to begin the following week, to culminate in a “monster rally” in Belfast on 18 March. Nineteen-seventy-two would be “loyal Ulster's year of decision.”

At 8.30 the following morning, the first two RUC men to lose their lives in Derry in the Troubles, Peter Gilgun, 26, married with an 18-month-old son, and David Montgomery, 20, were killed in a Provo ambush as their car travelled along Creggan Road at the edge of the no-go area. There was now, naturally, even more intense outrage in the calls for harsher security action.

As the two policemen drove into the ambush, Mr Faulkner was en route to London, possibly ruminating on the meeting of the Stormont Joint Security Committee, which he had chaired the previous night. It had been attended by the general officer commanding British troops in the North, Lieutenant General Harry Tuzo, RUC Chief Constable Graham Shillington, Junior Home Affairs Minister John Taylor and a British government official. It is likely, to put it no higher, that the handling of the Derry march had been the main item on the agenda.

In London, Mr Faulkner addressed a meeting of industrialists on the investment attractions of Northern Ireland, and then met for more than an hour with Prime Minister Edward Heath at Downing Street before flying home.

On the following morning, Friday 28 January, Mr Heath presided at a meeting of his cabinet's Defence and Overseas Committee, attended by Home Secretary Reginald Maudling—responsible for Northern Ireland affairs—Defence Secretary Lord Carrington, Leader of the Commons William Whitelaw, and the joint chiefs of staff. This group, minus the joint chiefs of staff, also constituted the cabinet's Northern Ireland Committee. It is likely that the Derry march featured at this meeting, too: during the Commons debate in April 1992 on presentation of the Widgery Report, Heath was to reveal that “cabinet ministers” had been aware of the plans for handling the Derry march.

The next day, 29 January, the RUC and the British army issued a joint statement: “Experience this year has already shown that attempted marches often end in violence and [sic] must have been foreseen by the organisers.

“Clearly, the responsibility for this violence and the consequences of it must rest fairly and squarely on the shoulders of those who encourage people to break the law. The security forces have a duty to take action against those who set out to break the law.”

That afternoon, the Democratic Unionists announced the cancellation of their “prayer meeting”:

“We have been assured that the civil rights march will be halted by force if necessary. We are prepared to give the government a final opportunity to demonstrate their integrity and honour their promise, but warn that if they fail in this undertaking they need never again ask loyalist people to forfeit their basic right of peaceful and legal assembly.”

The same afternoon, a run-of-the-mill riot in William Street shuddered to a halt when a local man, Peter McLaughlin, was hit in the shoulder by a single shot fired by a soldier stationed on a rooftop about 100 yards away.

As the street cleared, another man, Peter Robson, ran out to help. As he bent over McLaughlin, another shot from the rooftop on the Strand Road struck him in the shoulder and passed through his body less than half an inch from his spine. Within an hour, the British army had issued a press statement claiming that the two men had been throwing nail-bombs. They had fallen a few yards from the spot where Damien Donaghey and John Johnston, the first casualties of Bloody Sunday, were to be shot the next day. Neither man was ever questioned or charged in relation to the nail-bomb allegation.

Late the same night, at their home on Westway, Creggan, Peter Robson's brother Terry, having driven from Belfast upon hearing of the shooting and noted military vehicles on the move in unusual numbers, remarked: “There's something really odd about all this. Something's up.”

Bloody Sunday has been a bitter and emotional factor in Northern politics for 26 years, but it didn't become a mainstream issue or begin to figure in Anglo-Irish relations until the early 1990s. The relatives' organisation, the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign (BSJC), was formed in 1992, when activities around the 20th anniversary of the massacre brought representatives of the 14 families together for the first time. Until then, the annual commemoration march, the upkeep of a memorial in the Bogside and sporadic propaganda activity had been organised by the Bloody Sunday Initiative, a loose group with a shifting, largely republican membership.

It was a measure of the difficulty of winning mainstream support until recently that when this writer travelled to Dublin in January 1992 with a number of relatives of the victims for the publication of the book Bloody Sunday in Derry, written to mark the 20th anniversary, only one TD, Tony Gregory, attended the launch in Buswell's Hotel, across the street from Leinster House, although every member of the Oireachtas had been individually invited.

It has since been helpful that the founding of the BSJC coincided with the inception of the peace process, which has required the southern authorities to be seen representing the concerns of northern nationalists. Interest in Bloody Sunday has been significantly boosted, too, by new evidence that has come to light in the last two years. Thus the sense of momentum that has given some campaigners confidence that the truth is imminently to be acknowledged by the British authorities. But in fact, the more clearly the truth emerges, the uglier it seems, and the less likely that the British government will agree to look it in the face.

Given the context set out above, it will strike many as common sense that the Bloody Sunday operation was intended to strengthen the position of Prime Minister Faulkner and stave off Stormont's collapse. Direct evidence might be found in the minutes of the meetings at Stormont on 26 January and two days later at Downing Street. At the Widgery hearings, James McSparran QC, for the relatives, raised this with the commander of land forces in the North, Major

General Robert Ford:

McSparran: “Before the brigade orders were prepared, it had been discussed by the Security Committee and it had been discussed by the cabinet ministers in England?”

Widgery: “That is not a question for the general.”

McSparran: “Could I ask him does he know if it had been discussed?”

Widgery: “No.”

That Widgery's exclusion of the political background was itself politically motivated is suggested by the minutes of an extraordinary discussion between Widgery, Heath and the lord chancellor, Lord Hailsham, at Downing Street two days after the massacre, on the evening before the Commons announcement of Widgery's appointment to conduct the inquiry. Among “a number of points to which [Heath] thought it right to draw to the lord chief justice's attention [was that] it had to be remembered that we were in Northern Ireland fighting not just a military war but a propaganda war.”

Heath is also recorded saying that Derry Guildhall would be unsuitable as a venue for tribunal hearings, being “on the wrong side of the River Foyle.”
The Guildhall is on the mainly Catholic west bank of the Foyle.

Widgery himself “saw the exercise as a fact-finding exercise…It would help if the inquiry could be restricted to what actually happened in those few minutes when men were shot and killed; this would enable the tribunal to confine evidence to eye witnesses.”

In the event, Widgery confined himself to the evidence of some eye witnesses, refusing to hear the evidence of others. In writing his report, he then ignored much of the evidence that he had heard and distorted a great deal of the rest: an examination of the text rules out the possibility of this having come about through misunderstanding, carelessness or unconscious bias.

In the days after Bloody Sunday, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association gathered more than 700 eye-witness statements from civilians in Derry. Copies of these were presented to Widgery on 9 March. But instead of welcoming this reservoir of relevant information, Widgery, according to an internal tribunal memorandum dated 10 March, “considered that the statement…had been submitted at this late stage to cause him the maximum embarrassment.”

In fact, the three-inch-thick file of statements had been delivered to the Treasury Solicitor's Office in London on 3 March, 34 days after the event and 17 days before the tribunal's final public sitting. A delay of about a week had been caused by disagreement among relatives and others about whether to co-operate with the tribunal at all.

The 10 March memorandum records that “only 15” of the statements were “drawn to [Widgery's] attention.” It is not clear whether Widgery himself actually read any of these 15 statements. But on the basis of this knowledge, he is recorded saying of all 700 statements that he did not “think that the people who wrote them could bring any new element to the proceedings.” The statements were discarded.

The NICRA dossier was discovered by writer Don Mullan three years ago, in a plastic bag in the office of a civil rights group in Derry, and forms the basis of his book, published a year ago, Eye-witness Bloody Sunday. What mostly gave the book its huge impact were the repeated references in the 100 statements reproduced verbatim to shots fired from the City Walls where they beetle over the Bogside. The evidence selected by Widgery had either been unspecific on the point or told only of shots fired from ground level within the Bogside. Campaigners now argue that this factor on its own invalidates Widgery's conclusions and makes the case for a new inquiry.

It emerged that there had been other evidence available suggesting firing from the walls. In January last year, Channel 4 News broadcast tapes of British army and RUC communications recorded during the shooting by amateur radio enthusiast Jim Porter. Soldiers clearly identified as being on the walls are heard reporting incoming fire, firing and claiming “hits.” Mr Porter recalled offering his tapes to the tribunal and being rebuffed on the ground that the recording of radio communications without appropriate authorisation is illegal.

Additionally, Channel 4 and Mullan separately presented expert evidence from the post-mortem results that at least three of the victims had been shot from a height and not from ground level.

Widgery also rejected an offer of evidence from former Derry mayor Dr Raymond McClean, who had pronounced four of the victims dead in the Bogside and attended all 13 post-mortems at Altnagelvin Hospital. He would have given his opinion that at least one man and possibly two others had been shot from high above.

Widgery completed his mission with remarkable dispatch. The hearing of evidence and legal submissions was completed in under 100 hours, spread over 17 days between 21 February and 14 March. He heard 114 witnesses—37 people from Derry, including 7 priests; 21 journalists/photographers; 5 named and 35 unnamed British soldiers; 8 police officers; 6 doctors or forensic experts; and 2 other civilians, including Lord Fenner Brockway, one of the scheduled speakers at the intended Guildhall Square rally. Widgery delivered his report to Home Secretary Maudling on 10 April. It was published on 18 April—71 days after the incident under investigation. It runs to 39 pages.

All this can be taken as indicating a cavalier approach to his task by a man who, far from high-mindedly seeking out the truth, regarded himself as being on a political mission and had his mind already made up how best to accomplish the objective.

The indication is even clearer from looking at examples of Widgery's handling of the evidence that he did choose to hear, for example relating to the key moment when paratroopers opened fire in the courtyard of Rossville Flats and shot dead 17-year-old Jackie Duddy, the young man seen in a much-used film clip being carried dying through British lines by a group of men including Dr Edward Daly.

Lord Widgery heard from eight members of Support Company of 1 Para, who told that they had come under fire as they debussed from an armoured personnel carrier (APC) in the flats' courtyard, intending to arrest “hooligans.”

However, every soldier's account of the hostile fire contradicted every other soldier's account. The fog of battle hardly accounts for the discrepancies.
Sergeant O told of around 80 shots being fired in this enclosed space in the course of two to three minutes from different calibre weapons. Lieutenant N, on the other hand, couldn't recall any civilian gunfire at all. Major 236 described “continuous firing” not for two to three but for ten minutes. Lance Corporal V heard only single-shot rifle-fire. And so on.

Some of the soldiers took cover behind the APC, a bulkier vehicle than, say, a Ford Transit van. But not only did the blizzard of bullets miss the sheltering soldiers, it missed the APC….

Widgery heard evidence from six civilians about events in the flats' courtyard. They were Father (later Bishop) Edward Daly; Simon Winchester, a journalist then with the Guardian;  Mary Bonnor, a resident of the flats; Derrick Tucker, an Englishman living in Derry who had seen service with both the Royal Navy and the RAF; Joseph Doherty, an unemployed man from the Creggan estate; and Francis Dunne, a school-teacher, now headmaster of a large primary school. All were adamant that the soldiers' account of gunfire was total fabrication: no shots had been fired at the paras, they hadn't had to take cover, and so on.

Widgery professed himself “entirely satisfied” that the paras had come under fire and had fired back only in self-defence, and that it was in these circumstances that Jackie Duddy had been shot dead and Michael Bridge, Michael Bradley, Peggy Deery, Patrick McDaid and Alana Burke wounded. He explained: “Such a conclusion is not reached by counting heads or by selecting any particular witness as truthful in preference to another. It is a conclusion gradually built up over many days”—three, actually—“of listening to evidence and watching the demeanour of witnesses under cross-examination.”

Nowhere in his report does Widgery compare the two hugely conflicting stories. The reference to the “demeanour” of witnesses is his entire account of his process of reasoning. He offers no explanation for the remarkable level of disagreement between the soldiers.

    There is a hint at his underlying approach in the deadpan observation that “there was no reason why they should have…begun to shoot unless they had come under fire themselves.”

    The same approach led to other crucial finding by Widgery, including that “on the balance of probabilities” Gerald Donaghey, 17, had four nail-bombs in his pockets when shot in Glenfada Park. Much has been made of this case by defenders of the Bloody Sunday operation and by those arguing there was “blame on both sides.” It was the only case in which a weapon of any kind had allegedly been found on the body of a victim. (All others had been “spirited away.”)

The nail-bomb evidence came from a bomb-disposal officer, Soldier 127, who told Widgery that shortly after the shooting he had been called to Craigavon Bridge to examine a car containing a body. He noted two nail-bombs protruding from the jeans pockets, and two from the jacket pockets of a dead youth. Each of the nail-bombs, he said, was “about the size of a cocoa tin.” He summoned a police photographer and a Times reporter to note the nail-bombs. Both gave evidence confirming that the nail-bombs were in Donaghey's pockets when they arrived at the car.

Widgery heard evidence from two civilians who had carried the wounded Donaghey into the Glenfada Park home of Raymond Rogan, chairman of the local tenants' association. The two described his tight-fitting jeans and denim jacket, and said they saw no nail-bombs. Leo Young described searching Donaghey's jacket pockets for identification after they'd laid him down in the Rogan home. There had been no nail-bombs. Donaghey was examined in the house by Dr Kevin Swords of Lincoln Hospital, who had been in Derry visiting relatives. He gave evidence of loosening Donaghey's clothes to examine a gunshot wound in his abdomen and then “going over his whole body” for other wounds. He noticed no nail-bombs.

Charlie Hazlett, a reporter with the Belfast Telegraph for more than 20 years, sheltering in the Rogan home, said he watched closely as Dr Swords examined Donaghey. He noted no nail-bombs. Mr Rogan carried the dying Donaghey in his arms to his car and eased him into the rear seat. No nail-bombs. Leo Young sat into the rear seat and cradled Donaghey as they set off. Still no nail-bombs.

At Barrack Street, the car was stopped by a military patrol and Rogan and Young ordered out. A soldier drove the car to a first-aid post on Craigavon Bridge. Here, Donaghey was examined by a medical officer from the First Anglian Regiment, who gave evidence of examining the body before pronouncing Donaghey dead. He noticed no nail-bombs.

Shortly afterwards, when Soldier 127 summoned the police photographer and John Charteris of the Times, the nail-bombs were, literally, sticking out.
Charteris told the tribunal that he could see one of them clearly from outside the car, protruding from Donaghey's denim-jacket pocket.

It is scarcely to exaggerate, and not at all facetious, to speculate that a 10-year-old of average intelligence could work out what happened here. But Lord Widgery concluded that the nail-bombs had probably been in Donaghey's pockets all along. Donaghey had probably been a nail-bomber. The paras had probably had the right to kill him.

The demands of the BSJC, drawn up early in 1992, are for a clear declaration of the innocence of all the victims, the repudiation of the Widgery Report, and the prosecution of those responsible for the shootings.

Campaigners stress that they are not out for personal revenge. “I'm not fixated on having a 60-year-old Brit put in prison for murdering my father,” says Tony Doherty, whose father, Patrick, was shot dead at Joseph Place. “What I want is the complete truth.”

It is the demand for a formal renunciation of the tribunal's conclusions that raises the need for a new inquiry.

“No matter what apology is made or what sort of ‘review' is offered, until the British government formally repudiates Widgery's report, his findings will remain on the record as the official truth of what took place,” says Tony Doherty. “That's an insult. We will not accept it.

“The repudiation of Widgery would logically involve establishing a new inquiry. And after Widgery, we are justified in insisting on an independent element, whether an international panel of judges or whatever. We want all the available evidence made public and examined objectively. That includes any evidence of political motivation.”

The most obvious explanation of what happened in Derry is that the paras were deployed either to entice the IRA into battle or in the expectation that they would anyway be confronted by IRA members intent on battle, the plan being to inflict a major defeat on the republican forces and thereby shatter the resistance of the “Free Derry” no-go area while teaching the illegal anti-internment marchers a lesson in law and order they would remember for a long time—long enough for Mr Faulkner to staunch the haemorrhage of support to Craig-Paisley and to consolidate his position at Stormont. Given the certainty of thousands of marchers in the vicinity, any such plan would have involved a reckless disregard for civilian life. The paras were not policemen. Recalling the events in a BBC documentary broadcast in January 1992, the commander of 1 Para, Lieutenant Colonel Derek Wilford, put it plain: “When we moved on the streets, we moved as if we in fact were moving against a well-armed, well-trained army.”

Reporting the publication of the Widgery Report in April 1992, the Sunday Times's Insight team claimed that the plan of action for 30 January had been approved in advance by the Northern Ireland Committee of the British cabinet—because it carried an “obvious” risk of casualties.

This was the obvious possibility James McSparran had continued to pursue at the tribunal. “Do you know if the question of firing in the course of the arrest operation was discussed by the Security Committee?” he asked:

Ford: “…I do read the minutes…I can recall that the Joint Security Committee did take note of a comment made by the GOC and the chief constable that it was possible that the events in Londonderry…might lead to shooting by the IRA.”

After an exchange about the standing instructions governing return of fire, McSparran tried to return to his key question: “Did the operation which you carried out in the Bogside and in Derry…conform, in your view, to the tenor of the instructions issued by the Joint Security Committee?”
Widgery: “No, you need not answer that.”

But from the point of view of the relatives, this brings up precisely what needs answering.
Under the Public Records Act (1958), the minutes of both Stormont and Westminster cabinet committees are released after 30 years unless specific reasons, usually “national security,” are adduced for keeping them closed. In the normal course of events, then, the Bloody Sunday files should be opened in 2003.

But the 1958 act also provides for a decision by the lord chancellor to release such papers at any time. The current lord chancellor, Derry Irvine, could, with the approval of Tony Blair, take an executive decision to order the publication forthwith of all papers relevant to Bloody Sunday. This, in itself, might go a long way towards answering the questions that must be disposed of before the relatives can put the grief of Bloody Sunday behind them.
On the other hand, publishing the papers might suggest—and a new inquiry might show clearly—why Lord Widgery averted his eyes from some of the evidence and distorted some of the rest so as knowingly to reach conclusions at variance with the truth.

The truth about Bloody Sunday, which the relatives desperately need to know, may go so deep into the heart of British politics and law as to be mortally dangerous to the authority of the state.