Bloody Sunday was a "fairly disastrous" military operation, former British Defence Secretary Lord Carrington said today.
This was Downing Street's opinion in the immediate aftermath of British paratroopers killing 13 Catholic men on a Derry civil rights march on 30th January 1972, he said.
"A lot of people got killed and that was the last thing we wanted to see," Lord Carrington (83) told the Bloody Sunday Inquiry.
He refused to blame the British army for the bloodshed in the Bogside, saying that would be something for the 280 day old British government-appointed inquiry to decide on the evidence.
As the political head of the armed forces in 1972 Lord Carrington is the most senior politician to have appeared.
He spoke in a decisive and unfaltering voice during five hours of questioning at London's Westminster Central Hall, watched by relatives of the dead men.
He immediately sought to dispel long-held beliefs that there was a British government-sanctioned plot to shoot innocent civilians on that day.
Lord Gifford QC, representing the family of victim James Wray, told Lord Carrington that the British government had endangered Catholic lives in order to appease Protestant opinion.
Lord Carrington angrily replied: "I think that is a disgraceful accusation."
Suggestions that there was a plot to shoot innocent civilians are "ridiculous", Lord Carrington said, adding "people find plots in everything".
There was "never any question" of the British army firing on innocent people in Derry's no-go area in early 1972, as the armed forces struggled to maintain law and order.
"I can state quite categorically that it was never policy to shoot unless a target had been identified as a threat," he told the inquiry.
"I suspect the army was frustrated at the time with the situation in Northern Ireland at the time, but to suggest that there was a deliberate policy to shoot civilians is ludicrous and something that no politician would ever agree to."
Downing Street would not have sanctioned "any course of action which involved the deliberate loss of civilian life", he added.
Lord Carrington said he was not aware of a secret memo written by General Robert Ford, Commander of Land Forces and the British Army's second most senior officer in Ulster, suggesting shooting selected hooligan ringleaders would be the best way to restore law and order.
The memo was written three weeks before Bloody Sunday. No such plan existed, Lord Carrington said.
PA