A prominent solicitor and former civil rights activist told the inquiry on Wednesday that Official Republicans who were involved in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) were absolutely committed to non-violence.
Mr Rory McShane, a member of the Council of the Law Society of Northern Ireland, was chairing the rally in the Bogside on January 30th, 1972, which was interrupted when British soldiers opened fire. Mr McShane described how the late British peer Lord Fenner Brockway, then 83, who was waiting to speak from the platform at Free Derry Corner, remained standing after the shooting started. "I suddenly realised that he did not know what was happening." He and Ms Bernadette Devlin went up to get Lord Brockway down.
The witness said Ms Devlin said early in the march something like: "We will be lucky to get through this march with fewer than five or six dead." He did not believe this for a moment, as he thought it inconceivable that soldiers could fire upon peaceful marchers.
Asked by Ms Cathryn McGahey, for the tribunal, whether anybody in NICRA had advocated violence, he replied: "On the contrary, the whole point of the NICRA movement was peaceful, non-violent political activity."
Mr Edwin Glasgow QC, for a number of soldiers, put it to the witness that if individual officers of NICRA were also members of the IRA, the tribunal could infer that those individuals were not in any sense committed to non-violence.
Mr McShane said those in NICRA who had a background in the Official Republican Movement were absolutely and totally committed to non-violence. "The Goulding group, call them that, the Official Republican Movement, had had the experience of the 1956-62 campaign . . . that violence was a complete and utter failure in its political method, and they had taken a decision that they were not going down the violent route," he said.
Mr McShane said it had always been his opinion that what happened on Bloody Sunday "was a result of a deliberate policy by the security forces to `shoot us (civil rights marchers) off the streets'."
Another witness, Mr Gerry Newton, maintained, in the face of persistent sceptical questioning, that a soldier close to him in the car-park of Rossville Flats had a Sterling sub-machine gun. The soldier used the butt of this weapon to "clobber people" as they ran past him, and then fired several bursts from it.
Replying to Mr Glasgow, the witness said as an army cadet he had seen police and soldiers on a military camp using Sterling sub-machine guns and knew the noise they made.
Mr Glasgow put it to him that no soldier who got out of a Pig (armoured personnel vehicle) on Bloody Sunday had a sub-machine gun, but the witness said his recollection was clear.
After a photograph was shown of soldiers just outside the Bogside before the main shootings, Mr Glasgow agreed the weapon carried by one might be a Sterling sub-machine gun.