A group of 13-year-olds who joined the civil rights march on Bloody Sunday were hoping to give the British soldiers "a good hiding", a witness told the inquiry yesterday.
Mr Michael Joseph Rooney said, in reply to counsel's questions: "We were foolish. We were all 13 or 14. There was a mood that we were untouchable - we were happy." They were not even armed with sticks or stones, he said, but after he had run behind Rossville flats to escape the advancing paratroopers he met another 13-year-old, Danny Murray, who was holding a brush shaft and claimed that he had "whacked a para".
At that point there was the crack of a single high-velocity rifle shot, and "there was then a whole blatter of shots, about 40 or 50 altogether", he said. He was extremely scared, and along with Danny Murray and four or five others he cowered behind a telephone box until the shooting was over.
Mr Peter McLaughlin, who was aged 17 at the time, described how he was looking from the window of his family home on the third floor of Rossville flats while shots rang out in the car-park below.
Five or 10 minutes after the shooting started, he saw a civilian gunman inching his way along the gable end of houses across the car- park. The man stretched his right arm, wristed around the corner, and fired between three and five shots up Chamberlain Street. He did not take aim before he fired, and he could not have seen what he was shooting at.
The witness said: "I thought to myself, 'How stupid', because this was clearly a danger to the other people in the [nearby] playground."
Mr Peter Clarke QC, for a number of soldiers, suggested to the witness that he was among "a small minority" who had come forward and said they had seen this person, who has been described as "Father Daly's gunman", purely because Father Edward Daly had been the first person to mention that gunman's existence.
The witness said he had mentioned the gunman in a statement he made to NICRA (the Civil Rights Association) at the time, although this was not recorded, and if he had been called before the Widgery Tribunal - as he expected to be - he would have given that evidence also.
Mr Clarke suggested that "in the months, and even the years that followed, really the only people who talked about gunmen were really the priests, were they not?" The witness repeated that he would have given this evidence if called before Widgery.
He said that the impact Bloody Sunday had on the local population was perhaps not fully appreciated. "People did not do a lot of talking about the detail of their experience . . . Everyone in that community had their own experience on Bloody Sunday and there was not a lot of note-comparing."
Mr McLaughlin also described witnessing the shooting of Mr Paddy Doherty who was "dragging himself along the ground" painfully slowly on the other side of the flats. He seemed to be injured, and the witness said he first saw a bullet hit the wall behind Mr Doherty, and then a second bullet - fired from the direction of soldiers in Rossville Street - hit him.
However, another witness who was in the same area at ground level, Mr Edward Dillon, said he was certain that both Mr Doherty, and another man, Mr Daniel McGowan, who was injured, were shot from the city walls.
The retired headmaster of a primary school in the Creggan, Mr Hugh Kelly, described how about 10 or 12 "near-misses" cut through the air above his head as he lay sheltering with others in Westland Street, well away from the Rossville Street shooting.
His definite impression was that this firing was coming from the city walls, visible from that point.
The inquiry continues today.