ANALYSIS:The Saville Inquiry, which is expected to report shortly, has an important role to play in setting the record straight
ONE DAY soon – perhaps even in this present Irish generation – young quiz show contestants will fail to answer questions about how many died on Bloody Sunday, or what it was all about. The communal memory of atrocities fades or grows blurred and all hope of redress for the victims and retribution for the perpetrators of horrific deeds eventually dies.
The search for truth and justice remains active and urgent, however, while there are very many eyewitnesses and survivors of these events still living. And on January 30th, 1972, there were upwards of 10,000 civilians close by in Derry’s Bogside as death was dispensed deftly and rapidly by agents of the (British) state.
To all of these witnesses – including journalists such as the present writer – the shootings came as a bolt from the blue, an action so devastating and disproportionate that it defied credibility. The consequences were to resonate and influence events through 30 years of remorseless civil conflict.
Personally, I had no professional obligation to attend that Sunday's civil rights march which was to demonstrate mass public protest at the system of internment without trial then in operation in the North. Some months previously I had joined The Irish Timesforeign desk as a sub-editor – a desk job – rather than as a reporter.
But for some 15 years previously, as a writer for other publications, I had a close involvement with every stage of the civil rights campaign and the expanding civil unrest in the North. The energy and excitement of that mass movement of civil disobedience and defiance was an irresistible pull to most young journalists, and it offered real-life drama, challenges – and adrenaline – on a scale unmatched in the drab Republic.
Moreover, Derry’s Bogside, with its “no go” area and intense street riots defying the “security forces”, seemed to reflect the emerging global youth revolution – from the anti-Vietnam War protests in the US to the French students manning barricades in Paris.
In the summer of 1969, with the “Battle of the Bogside” raging, we chased Irish Army lorries along byways in Co Donegal until ordered away at the point of a submachinegun. We were spurred on by rumours of an impending cross-Border military intervention by the Republic.
At the Bridgend Border crossing point, with radio reports of the Bogside conflict intensifying, I hitched a ride in a battered van which sped towards Derry, as another passenger waved a Tricolour out the window. They dropped me at the top of William Street, where I gazed with astonishment at an almost surreal scene.
There was not a single person to be seen on the street, but over its entire length it was strewn with broken glass and rocks, overturned cars, some still burning, and all the signs of an intense battle which had just moved on elsewhere.
That was the day the British army was deployed throughout the North, and the B Specials and RUC pulled back. Over the following two years up to Bloody Sunday, violent interaction between the Northern state and its nationalist citizens intensified and a restructured Provisional IRA emerged.
Militaristic republicanism, however, remained an activity of a tiny minority, frowned upon by the great majority who preferred the peaceful protest campaign developed by the civil rights movement.
In the run-up to January 30th, 1972, reports coming south predicted the biggest civil demonstration against internment yet to take place in the North, and it seemed natural – even imperative – to use a weekend’s leave to travel to Derry for this event. It would be a mass action of civil disobedience, since all parades had by then been banned by the Stormont government.
I awoke painfully early on Sunday morning from fitful slumbers on a couch in the Bogside home of the hospitable McCafferty family.
The previous evening had been filled, as usual, with much political debate and argument, and some liquid refreshment. Slipping out the front door, I headed for the only shop I knew of in the Bogside, a little general store on the ground floor of the high flats in Rossville Street. It would be a long day, restaurants were non-existent in the Bogside and some portable snacks such as chocolate bars would be needed for sustenance through the march.
At that early hour, only children clustered into and around the shop, sent for breakfast messages such as bottles of milk. It was a frosty, sunny morning, and even today I have a distinct memory of a shadow falling across the window of the shop and the sound of a powerful engine. A heavy Saracen armoured car crawled along Rossville Street and up to and through the chicane in the rubble barricade that marked the boundary of “Free Derry”.
Incongruously, a tiny boy, no more than six or seven, rushed out the door and picked up a stone as big as his head. He could barely carry the missile, let alone launch it at the Saracen. His older sister ran out after him, screaming at him to come back “or your mother will kill you”. A trivial, even funny incident, and it was only years afterwards that the thought occurred that this might have been one of several early reconnaissance, or probing patrols, linked to the planned incursion by paratroops later that day.
Up on the open ground on the Creggan estate a couple of miles away, people were gathering by lunchtime, and dozens of coaches were arriving from all parts of the North. There was a carnival atmosphere, overlaid by high-energy tension and defiance as, after all, this parade was proscribed and was to be a huge gesture of protest against the internment without trial of hundreds of Catholics.
The course of the march, the spin-off riot at the army barrier in William Street, and the gathering of the mass meeting at Free Derry Corner in Rossville Street, have been documented repeatedly and in immense detail by hundreds of eyewitness statements to the Saville Inquiry and elsewhere. From personal memory, the first intimation of real menace came as I stood on waste ground near the corner of Rossville Street, dodging the clouds of CS gas emitted by canisters dropping all around.
Glancing up to the roofline of the houses that fringed the area, I noticed that every attic window was slightly open, and I still recall the first frisson of fear that day as I saw the outline of helmets and rifle barrels – snipers – behind every window. This was plainly overkill for the policing of a peaceful civil rights march.
There was no time to reflect on this, however, for events unfolded quickly from that point, and Lord Saville’s report will certainly analyse in depth and moment-by-moment the sudden onrush by paratroopers on a so-called “scoop up” arrest operation into a Rossville Street crowded with civilians making their way to the meeting.
My own experiences are documented in The Irish Timesreports of the following and subsequent days, and in my evidence to the Saville Inquiry. All of the eyewitness and documentary evidence can be accessed easily online on the superb CAIN website (Conflict Archive on the Internet).
Suffice it to say that the most personally traumatic moment was when I came upon the bloodied civil rights banner which had led the march. It lay on the ground in the gathering dusk, and on it was a circle of flowers. At the centre of this floral ring – making a strange impromptu shrine – lay an open matchbox which contained an intact human eyelid and eyelash.
Much later it was possible to deduce that this was the eyelid of Barney McGuigan, a much-respected member of the Bogside community. He had gone on the march wearing his Sunday best, and was sheltering with other terrified civilians behind the gable of Rossville Flats as the hail of high-velocity army shooting continued.
As a dying youth on the nearby rubble barricade called repeatedly for help, McGuigan pulled a clean white handkerchief from his pocket and, holding it high in the air, stepped out from cover to go to the boy’s aid. He was cut down instantly by a paratrooper’s bullet through the head.
It is not contested that this senseless orgy of killing destroyed any sense of hope in the Northern Catholic community that change and reform could be brought about by peaceful, constitutional means – and indeed the civil rights movement faded out in the succeeding months. But what really capped the deep trauma of that tragic day was the elaborate cover-up that followed – particularly the manner in which the report of the then British lord chief justice, Lord Widgery, systematically constructed the suspicion or insinuation that many of the victims had been using firearms.
Widgery did not dwell on the multiple eyewitness accounts of McGuigan’s act of bravery. Conceding that it was not possible to say that McGuigan was using or carrying a firearm, Widgery closed the chapter on this victim with the extraordinary comment that “The paraffin test . . . constitutes ground for suspicion that he had been in close proximity to someone who had fired.”
Thus the judge, whose name will forever be associated with propaganda, perversion of the truth and whitewash of murder, implied that in some way the killing of McGuigan was justified.
Widgery did not discuss why a man clutching a white handkerchief should have his brains blown out by an aimed shot fired by a soldier. And no serious effort was ever made to bring the rigours of the law to bear on this soldier, or any of the others who killed and maimed on Bloody Sunday.
There is no statute of limitations on the prosecution of such crimes of murder, and the memory of the innocent dead and their surviving families is grievously insulted by the argument in some – particularly unionist – quarters that the killings should be forgotten and the case dropped because so much time has elapsed.
That suggestion is simply an argument that the guilty should go unpunished (and the truth remain untold) if they can just evade detection for long enough. And the fact is that many of the paratroopers, their officers and members of the Edward Heath political establishment who oversaw the Bloody Sunday operation, are now dead.
If, after 38 years, the report of Lord Saville can bring some retrospective honesty and impartial truth to bear, it may be of more value to the reputation of Britain than to the diminishing cohort of victims and relatives.
For the elaborate cover-up served its purpose in moulding and reassuring British public opinion at the time. After the Widgery report, the Daily Expresswas quick to trumpet: "The army emerges from the Widgery Tribunal report with its reputation enhanced. Bloody Sunday in Londonderry was principally the fault of the march organisers and the IRA."
It is extremely unlikely that British public opinion will pay much attention to Lord Saville’s findings now. The dead cannot speak for themselves, but those who still survive from that terrible day may simply be left reflecting on the truism that “justice delayed is justice denied”.