State of Emergency: the Way We Were
Page 64
Over Christmas, the situation showed no signs of improving: indeed, two days before the end of the year another soldier, just 20 years old, was shot dead by a sniper. On 7 January, Ford wrote another report that was to become enormously controversial. Containment, he wrote, was clearly failing. Not only were the Derry Young Hooligans pushing further into the city centre, infuriating local shopkeepers, but the army had abandoned patrols outside the Bogside to protect their men from sniper fire. Even when soldiers went out in their armoured personnel carriers, they ran the risk of being surrounded and attacked by teenage ‘yobbos’, and then shot by snipers from the massive Rossville tower blocks when they got out of their vehicles. Law and order had degenerated to such an extent that local Protestant leaders were demanding ‘curfews and shooting on sight’. The only solution, Ford believed, was to get tough:
I am coming to the conclusion that the minimum force necessary to achieve a restoration of law and order is to shoot selected ringleaders amongst the DYH [Derry Young Hooligans], after clear warnings have been issued. I believe we would be justified in using 7.62mm but in view of the devastating effects of this weapon and the dangers of rounds killing more than one person, I believe we must consider issuing rifles adapted to fire .22 inch ammunition to sufficient members of the unit dealing with this problem to enable ringleaders to be engaged with this less lethal ammunition. If this course is implemented, as I believe it may have to be, we would have to accept the possibility that .22 rounds may be lethal. In other words, we would be reverting to the methods of internal security found successful on many occasions overseas, but would merely be trying to minimise the lethal effects by using the .22 round. I am convinced that our duty to restore law and order requires us to consider this step.
Hostile commentators have sometimes taken this passage as evidence of a supposed British army plot to murder innocent civilians; but it was clearly nothing of the kind. In any case, just four days later Heath’s Cabinet committee on Northern Ireland met to discuss the situation in Londonderry and agreed that although a major military offensive ‘might in time become inevitable, [it] should not be undertaken while there still remained some prospect of a successful political initiative’. Only by ignoring this wider context can anyone possibly believe that the British had a ‘premeditated and well planned’ operation to murder civil rights demonstrators, as Gerry Adams puts it. After all, neither the government nor the army had anything to gain from killing civilians in the full gaze of the world’s media. They may have made mistakes, but they were not that stupid.9
It was just three weeks later that disaster struck. Since 30 January 1972, Bloody Sunday has become not merely the most controversial single incident of the entire Troubles but perhaps the most exhaustively chronicled moment in modern British and Irish history, thanks to a vast number of narrative accounts, two television films, two songs entitled ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ by John Lennon and U2 (neither of them any good), and two highly contentious public inquiries, the first a whitewash by Lord Widgery in February 1972, the second an absurdly bloated affair set up by Tony Blair at a cost of more than £200 million. So much controversy surrounds the day that eyewitnesses cannot even agree how many people went on the march that triggered the violence: while organizers claimed 30,000, Lord Widgery thought the real figure was nearer 3,000. What is clear, though, is that the march began in a festive and relaxed atmosphere. Its organizers were civil rights activists (not hardcore republicans), protesting against the internment of Catholic civilians. Prevented by army barricades from marching into the city centre, as they had planned, they walked instead to the so-called ‘Free Derry Corner’ where army patrols had had so much trouble from nationalist hooligans. At the barricade on William Street, however, a group of teenagers confronted the British paratroopers and started throwing stones, as had long since become routine.
It was here that the shooting started, though who fired first, or at all, is almost impossible to determine. Many historians now agree that an Official IRA sniper probably fired at least one shot, though it is not certain that he opened fire first. What is certain, though, is that the paratroopers fired five rounds, wounding a teenager and a 59-year-old man. Meanwhile, just after four o’clock, the Paras in C and Support Companies were ordered to move into the Bogside and ‘scoop up’ the rioters, although they were expressly ordered not to conduct a ‘running battle down Rossville Street’. Only minutes later, as Support Company’s armoured personnel carriers screamed into the courtyard of the towering Rossville Flats, more shooting broke out. According to the Paras, they came under heavy fire from the flats; yet no other witnesses saw gunfire, and no guns, bullets or bombs were ever recovered from the scene. What is beyond doubt, however, is that the Paras fired more than 100 rounds into the confused melee of fleeing marchers, killing thirteen unarmed civilians, seven of them teenagers. Some were trying to help the injured; others were running to safety; many were shot from behind. ‘Am I going to die?’ one 17-year-old boy gasped as Father Edward Daly, the Catholic priest who became for ever associated with that awful afternoon, knelt over him. ‘I said no,’ Daly recalled, ‘but I administered the last rites. I can remember him holding my hand and squeezing it. We all wept.’10
By any standards it was a terrible day, a tragedy for which there could be no consolation. But it does not take £200 million to work out why Bloody Sunday happened. With armed British troops, trained to fight and kill, patrolling the streets of Northern Ireland under intense provocation from Catholics and Protestants alike and under heavy pressure from Stormont and their superiors, disaster was always a possibility. As General Ford had written in December, there was a strong likelihood that if the army went into the Bogside a ‘slaughter of the innocent’ would result, and he had been proved right. But the immediate context, too, was crucial. The army had been losing men almost every week to IRA snipers, and just three days before Bloody Sunday the IRA had shot dead two young Derry policemen and set off two bombs at the army’s Hollywood barracks. It was hardly surprising that the army expected Sunday’s civil rights march to turn violent, and Ford’s officers warned him that however peaceful the marchers’ intentions, ‘the DYH backed up by the gunmen will undoubtedly take control at an early stage’. Above all, the Paras’ operational orders on Sunday afternoon explicitly told them that they might face ‘IRA terrorist activity’ and ‘shooting attacks against the security forces’, and that ‘almost certainly snipers, petrol bombers and nail bombers will support the rioters’. Since the beginning of 1971, snipers had already killed twenty-four British soldiers; news that they would be facing them that afternoon naturally made the Paras jittery. ‘The one thing that stuck in my mind’, Support Company’s sergeant major said afterwards, ‘was the fact that we were warned about sniper fire, possibly from the Rossville Flats. Sniper fire is very, very accurate … it’s feared by soldiers … It’s something to be very, very wary of … None of the people in my Company wanted to be killed by a sniper.’11
That said, however, the Paras were the worst people imaginable to be policing a civil rights march against such a tense, fearful background. They were intensely proud of their reputation as a highly trained, highly motivated elite: one later told Peter Taylor that their ‘very hard-minded’ ethos was built on ‘aggression and speed of movement’. Their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Wilford, was a cultured man who relaxed by reading Virgil in the original, but he insisted on a hard line and strict professionalism, with his men always blacked up and camouflaged, as though they were fighting a rival army. ‘This was a war,’ he said, ‘so we had to behave accordingly.’ In Belfast, the Paras had won a reputation for aggressive professionalism verging on outright brutality: just days before Bloody Sunday, the reporter Simon Hoggart wrote that they were the troops ‘most hated by Catholics in troubled areas’, and quoted one unnamed officer who said that they were ‘frankly disliked’ by other British officers, ‘who regard some of their men as little better than thugs in uniform’.
Some of the Paras seem to have been wracked with guilt after their afternoon’s work: the company sergeant major of Support Company, who saw no snipers or bombers that day, disbelievingly asked one soldier: ‘What the hell were you doing?’ But as another recalled, the general ‘mood between the blokes was, not elation, but at the same time, it was a job well done’. Perhaps that is hardly surprising: these were professional killers, after all, who had little sympathy for the nationalist population and thought they were merely defending themselves. What is more striking, though, is the reaction in mainland Britain, where although there was considerable shock at the deaths of thirteen civilians, there was also strong support for the army. One paratrooper stationed in Britain recalled that when the news came through, his view was that ‘the Paras had taken out the enemy … I am ashamed to say we cheered.’ The Daily Mail launched a passionate defence of the army’s reputation (‘our troops are doing an impossible job impossibly well’); less predictably, the Guardian ran an editorial written by the Ulsterman John Cole that struck a similarly defiant note. ‘The march was illegal,’ Cole wrote. ‘Warning had been given of the danger implicit in continuing with it … The army has an intolerably difficult time in Ireland. At times it is bound to act firmly, even severely.’ And Reginald Maudling’s Conservative constituency agent spoke for millions when he told the Home Secretary that although ‘it is never pleasant when people are shot dead … I must say I am glad that, at long last, the troops have started to get tough in riot situations, and I think that this attitude will have the support of everyone interested in the preservation of law and order.’13
Maudling himself treated Bloody Sunday with exactly the same sensitivity and seriousness that he brought to the general subject of Northern Ireland. In a packed House of Commons the next day, he casually remarked that the march had been illegal and that the army had been returning fire at people ‘attacking them with firearms and with bombs’. Not only did he not utter a single word of regret about the thirteen victims, therefore, he also contrived to smear them as IRA gunmen. Perhaps it was hardly surprising that the intemperate young Nationalist MP Bernadette Devlin launched herself across the chamber at him, pummelling the bulky Home Secretary and trying to pull his lank hair. He seemed remarkably unperturbed, though: one onlooker remarked afterwards that ‘she almost woke him up’. This was hardly likely to mollify the outraged nationalist population, and they were even less impressed by the Widgery report in April, which took the Paras’ self-justification at face value and issued barely a word of criticism.14
All in all, Bloody Sunday was a catastrophe for Britain’s image abroad. In the United States, donations to NORAID went through the roof; in Dublin, a mob set fire to the British Embassy while the Irish government angrily recalled its ambassador from London. ‘What swept the country’, wrote the journalist and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘was a great wave of emotion, compounded of grief, shock, and a sort of astonished, incredulous rage against an England which seemed to be acting in the way we often accused her of acting but of which we had not for decades really believed modern England capable’. And of course in Northern Ireland itself the Provisionals rubbed their hands with glee. The leading historian of the IRA suggests that, such was the Catholic fury after Bloody Sunday, they had ‘more potential recruits than they could easily absorb’. It was not, as is often claimed, a turning point; there had been too many atrocities already, and Northern Ireland had passed the point when major sectarian strife could have been avoided. But as one leading Provo later remarked, ‘events that day probably led more young nationalists to join the Provisionals than any other single action by the British’. From that day on, wrote Gerry Adams, ‘money, guns and recruits flooded into the IRA’.15
Bloody Sunday was the death knell for Stormont. Ever since British troops had first arrived to protect Catholic neighbourhoods from Protestant mobs, direct rule had been a strong possibility. A government that could not keep order on its own streets and was heartily distrusted by a large minority of its citizens was always on borrowed time, and by the second half of 1971 there was an increasingly firm Whitehall consensus that Stormont would have to be put out of its misery. After Bloody Sunday, however, the question of Northern Ireland’s constitutional future took on new urgency. It is nonsense to imagine, as republicans often do, that the British government was desperate to hang on to Northern Ireland; in fact, most ministers would gladly have been rid of it, and the public were already sick and tired of seeing it in the headlines. Indeed, it is striking how imaginative and radical Heath was prepared to be in February 1972. No option was off the table: among the alternatives his ministers discussed were a new partition of Northern Ireland allowing Catholic areas to join the Republic, a national referendum on its constitutional position, and an arrangement inviting Dublin to share the government of the troubled province. ‘The long-term solution’, the Cabinet minutes noted on 3 February, ‘might have to involve some sort of constitutional association between the two parts of Ireland, while permitting the Six Counties of Northern Ireland to continue to form part of the United Kingdom.’
Heath’s Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home, usually regarded as being on the right of the Tory Party, was prepared to go even further. A few weeks later, he suggested to Heath that ‘the real British interest would I think be served best by pushing them towards a United Ireland rather than tying them more closely to the United Kingdom’. The problem, however, was the unionist majority; by now, any hint of a united Ireland would probably have triggered a mass armed uprising. And when Heath summoned Brian Faulkner to London to discuss the various options, he found the Stormont Prime Minister in defiant mood. Not only was Faulkner opposed to any radical solution, he even baulked at inviting moderate nationalists to join his government. The result, he said, would be a ‘bedlam cabinet’; what was more, of course, it would destroy his own standing among the Unionist rank and file. As for letting Westminster take over all Northern Ireland’s security arrangements, he was opposed to that, too, on the grounds that it would ‘reduce our government to a mere sham’.16
But Faulkner’s government was running out of time, for the weeks after Londonderry saw the collapse of the last vestiges of law and order. In February, the two wings of the IRA killed seventeen people, among them ten innocent civilians. In the month’s most ominous incident on 23 February, the Official IRA planted a bomb near the officers’ mess at the Parachute Regiment’s headquarters in Aldershot, killing seven people. While the IRA boasted that their ‘successful retaliatory operation’ had killed ‘several high-ranking officers’, the victims were actually five dinner ladies, a gardener and a Catholic army chaplain. Almost two weeks later, the Provisionals followed suit by bombing the Abercorn restaurant in Belfast city centre, which was packed with women and children having a break from their afternoon’s shopping. Two women in their early twenties, both Catholics, were killed; 136 men, women and children were injured, many seriously. Two sisters lost both their legs; one, who was shopping for her wedding dress, also lost an arm and an eye. Afterwards, one paramedic sa
id, the ambulances were ‘awash with blood … It was the most distressing scene I have ever witnessed. There were bloody, mangled bodies lying everywhere.’ In a nightmarish irony, the surgeon who operated on many of the wounded, Fred Bereen, discovered only later that his daughter Ann had been one of the two young women killed.17
By now, as the Sunday Times put it, ‘carnage and mutilation [had become] the accompaniment of daily life’. Almost every day brought fresh reports of shootings and bombings, while the air was full of talk of pogroms and purges. There were those who still talked of peace, particularly in Belfast’s leafy middle-class suburbs, a world away from the violence of the estates, but it is simply not true that the conflict was imposed on an otherwise peace-loving population. ‘Hatred infected entire areas,’ remembered Kevin Myers; ‘it was this ruthless malignancy that gave them a common, almost reassuring identity. Politicians spoke of a “tiny minority” of terrorists: yet for every active terrorist there was probably a support group of at least fifty non-terrorist individuals.’ When the BBC interviewed ordinary citizens, it found many who welcomed the prospect of a bloody reckoning. One Catholic man looked forward to the British army’s withdrawal so that there could be a full-scale ‘civil war’, with the Republic’s armed forces on the Catholics’ side (‘Mr Lynch won’t let us down’). An elderly Protestant housewife, meanwhile, told an interviewer that when the British left, ‘we’ll just have to fight with our bare hands.’ And on 20 March the savagery reached a new low when the Provisionals detonated their first car bomb in Belfast’s busy Donegall Street. Six people were killed and some 150 injured, many of whom were actually fleeing from an earlier bomb attack in a nearby street. The scene ‘looked like a battlefield’, reported the Belfast Telegraph, with dozens of bodies ‘lying in pools of blood on the roadway’. Many people were screaming in unbearable agony from the shards of glass embedded in their wounds; one old man, barely conscious on the pavement, seemed ‘unaware that half his leg had been blown off in the explosion’.18