The many top-level military and political documents uncovered by the Bloody Sunday Inquiry contain no hint of any secret plan for a confrontation with the IRA on the day of the shootings, it was claimed yesterday.
On the third day of the hearings in Derry's Guildhall, counsel to the tribunal, Mr Christopher Clarke QC, reviewed an extensive body of confidential official records. He said the material included papers and briefings at the highest level both in the military and in government.
"There is no reference in it to any plan or anything that looks like a plan to draw out the IRA in order to engage with them or to teach the citizens of the Bogside a lesson," he said. "On the contrary, important parts of this material are inconsistent with such a plan."
He quoted the minutes of a meeting of the British government's Northern Ireland Policy Committee, known as GEN 47, held on January 11th, 1972: "A military operation to reimpose law and order in Londonderry might in time become inevitable, but should not be undertaken while there still remained some prospect of a successful political initiative".
Mr Clarke added that a plan to use the march to provoke a confrontation with the IRA "would, a tribunal may think, require both Cabinet approval and military planning or at least one of those.
"Such a plan would require a number of very senior personnel from the prime minister and the chief of the general staff downwards to be involved in it . . . and could not be carried out at all without giving the necessary instructions to the troops".
Mr Clarke also quoted a statement given to the tribunal by Gen Sir Michael Jackson (then Capt Jackson and the Adjutant of 1 Para). In it, Gen Jackson said: "It would be absurd to suggest that there was a secret oral instruction that would in some way take precedence over written orders.
"For such a complex operation, written orders would have been needed. The mission was to conduct an arrest operation pure and simple. If the IRA sought to open fire then we would obviously react to them, but we did not seek this reaction." Mr Clarke also referred to portion of a statement provided to the tribunal by Sir Edward Heath, who was British prime minister at the time of Bloody Sunday.
Sir Edward says that at a meeting of GEN 47 on January 27th, three days before Bloody Sunday, the march was discussed: "The tenor of the discussion was that this could be expected to be a comparatively peaceful march, but that, as with all marches in the Province at that time, IRA or hooligan attempts to infiltrate and exploit the march for their own purposes could never be ruled out.
". . . ministers were told that reliance would be placed mainly on water cannon, and that the use of CS riot control agent would be restricted. The record suggests, and my recollection is that the possibility of using live firearms was not discussed and no specific political authority was sought or given for the use of firearms.
"It would have been understood that firearms should be used only if those in command on the ground considered their use to be absolutely necessary".