BLOODY Sunday was one of the defining moments of the North of Ireland conflict. It occurred as part of the Tory "get tough" security policy in the six counties which at the time, as now, was heavily influenced by the traditional alliance with, and reliance on, the Unionists.
The first of the three major rough handed operations which were like a series of rocket propulsion thrusts for the emerging Provisional IRA occurred on July 3rd, 1970, within a few days of the Tories taking power after the June 20th General Election. The "softly softly" Labour policy on security which Roy Hattersley had been pursuing went out the window with the Falls Road curfew - the "Rape of the Falls", as it is still referred to in West Belfast.
By the time that search and ransack operation was over, deaths, destruction and provocations had unleashed a tidal wave of IRA recruitment.
However, the British continued to sing out of the Unionist hymn book, and the following year, on August 9th, 1971, internment was introduced to the accompaniment of "deep interrogation" techniques. These eventually led to London's being taken before the Court of Human Rights by Dublin, on torture charges. The "lamb laidir" policy was still in place on January 30th, 1972, in Derry when an illegal, but peaceful, parade of Nationalists was held to protest against internment.
For my book on the Troubles I interviewed Nigel Wade of the Daily Telegraph who covered both Bloody Sunday and a previous march along the shore at Magilligan a week earlier. Wade had been horrified by the brutality of the Paras on that occasion. They chased demonstrators into the icy seas and only ceased beating them when hauled off by their baton wielding NCOs. Some of the hyped up Paras had batons broken over their heads before they released their victims.
When, seven days later in Derry, Wade saw the same Paras being unleashed from army vehicles with rifles in their hands - their officers calling out "Go on, Paras, get them" he knew instantly that something appalling was about to occur. It did. The soldiers opened fire on the demonstrators, killing thirteen of them. It was a day of infamy. But this was not how it was seen by the Daily Telegraph. "They shot well," was the verdict of a Telegraph correspondent to Wade an hour or so after the slaughter.
Disturbed by the approach to Ireland, Wade transferred to Washington without his, or anyone else outside the British Army, realising just how "well", or deliberately, the army had shot. Certainly the whitewash "investigation" carried out by Lord Chief Justice Widgery into Bloody Sunday did nothing to enlighten him, or anyone else.
But murder will out, and the effect of this excellent book by Don Mullan, his collaborator, John Scally, and the preface writer, Jane Winter, will be finally to discredit the official account of Bloody Sunday. On that day Mullan was a fifteen year old participant in the march. His twenty five year ambition to bring out the truth about what he saw has now established a number of damning facts central to an understanding of what happened.
In the first place, he has discovered that lethal fire was directed at the demonstrators by British Army units other than the Paras. At least three of the dead were shot by a soldier or soldiers unknown from a hideout above Derry's walls.
Another key piece of research is the fact that Widgery himself only looked at fifteen of the five hundred eyewitness statements submitted.
Why Widgery could be so unbelievably selective becomes explicable when one reads the confidential Downing Street minute of the briefing direction given by the then British Prime Minister, Ted Heath, to Lord Widgery, two days after the massacre. "It had to be remembered that we were in Northern Ireland fighting not only a military war but a propaganda war."
Unsurprisingly, Widgery's conclusions amounted to an important, if temporary, "victory" for the British in that propaganda war. The Paras were found note guilty of anything even remotely resembling the deliberate and unlawful taking of life. They might have been "reckless", but that was all. In fact, their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Derek Wilford, was awarded an OBE later that year. At least Private Lee Clegg had to wait for the advent of a British General Election before the British moved to reward him for his services to Unionism by referring his slap on the wrist sentence to appeal.
Other scandalous stories emanating from the British damage limitation exercises following Bloody Sunday included the myth that some of the dead had fired on the Army, or were carrying weapons or explosives. A vignette of Mullan's, however, indicates the type of person who was shot. "The scene I shall never forget is that of finding the blue and white Civil Rights banner, carried at the front of the march the previous day, now lying on the ground a few yards from a telephone kiosk. It was soaked in the blood of 41 year old Barney McGuigan, probably one of the most inoffensive and goodhearted people in Derry at that time.
The death of McGuigan and people like him meant that, for a very long time afterwards, there were people in Northern Ireland who felt that anything the IRA did was justified.
This is not Mullan's view. The highlights from his book have been widely publicised, most notably in a remarkable Channel 4 programme, but the book itself should be read and pondered on. Bloody Sunday was the inevitable outcome of the Executive decision to introduce counter insurgency methods into due process at the behest of the Unionists and the Tory Right.
Now, in the wake of Drumcree, with the peace process stalled, in large part because of that same Tory/Unionist alliance, we are in a political vacuum, as we await the outcome of the British General Election. We are also approaching the 25th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. As Terence McCaughey says in his fine introduction to this book, Don Mullan has "done us all a service by enabling those who want to do so, and can bear to do so, to hear these voices which have been silent for twenty five years."
It is a chilling parable for our times.