Kevin McCorry, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) chief march steward on Bloody Sunday, finds the Saville Inquiry sidestepped the key issue of who made the political decisions that led to the deaths of 14 innocent men.
George Bernard Shaw once said, “Truth telling is not compatible with the defence of the realm”. Did the Report of the Saville Inquiry disprove Shaw’s dictum? Veteran Irish Times journalist Dick Grogan, who was actually in Derry on Bloody Sunday, was one of the few journalists to get it right when he observed that while Saville “exonerated” the victims, “the issue of responsibility for the military operation was sidestepped”.
True to Shaw’s dictum, Widgery had determined in 1972: “There would have been no deaths in Londonderry on 30th January if those who organised the illegal march had not thereby created a highly dangerous situation in which a clash between demonstrators and the security forces was almost inevitable”.
Blame for the deaths was thereby lumped on the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. For all the time taken for the Saville deliberations, the inquiry still didn‘t get the measure of the Paras and what they were capable of. As an old military man, Widgery did know. NICRA’s local leader Bridget Bond had notified Chief Superintendent Lagan that the march would be non-violent. The organisation had no way of learning about or anticipating the military strategy for the march that involved the assignment of an aggressive combat regiment for arrest operations.
Widgery had found in the body of his report that except for a couple of instances armed soldiers fired on unarmed civilians in the honest belief that it was necessary to shoot to protect their lives or the lives of their comrades from threatened hostile action by armed gunmen or bombers.
The most that he would accept was that sometimes that belief was mistaken. It’s a fair indicator of the contempt underlying Widgery that his inquiry didn’t even consider that findings as to the wounding of the thirteen civilians on Bloody Sunday were relevant. It was quite clear from the outset that the evidence that Widgery had heard along with evidence that had been made available to him at the time of his inquiry, completely contradicted and discredited his findings that the soldiers had acted in good faith.
At first sight Saville seems to represent a new approach. Chapter 4 of the Report, the “Question of responsibility for the deaths and injuries of Bloody Sunday,” acknowledges: “The immediate responsibility for the deaths and injuries on Bloody Sunday lies with those members of Support Company whose unjustifiable firing was the cause of those deaths and injuries”.
Saville also pronounced that “the organisers of the civil rights march bear no responsibility for the deaths and injuries”. However, it is not well known that the Saville inquiry at first refused to grant legal representation to NICRA and in the end only granted representation for limited parts of it.
On the wider legal and political issue as to whether “others also bear direct or indirect responsibility for what happened”, the defence of the realm approach is very much in evidence. For example, what responsibility
rested with the military top brass, and the British and Stormont Governments?
In a classic but not widely-known forensic dissection of Bloody Sunday and the Widgery Report, Professor Samuel Dash, later the chief counsel of the US Senate Watergate Committee whose 1973-74 investigation into the Nixon Administration’s involvement in the Democratic National Committee break-in forced Richard Nixon’s resignation, concluded in 1972 that: “The military plans and strategy approved in advance by the Commander of Land Forces in Northern Ireland and the leadership of the Stormont Government… reveal that officials should have known that they were exposing thousands of peaceable citizens to a high risk of death or serious bodily injury”.
On the basis of the same evidence that was presented to the Widgery Inquiry, Dash went on to further find that, “Those in command decided to accept a high risk of civilian deaths and injuries, despite the urgent warnings of this risk by the Chief Superintendent of Police in Londonderry and his strong recommendation that the march be permitted to take place without any military interference”.
He also found that, “The Commander of Land Forces in Northern Ireland made a reckless decision when he personally assigned the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment with the special mission to conduct arrest operations. His action made a military attack on civilian demonstrators more likely, creating a high risk of civilian deaths and injuries … the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment had a notorious reputation in Northern Ireland for brutality to civilians.
The paratroopers were trained to be quick on the trigger to kill in aggressive warfare against a dangerous enemy and were singularly unsuited for action against civilian demonstrators or rioters”. Were these findings in Sam Dash’s 1972 damning indictment of Widgery, “Justice Denied – A challenge to Lord Widgery’s Report on Bloody Sunday” disproved by Saville?
To examine for example the military plans and strategy. Saville did not criticise General Ford for deciding to deploy soldiers to conduct an arrest operation despite the advice of Chief Superintendent Lagan. Quite bizarrely, he also found that “the army and the police worked together in deciding how to deal with matters of security” when in fact all the evidence showed that Lagan’s advice was totally ignored.
On the decision to deploy 1 Para, Saville concluded that General Ford’s deployment of 1 Para to carry out arrest operations was “open to criticism” as it was a force that had a reputation for using excessive physical violence but the general “had no reason to believe and did not believe that the risk of soldiers of 1 Para firing unjustifiably during the course of an arrest operation was such that it was inappropriate for that reason to use them for such an operation”. Again cute old Widgery could have put him wise on this illusion!
The Paras carried weapons whose sole purpose was to kill, had a reputation for excessive aggression even among their military colleagues, and had more than lived up to that reputation during their time in Northern Ireland. Saville is having recourse to judgespeak in the finding that the deployment of such troops to conduct the arrest operation posed no risk that they would act totally in character and do what they did best – kill or wound anyone unlucky enough to come within their professional purview on that day. Furthermore, the particular culture of the Parachute Regiment fitted in with Ford’s own mindset. An indication of that mindset was revealed in a memorandum which he had authored earlier in January and in which he had recommended shooting selected unarmed rioters in Derry after a warning. He had no compunction about recommending this course of action for selected individuals despite the fact that they were not posing a threat of causing death or serious injury.
Saville is revealingly selective in its treatment of the military culture surrounding the use of lethal force, refusing to even investigate whether or not there was any evidence that soldiers felt that they could fire with impunity secure in the knowledge that there would be no proper investigation of their actions. “In these circumstances, we are not in a position to express a view either as to whether or not such a culture existed among soldiers before Bloody Sunday or, if it did, whether it had any influence on those who fired unjustifiably on that day”.
This reticence is in stark contrast to the attention Saville devoted to the propagation of the line that NICRA had been “infiltrated” by republicans or indeed whether or not it had become a “republican front”. A lot of evidence heard by the inquiry revealed that this line had been one that the British and Stormont Governments from Edward Heath and Brian Faulkner down were very anxious to promote.
Two responses can be given to Saville’s finding that the London Government could not have planned the Bloody Sunday because in the months prior to it, “genuine and serious attempts were being made at the highest level to work towards a peaceful political settlement in Northern Ireland” and that “any action involving the use or likely use of unwarranted lethal force against nationalists on the occasion of the march (or otherwise) would have been entirely counterproductive to the plans for a peaceful settlement; and was neither contemplated or foreseen by the United Kingdom Government”.
This finding does not take into account realities such as the fact that most of the proposals doing the rounds in British Government circles at the time envisaged a transitional period of direct rule of Northern Ireland from London and perhaps even an imposed Northern Ireland settlement. The British authorities were not looking for an immediate settlement.
In the meantime, they were concerned about the developing and growing mass campaign against internment.
Documents considered by the Inquiry showed that the authorities realised how politically damaging a mass campaign of opposition to internment was. A memorandum circulated at a key meeting a couple of days before Bloody Sunday acknowledged that a mass campaign was more difficult to deal with than paramilitary violence. General Ford had already produced his now infamous document advocating the shooting dead of selected rioters even though they were not posing a threat of death or serious injury to troops. Other documents put before Saville had made similar proposals. In addition the same Ford was on record that the army should adopt a more aggressive approach to the security situation in Derry.
But the whole Saville argument begs the question, whether the Heath Governmentcould credibly claim that the planning and implementation of an arrest operation that showed a reckless disregard for civilian lives and limbs could, thirty eight years later, be judicially shrugged off as on a par with the escapades of a few drunken soldiers out on a Saturday night rampage.
In other words, was Bloody Sunday a military operation, which was in some way independent of and separated by a great wall from the decision and policy making centre that exercised ultimate control over it? Was it in fact an independent action for which the soldiers’ political masters could not be held responsible?
The common sense answer from most people would be that it was not. The particular action was conceived by the most senior generals and carried out by soldiers of an elite regimentof the London government’s armed forces. They remained all the time responsible to their political masters. The reality of Bloody Sunday was that the military plans and strategy approved in advance for dealing with the 30th January NICRA march exposed thousands of peaceful citizens to a high risk of death or serious bodily injury. The best that can be said for the authorities is that they were reckless as to the lives and well being of those taking part in the NICRA demonstration.
Lower down the food chain, the Stormont Government, Saville acknowledged, had been “pressing the UK Government and the Army to step up their efforts to counter republican paramilitaries and to deal with banned marches” but again draws back and pronounces, “we found no evidence that suggested to us that it advocated the use of unwarranted lethal force or was indifferent to its use on the occasion of the march”.
On the evening of Bloody Sunday, Brian Faulkner, the-then Northern Ireland Prime Minister declared,
“Today’s events illustrate precisely why it was found necessary, with the full support of the Government at Westminster, to impose a general ban on all possessions throughout Northern Ireland … Those who organised this march must bear a terrible responsibility for urging people to lawlessness and for providing the IRA with the opportunity to again bring death onto our streets”. This from the man who some months earlier with the introduction of internment without trial had brought death and destruction onto the streets and the torture and ill treatment of detainees in interrogation centres throughout Northern Ireland!
Saville quotes former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s particular take on the Shaw dictum about truth telling and defence of the realm: “matters had reached a point when what mattered was not the truth but what people believed”. Perhaps the last word on Saville is that it never got beyond that point. Shaw’s dictum is still bang on the nail.
