The Troubles: Bloody Sunday (Part 4)

The Rest Is History

This episode explores the tragic events of Bloody Sunday on January 30, 1972, when British paratroopers shot 13 unarmed Catholic civilians d

Key takeaways

• The Saville Inquiry, established in 1998, concluded that the British paratroopers' actions on Bloody Sunday were unjustified and unjustifiable, marking a significant shift from the earlier Widgery Report which exonerated them.

Main topics

• Bloody Sunday (January 30, 1972)
• The Saville Inquiry and its findings

Notable quotes

There is no doubt. There is nothing equivocal. What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable.

Conclusion

Bloody Sunday remains one of the most defining moments in modern Irish and British history,

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:04) The Speaker 3 (0:05) city moves fast, but your vibe, that's different. Sharper, smoother, more alive. Speaker 2 (0:15) The new Speaker 3 (0:20) Honda City isn't just made to drive, it's made to feel. The new Honda City, all new vibe. Speaker 5 (0:32) Hello. Now, before we go to today's episode, I have some insanely exciting news for you. On Friday, the 4th of September, Dominic and I will be forming live at the South Bank Centre in London. And better yet, we will be doing something completely new, something that no one has ever heard before on The Rest Is History, the ultimate Victorian adventure. So Speaker 4 (0:57) to give you just a little taste, we will be in Africa. In 1868, the Emperor of Abyssinia, Theodore II, has kidnapped 59 Europeans and he is holding them hostage after descending into this demented rage because one of his fellow monarchs, Queen Victoria, has declined to answer his letters. I'm not making this up. And the British, after months and months of fruitless waiting, have lost patience and they have sent a military expedition under General Napier halfway around the world to save them. An expedition that includes thousands of mules, loads of elephants, and they've even had to build their own railway across the highlands of Abyssinia or Ethiopia to try to get to his mountain citadel. It is a bonkers story. Speaker 5 (1:49) Yeah, it's absolutely extraordinary, full-blown British imperial epic. full of ludicrous behaviour, mad characters, colossal moustaches, everything that we love on The Rest Is History. It is, though I say so myself, a guaranteed classic in the making. Speaker 4 (2:07) So you're probably thinking, how can I get a ticket for this extraordinary Victorian adventure? Here is the answer. If you want to get a ticket for this event on Friday, the 4th of September, all you have to do is to go to therestishistory.com. It is as simple as that. You maybe have to part with some money, but it will be money very, very, very, very well spent. See you there. Speaker 5 (2:40) Mr Speaker, I am deeply patriotic. I never want to believe anything bad about our country. I never want to call into question the behaviour of our soldiers and our army, who I believe to be the finest in the world. And I have seen for myself the very difficult and dangerous circumstances in which we ask our soldiers to serve. But the conclusions of this report are absolutely clear. There is no doubt. There is nothing equivocal. There are no ambiguities. What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong. What happened should never, ever have happened. The families of those who died should not have had to live with the pain and the hurt of that day and with a lifetime of loss. Some members of our armed forces acted wrongly. The government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the armed forces and for that, on behalf of the government, indeed, on behalf of our country, I am deeply sorry. So that was former Prime Minister David Cameron speaking to the House of Commons on the 15th of June 2010. And it was his response to the report of the Saville Inquiry, which had been set up 12 years earlier by Tony Blair, to investigate the single most controversial moment of the entire Troubles. And that moment was the shooting and killing of 13 unarmed Catholic civilians by British paratroopers during a protest march in Derry on the 30th of January 1972, a day that has gone down in infamy as Bloody Sunday. And the Saville Inquiry was actually the second official British investigation. The first, under Lord Chief Justice Widgery, a splendid name, was conducted just weeks after the event. And that one largely exonerated the paratroopers. But most people didn't agree with that conclusion. Certainly the families of the victims never accepted it. And of course, you too never accepted it. And their song helped to make Bloody Sunday. cause celebra, wherever popular music is listened to by earnest teenagers in bedrooms. Speaker 4 (5:23) So Tony Blair set up the Savile Inquiry as part of the peace process in 1998. And it was incredibly expensive, cost almost 200 million pounds. And the Savile Inquiry, unlike the Widdery Report, it blamed the paratroopers for losing control and for lying about it afterwards, hence Cameron's statement afterwards. So it's obviously a notorious date in modern British and indeed Irish history. And today we'll explore the context for Bloody Sunday. We'll talk about what happened that day in January 1972, why it mattered, and how Northern Ireland spiralled into hell, basically, in the worst year of the Troubles. But first... by way of recap, let's pick up in the autumn of 1971. So in the last episode, we talked about the disaster of internment, which was that August, the new stories about the torture of the people who were interned, and then the sectarian bomb attacks that autumn. So the Four Steps, the Red Lion pubs, the McGurk's Bar attack, and then the Balmoral Furniture Showroom. Now amid all this, in October, of that year, 71, relatively new Stormont Prime Minister Brian Faulkner flies to London. And he has come to brief Ted Heath on the desperate security situation. And Faulkner says to him, look, this is dreadful. If these bombings continue, a breakdown in government might occur in a matter of weeks. And Heath says to him, I mean, this is very bad news. I agree it's awful. And this cannot go on. The British people, the British public is losing. Speaker 4 (7:00) Now, if you think about their options at this point, if we step back and think about their options, what can the British government plausibly do? So one option, which would be the sort of the John Lennon option, and of course the option that the provisional IRA would like, the Troops Out movement, lots of people on the left who think this is Britain's Vietnam, but also lots of ordinary people in Britain who don't. They don't give a damn about Northern Ireland. They don't understand why the British Army is there and why people are dying. This option would be to get out, to just say, fine, forget it. We're going home. We're going to leave you to your own devices. So the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, we talked about him last time, very clever, very corrupt, lazy, off his face on gin all the time. Slightly of this mind, so there's a story about a group of community relations experts coming to meet him at his office, and they found him slumped in an armchair, and he was completely sort of exhausted and demoralized. And he said, so what do we do? Arm the Protestants and get out? And obviously, you know, this is an option. It's the de Gaulle option, isn't it, with Algeria? Right, exactly. Now, why don't people do that? Well, a difference between Algeria and Northern Ireland, I can remember I actually had a... when I was at university, a tutor of mine encouraged me to see similarities between the situation in Algeria and that of Northern Ireland. But an obvious difference is, in Algeria, the people who want to stay part of France, the Pieds-Noirs, as they're called, they're very much a minority. But in Northern Ireland, a majority of people there, if you regard it as a separate entity... A majority of people in that entity want Speaker 5 (8:37) to remain part of the United Kingdom. Also, they've been there since the 17th century, haven't they? Speaker 4 (8:41) They've been there a long time. There are a million of them. It's a very unusual thing for a country to basically dismember itself, to throw away part of its own territory where the majority of the population want to remain part of that country. And perhaps more importantly, almost everybody looking at the situation agrees that if the British Army did withdraw and if Britain did go home, as it were, the result would be an absolute sectarian free-for-all. There would be massive bloodshed. Probably, effectively, we've talked about a low-level civil war. There would be a proper civil war and the Republic of Ireland would have to get involved. Speaker 5 (9:22) And there'd also be massive blowback in Britain, right? I mean, at the very least, there'd be hundreds of thousands of Protestant refugees, presumably crossing to mainland Britain. Speaker 4 (9:30) Yeah, completely the wood, completely the wood. And of course, this is why the fact that it would be so chaotic, this is why in the course of the 1970s... In private, the Irish government are desperate for this not to happen. So in 1975, I mean, we'll maybe talk about this when we come to it in a future series. In 1975, the Irish government actually get in touch with Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State, and they say, we want you to put pressure on the British. Do not withdraw. It's the last thing what we in Dublin want. We don't want a United Ireland right away. Please stay and hold the line. And Speaker 5 (10:01) there's an element in Irish government thinking that still secretly Speaker 4 (10:04) has a little bit of that. I think so. I think undoubtedly, undoubtedly that it would be, you'd be importing a large number of people who basically hate your state. And, you know, do you really want to do that? So people keep coming back to this idea, this sort of what they see is another kind of semi-nuclear option. Scrap self-government in Northern Ireland and put it under direct rule from London. Heath hesitates to do that still at this point. Why? Because the Ministry of Defence have told him that if you do that, you can't be certain that local public officials will follow your orders. There might be a complete breakdown of public services. The whole country might fall apart. British military intelligence says the risk of doing this is if the Protestants turn against us. We will be fighting, and I quote, fighting both sides in the middle of a civil war. At this point, the British public would say, well, this is mad. Our troops should come home. And then you would get the massive bloodbath anyway. And so after all this, Heath and his ministers decide, what are we going to do? We'll just keep doing what we've been doing. We'll muddle on. We'll muddle through. And crucially, we must keep Brian Faulkner in power. Because if he falls, we have no other option. So where does this leave the British Army on the ground? We haven't really talked much about them in this series. Initially, there were about 7,000 of them. This has now doubled to 15,000. And obviously they're not there, you know, any illusion of them being there as sort of jolly peacemakers having fish and chips and cups of tea has long since disappeared. They're in this quagmire, hence the Vietnam comparisons. It's this sort of, I think the weird thing about it for them is it's like a parallel universe kind of... apocalyptic britain so there's um in peter taylor's book brits about the experience of the army he talks about this um young officer who flew into belfast for the first time in august 1971 and this officer looked down and he said you could see roads that had been blocked and barricaded you could see fires from bonfires burning cars and burning houses and he said The mad thing is that all this was happening in a city of the United Kingdom with red telephone boxes and red letter boxes. I mean, that's the thing that kind of messes with the soldiers' heads in a way. And of course, it's very dangerous. So every month soldiers are dying. 42 of them died in 1971, killed by the IRA. 64 of them died in 1972. I mentioned in the last episode Kevin Myers, the RTE journalist, his memoir, Watching the Door. There's a moment in that, a very sort of evocative passage. He remembers in the summer of 1972 being on this burned out kind of Belfast estate and watching a teenage IRA gunman open fire on a British patrol and one of the British soldiers being left bleeding to death in the middle of the street and children laughing and jeering him as he lay there dying. And Myers, I mentioned him last time, Irish Catholic parentage, born in Leicester, ended up working for Irish TV. In his memoir, he actually says the one thing that's underrated is what he calls the forbearance and good cheer of the British troops. He says they're under the worst provocation and it's amazing that they behaved as well as they did. Of course, that's not an argument you often hear and may seem incongruous given the subject of today's episode. Now, even the soldiers themselves, of course, admit that they're not perfect. So most of these men, especially we're talking about the rank and file, the squaddies, they are relatively poorly educated young men. Lots of them in their late teens, early twenties. When you look at the ages in the casualty list, it's stunning how young they are actually. They're often from working class estates in the cities of Northern England. These are people to whom turning the other cheek does not necessarily come naturally. And many of them actually come to hate the people of Northern Ireland. There's a bloke called Jim who Peter Taylor quotes. You see these blokes dying in gutters in a war which is not classed as a war. It makes you bloody bitter and it fills you with hate. I hated the people in those areas with an intensity that used to make me feel almost physically sick. And Jim, in his interview, he talks about, you know, we would go in, we would kick in their doors, we would smash their windows. When we got a chance, we would smash in their TV screens. And I think you can see in the context how that would seem, how young men probably would behave like that. Speaker 5 (14:24) Can I just ask about the officers? Because I don't know if you've seen the adaptation of Say Nothing. I've not. I've read the book, but not seen Speaker 4 (14:32) the TV series. Speaker 5 (14:33) So about two sisters who joined the IRA. Yeah. And Rory Kinnear plays a British intelligence officer absolutely brilliantly, I have to say. And he has kind of counterinsurgency experience from various British colonial engagements. Speaker 4 (14:49) Yeah. Speaker 5 (14:49) And he is played with a very icy heart. I think it's fair to say. And is that how the British officer class see what's going on? Do they similarly, you're saying, you know, I hate these people, this guy that gets quoted. Do you think the British officer class feel the same? Speaker 4 (15:06) It's hard to generalize. Not all of them hate the local people, of course, but I think a lot of the British officer class, I mean, if you're in that position, the chances are that you might have served in the colonial engagement earlier in the 60s in Aden or wherever. So I think it's probably fair that quite a few of the British officer class view it through a colonial prism, as it were, to use the kind of jargon. I think they don't, they come to see, they come to have contempt or a dislike, a contempt for or dislike of the locals on all sides. So you don't find, you know, it's not like they're falling over themselves to pour syrup over the unionist population. I think they come to feel like, you know, it's us against the world. They're in an alien environment. Everybody's against them. They don't understand it. They're sick of it. Their mates are dying. And that's true whether you're the old Etonian officer or whether you're the kid who left school at 16 and went straight into the army, I think. Speaker 5 (16:06) Right, because the officer class will be complicit in what happens on Bloody Sunday just as much as the squaddies who do the firing. Speaker 4 (16:16) Well, when we come to Bloody Sunday, I mean, the single most best-known British soldier involved in Bloody Sunday. is very much an officer class kind of person, as we shall see. So the Catholic population at this point, the relationship between them and the army is just incredibly toxic. The Catholic population view the army as bullying occupiers. The army view them as their enemies. And nowhere is this more pronounced than the city where the British army had first arrived, which is Londonderry or Derry. And a reminder for people, you know, the name gives you a clue to its sort of fractured identity. It's about 60-40 Catholic Protestant. It's economically really struggling. The mood in Derry is very fractious and very bitter and has been since the late 60s. In fact, the scars of the fighting in 1969 at this point have still not healed. There are still burned out shops, burned out businesses. There are huge barricades that block off Catholic estates, so particularly in an area that is called Free Derry. You know, basically there's a big mural. It says, you are now entering Free Derry. There are barricades there. The entrances to the estate, the bog side, are guarded by vigilantes in masks and balaclavas who are often openly carrying guns. And the British Army do not try and pull these barriers down? No, they do not. And from this area, from Free Derry, gangs of unemployed... teenagers who call themselves the Derry Young Hooligans. That's what it says on the tin, I guess. That's what it says on the tin, exactly. They go out on kind of raids into the city centre and they will loot shops and they will try to burn Protestant-owned businesses and things like this. So by the second half of 1971, there is a sense that, you know, legitimate authority in Derry has pretty much broken down. The Protestant business owners are outraged at this. They estimate their losses from arson at about £4 million. A lot of money then. They are furious that the RUC, the police, and the British Army are not protecting them. And every day there are these sort of scuffles and confrontations at the edge of the bogside where teenagers will throw stones at British Army patrols, but the patrols won't go in. And there are some people in the army who find this incredibly frustrating and humiliating. One of these people is a man called Lieutenant Colonel Derek Wilford, who commands the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment. And Wilford says of these patrols in Derry, they just stood there in the road like Aunt Sally's and they never went forward. It was horrifying. In other words, he's embarrassed to be a British officer when this is happening. And Speaker 5 (18:51) the paras are the most... Speaker 4 (18:52) The hardest of the hard, as they see themselves. And Wilford's view is shared by the new British commander. in Northern Ireland, Major General Robert Ford, who arrives in the late summer of 1971. Ford looks at the maps and he sees black lines on the army maps that mark free Derry. And he says, this is an embarrassment. We shouldn't have such lines on our maps. The local officers have been too soft. And actually, by being too soft, they invite provocation and they put our men's lives at risk. And men are dying. So pretty much one a month is being shot by snipers and killed. And probably twice that number being wounded. And Ford thinks this is getting worse because basically the people in the bog side are becoming emboldened. So on the 14th of December, Ford writes to his officers and he says, the situation in Derry is deteriorating. It's insane that we have abandoned part of the second city of Northern Ireland to 40 IRA gunmen and 500 hooligans. And we've done nothing at all about it. He says the correct military solution, these are his words, would be to cross the line into the no-go area, go in hard and root out the IRA. But, he says, the drawbacks are so serious that I want to hold off doing that for the time being. Why? Because, and I quote, the risk of casualties is high and apart from gunmen or bombers, so-called unarmed rioters, possibly teenagers, are certain to be shot in the initial phases. Much will be made of the invasion of Derry and the slaughter of the innocent. So these are very prescient words. from Major General Ford. Anyway, over Christmas, there's no improvement. So on the 7th of January, Ford writes another report and this becomes incredibly controversial later on. He says things are getting even worse. Our armoured cars, when they go, when they pass, they're surrounded by these teenagers and attacked and the soldiers get out. And when the soldiers get out, snipers on the high rise Rossville flats shoot at them and sometimes wound or kill them. This is absolutely unacceptable. We have to get tough. And he goes on to say, the only way that we can restore law and order in Derry is to, and I quote, shoot selected ringleaders amongst the Derry young hooligans after clear warnings have been issued. You know, we have to shoot some of these teenagers. But, he says, he goes on to say, We do not want to have unnecessary casualties. We don't want to bring a firestorm of criticism down upon us. So we will use a particular kind of ammunition, so .22-inch ammunition. It's much less likely to kill people, and it's much less likely to cause accidental casualties by killing people in the vicinity. In other words, I think what Ford is basically saying is, I want us to shoot people, but not necessarily to kill them. Speaker 5 (21:51) Yeah, Speaker 4 (21:51) salutary violence. Exactly. So that was on the 7th of January, 1972. Now, 11 days later, Brian Faulkner, the prime minister, announces a ban on all parades in Derry. However, the civil rights group, NICRA, which we talked about a couple of episodes ago. Speaker 5 (22:07) Sounds very sinister, doesn't it? Sounds like a kind of Speaker 4 (22:09) pro-smoking Speaker 5 (22:10) lobby. Speaker 4 (22:11) Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, this group, they have planned a civil rights march to protest against internment, which of course was introduced in August. And this march is scheduled for Sunday the 30th of January. And this is the day that we'll go down as Bloody Sunday. So they want to do this march, which is technically illegal. Speaker 4 (22:34) And we come now to the day. Probably no day in recent British history, perhaps all British history, has been chronicled so exhaustively. D-Day, perhaps? Possibly, but when I tell you this, the Savile Report, which covers this day, comes to 10 volumes, 5,036 pages, and Speaker 5 (22:54) about 2.5 million words. So you haven't listened to We Have Ways on D-Day, because I think there's a lot more. Speaker 4 (23:01) They've spent