Sunday, Bloody Sunday – a long day's journey into light

As it happens, this posting answers the jibe from 'Tarquin' that I attack anything David Cameron does, because it is David Cameron doing it.  I completely agree with and endorse his response to the Saville report on the Londonderry massacre (otherwise known as 'Bloody Sunday'). He was quite right to offer the apologies of the British government and to accept that those killed on that day in 1972 were innocent, and to do so in generous and candid terms.

But that is not my reason for posting on this subject. I am moved to do so by reading Douglas Murray's excellent and moving book on 'Bloody Sunday', recently published by Biteback.

I had long argued that the British government should apologise for this action, from a Unionist perspective. In my view Londonderry is a British city, under the British Crown. If British soldiers had done anything similar in Portsmouth, Bradford , Stirling or Swansea, the government would have fallen the next day.

The same must surely be true in this case.

Yet the shootings of 30th January 1972 did not bring down the government of Edward Heath. On the contrary,  a wall of dishonesty and obscurity was thrown up around the event, and it is without doubt true that the Provisional IRA was able to use it to establish itself as a major force. It was the worst British blunder in Ireland since the executions of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising.

I am old enough to remember the occasion. And I took part in a protest demonstration in York the following day, one of the few such demonstrations I can now look back on and say 'I was right to be there'  - though I am sorry to say that the march turned violent at one stage, something that did no good to the cause.

At that time (and Dominic Sandbrook gives an extraordinarily good summary of the beginning of the Ulster troubles in his recent book 'White Heat') everyone involved was making a very considerable mess of Northern Ireland. It's also my belief that the IRA, and the wicked men who always wanted bloodshed, took advantage of the 'Civil Rights' movement in a deeply cynical way – a way that wasn't understood by the old and often naïve country gentlemen who were in charge at Stormont, or by the bored and detached politicians in London who suddenly had the Irish Question dropped in their laps. The one good thing that came out of it was Direct Rule (I don't think there should ever have been a Parliament at Stormont) which achieved an enormous amount of wise reform, and which was the fairest and most law-abiding form of government the province ever had.

But the marchers who set out on that clear sunny day in January 1972 were overwhelmingly peaceful, religious, kindly people who felt that they had been unfairly treated and wished to say so.

And Murray's description of the deaths of some of them – Patrick Doherty and Barney McGuigan – will break your heart.  It is with these appalling scenes that he rightly opens the book, underlining the fact that real men died, and shed real blood, and that is what it is really about.

And he follows, relentlessly but in a light, fluent and irresistible style which kept me reading late into the night, bringing the awful day back to life and then pursuing various fascinating aspects of the vast, almost endless Saville Inquiry, much of which he attended.

The report itself, thousands of pages, is unlikely to be read by most of us. That is why Murray's book is so useful. I found myself repeatedly jolted by new knowledge (perhaps I should have known these things before, but I didn't, and now I do, and that is Murray's doing) . He delves into things which remain either buried in secrecy or lost forever, thanks to the failing memories of the eyewitnesses.

By being sympathetic to , or at least understanding of,   most of the main characters, his accounts of their failings are all the more devastating. Some of the soldier witnesses come out of the affair quite shamefully badly, evasive, dishonest, even disgraceful.

I don't feel that this is so of Colonel Derek Wilford, the officer who seems to have taken most of the blame and whose identity – unlike that of the shooters themselves – has always been known, remains a moral puzzle. I remember strongly sympathising with his cry of pain in a long-ago radio interview (it ran roughly 'Why is it always Bloody Sunday? What about Bloody Tuesday, Bloody Wednesday, Bloody Thursday, Bloody every day of the week when the IRA murdered innocent people'). He has a point.  The IRA was and is a horrible organisation, which gloried in grisly murder, often of unarmed people in front of their families. Those responsible are now free, and in some cases highly-regarded, comfortable public figures. There will be no judicial inquiry into their crimes. If there were, they might well be as evasive and unconvincing as the wretched soldiers who, in my view, lost control of themselves in an undisciplined outbreak.

And Colonel Wilford's  loyalty to his men – quite proper in an army officer – remains commendable in a way, though it is not clear that they have been as loyal to him in return. He is also one of the few – if not the only person – who seems to have suffered as a result of his part in the disaster. He is the official scapegoat, his career blighted ever afterwards. 

Murray goes as far it is possible to go in the search for 'Infliction', the ultra-mysterious MI5 informant whose report, produced during the Inquiry,  was so embarrassing to Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness. Mr McGuinness's tricky, crowd-pleasing performance at the tribunal is neatly and mercilessly described.

His account of the behaviour and evidence of Bernadette Devlin (I still think of her by that name. and remember clearly her brief and fiery transit through British politics), in which she seems at one moment to be horrified by what she has herself thought and said,  is extraordinarily powerful and evocative.

And his summary of the surprisingly strong evidence that there were in fact armed IRA men in Londonderry that day, and that some of them did in fact open fire is pitched exactly right. No, this does not in any way excuse the killings of unarmed, innocent men. But it does puncture a very important part of IRA propaganda about the event, and makes the stupidity of the killings easier for us, who were not there, to understand, though not to forgive.

All that having been said (and I could say much more if I had time) the crowning moment of the book comes at the end, when Murray returns to the poor McGuigan family, deprived of husband and father by an unjust and unjustifiable bullet. Earlier, he has recounted how, through a regrettable accident, Barney McGuigan's widow came to see the terrible mortuary pictures of her late husband's unspeakable facial injuries, decades after his death, an awful public ordeal followed by a 'terrible eruption of sobbing' .

If this account of grief beyond any human being's power to offer comfort doesn't make you hate war, I don't know what will.

But now read this : 'Barney McGuigan's son Charles, meanwhile, would have been better justified than most in deciding that he should avenge the army, the security forces, the government that stood behind them.  But nor did he choose to do so in the years after his father's death. To Lord Saville, he recounted how 'at the time of my father's death, my mother cleared a space in our kitchen and made me kneel under the Sacred Heart picture and swear to her that I would never do anything about my father's death that would bring shame on the name of the family. Having lost her husband, I believe that my mother was determined that she would not lose any other member of her family as a result of what had happened.' He finished  by saying 'I have honoured that promise to this day.'

Murray also records the statement of Leo Friel, who saw Barney McGuigan shot. Mr Friel said : 'I had witnessed what one person could do to another when I saw Barney McGuigan and I knew I could never justify doing this to another human being. I saw reality that day.'

He added, very tellingly :' (emphasis mine) ' If I had been a hundred yards up Rossville Street and had *not* seen Barney McGuigan shot, I would have joined the IRA'.

Murray comments : '…These people, and many others, realised that they had a choice. And, like many others who have no memorials and are rarely recognised, they made the most important decision of all. They decided that in response to murder, they did not have to become murderers themselves'.

Yes, Bloody Sunday was a recruiting sergeant for the IRA, as the old cliché goes. But those who answered that Sergeant's call were volunteers, not conscripts, They had an alternative. We should not forget that, when we judge these events.