Northern Ireland: Bloody Sunday

British involvement in Ireland began with the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169. In the 16th and 17th century, the British Crown confiscated land from Irish Catholics and gave it to British Protestants. This was seen as a method of 'civilising' Ireland. Many of the Protestants settled in the north of Ireland.

Between 1919 and 1921 the Irish fought a war of independence that ended in the partition of Ireland in 1922. The six counties in the North with a Protestant majority remained in the United Kingdom. While there was a Protestant majority in Northern Ireland there was also a Catholic population. In the late 1960s, a Catholic civil rights movement had developed, protesting voter discrimination, lack of housing, and discrimination in the labour market.

After a three-day riot in the Bogside district of the city of Derry in 1969, the British government decided to send the British army to Northern Ireland. Usually, a government uses the police against their own citizens, and the army against foreign enemies. Sending soldiers to Northern Ireland was seen as an escalation of the conflict, fuelling paramilitary groups on both Catholic/Republican and Protestant/Unionist sides.

Some Catholics had welcomed the British Army, thinking that they could not be worse than the Protestant-dominated local police force. This hope soon died. In 1971, the government introduced internment – the imprisonment without trial of people suspected of being involved with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). Several people were killed by the British Army in this process.

The City of Derry had become a focus in the civil rights campaign. The city had a Catholic majority, but gerrymandering ensured that local elections always returned a Unionist majority. Sunday 30 January 1972, a civil rights group organised a march, protesting internment, lack of housing, and voter discrimination. The authorities had allowed the march to go ahead, but wanted to limit how far they could march to avoid rioting. Instead of just sending the police to maintain order, the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment was sent to Derry to arrest rioters. There were some clashes, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Then, some of the soldiers disobeyed orders and started chasing protesters, using violent and excessive force when arresting people. Without any warning a group of paratroopers started firing at people. 26 were shot. Thirteen people died that day, and another died later from injuries. Most of the people who were killed were between 17 and 22 years old.

Already the next day in the House of Commons, the minister responsible stated that the army shot in self-defence. The government went on to set up a one-man inquiry which after only eleven weeks largely cleared the soldiers of any crime and accepted their claims that they shot at IRA terrorists and bomb throwers. For the people who had lost loved ones in this tragedy, and for the people who had been injured or witnessed the shootings, this added to the pain. There was a stigma attached to Bloody Sunday, as the government had declared that those killed had been armed terrorists.

Every year, there was a commemoration march and rally held in Derry. Eventually, this grew into a campaign for justice that demanded a new inquiry into the truth of what happened, with a formal acknowledgement of the innocence of the victims. As new documents were released and new witnesses came forward, more and more people supported the demand. 40 000 people signed a petition to the prime minister.

As a part of the negotiations leading to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, Prime Minister Tony Blair established the Saville Inquiry to reinvestigate what really happened that Sunday. They held hearings for seven years and interviewed 900 witnesses, making this the largest investigation in British legal history.

The report was made public in 2010. It concluded that all those who were shot were unarmed, that none were posing a serious threat, that no bombs were thrown, and that the soldiers had lied to hide their actions and to justify firing. This led to Prime Minister David Cameron formally apologisingon behalf of the British government in the House of Commons:

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.

While this was a joyous day for the family members of the fourteen who died, they were disappointed when the soldiers identified in the report were not prosecuted for their actions.