Bloody Sunday was a terrible day and a turning point, which came after other horrifying killings

News Letter editorial of Friday January 28 2022:
News Letter editorialNews Letter editorial
News Letter editorial

The wave of 50th anniversaries of Troubles killings are only getting under way on a large scale now.

While the tragic toll of deaths begins in the late 1960s, the number of fatalities was still relatively small until early 1971.

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There were numerous turning points in the conflict, one of which was the ‘honeytrap’ murder of three Scottish soldiers in March 1971. Prior to that the total number of lives lost was 59. Within 18 months, the grim tally was more than 500.

This weekend it will be half a century from another turning point in the Troubles, and one of its worst days, Bloody Sunday in Londonderry.

The killings of 13 people at a civil rights march in Londonderry were terrible, and completely unnecessary. Such bloodshed was a grave stain on the generally excellent record of the British Army. It enraged and radicalised many people.

That the shootings did not get the official scrutiny that they should have done deepened the sense of pain and grievance in the Northwest. Subsequently there has been a huge public inquiry and a massive police investigation, all of it costing the state hundreds of millions of pounds.

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This is turn has led to a fresh sense of grievance, this time among victims of terror, particularly after another major inquiry (in the form of an inquest) was held into soldier killings at Ballymurphy.

While it is entirely appropriate that killings by state forces are carefully investigated, there has in recent years been a huge imbalance in legacy investigations against paramilitary victims.

The overwhelming bulk of Troubles killings were carried out by terrorists, and of those paramilitary murders there was two-to-one ratio of republican/loyalist culpability.

Among the almost forgotten deaths are the 10 people murdered by the IRA in January prior to Bloody Sunday.

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The former in no way excused the latter but was a context to the tragedy. It is fitting that yesterday two RUC men killed on January 27 1972 were remembered in Londonderry.

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