Ben Lowry: The killing of civilians by soldiers on Bloody Sunday was a total horror, that happened amid a terrible context of paramilitary murders
The scar of the appalling Bloody Sunday killings in January 1972 was made worse by the absence of any truth, justice or accountability in the months after that tragic day.
I write that as the editor of a newspaper that has been alone in the media in putting an unwavering focus on the scandalous things that have been happening on legacy to demonise the security forces and their role in the Troubles.
We have reported on this anti-state imbalance in legacy comprehensively for a decade, during which it has got steadily worse. While some mainland newspapers take an intermittent in their interest in the matter, none have reported on it continuously as we have done.
I think this capitulation to terrorism is a moral collapse in a UK that patiently saw off three decades of IRA-led carnage. But I also think that those of us who have strong views on legacy can fall into the trenches so fast that we are slow to recognise wrongdoing on that side of the divide we try to defend.
While the persistent disorder and rioting in Northern Ireland prior to Bloody Sunday was a real challenge for the army, the use of a fierce military unit such as the Parachute Regiment at the banned civil rights march in the Bogside that day – January 30 1972 – was disastrous.
The killing of 13 unarmed civilians was unjustified and unjustifiable, as David Cameron as prime minister told the House of Commons 15 years ago on the publication of the Saville Inquiry, which was released 38 years after Bloody Sunday. It is a great pity that this point was not recognised far earlier than in was. But we should be realistic as to why it was not recognised earlier.
The late David Trimble, an academic lawyer, gave warning before Saville that if it diverged much from the now widely discredited Widgery report into Bloody Sunday, published weeks after the event which found that the soldiers’ firing “bordered on the reckless”, it would end in murder trials.
Sure enough we had a murder trial this week, in which Soldier F was acquitted on all seven charges against him. We should note that the experienced and respected judge who presided over the trial was scathing about lies told by some of the soldiers during the hearings.
It was not feasible that any UK government, Tory or Labour, would in the weeks after Bloody Sunday have contemplated findings into those killings that would lead to murder trials of British soldiers. The province had by that point been brought to the brink of civil war by the IRA. It would have been seen across the UK as an outrage to put soldiers on trial in such circumstances, and it would have led to almost mutinous resentment in security forces who by the summer of 1972 were often being killed.
The newly elected Tory government of 1972 had secretly flown Provisional IRA leaders including Martin McGuinness to London in June 1972 in a desperate bid to get an end to their violence. The IRA did not get its demands, and made that clear within weeks, when it bombed the hell out of Belfast on Bloody Friday, killing nine people. Not only do we barely ever hear about such atrocities, in yet another illustration of the moral collapse on legacy Sinn Fein was able to play a key part in the 50th anniversary commemorations of that massacre, which was made to sound like it had been accident, rather than a republican atrocity (to read Ben Lowry in 2022 on that, click here: ‘Try to imagine a Bloody Sunday memorial that did not mention the Paras the way the Bloody Friday commemoration did not mention the IRA’).
I have often said that the UK state, far from having been brutal, reacted to the IRA more gently than almost any nation on earth would have done. Plenty of states would have taken out such terrorist leaders with a rocket after Bloody Friday. Instead, Britain let the IRA come off terror at a time of their choosing, 25 years later.
This context of Bloody Sunday has been utterly lacking in much of the media’s coverage of that day.
The missing context does not just relate to the IRA mayhem after Bloody Sunday, but its calculated violence before, such as the murder of two RUC officers, one Catholic, days prior to the civil rights march. Think also of one of the key turning points in the Troubles – the Provisional’s ‘honeytrap’ murder of three Scottish soldiers in March 1971, which was a calculated attempt to end any lingering good relations between nationalists and British soldiers. There had been only 59 Troubles killings prior to those three murders. By the end of the following year, there had been another 600 deaths.
Most army killings happened in 1974 or before, during the chaotic early Troubles. From the mid 1970s, the military had massively improved soldier training. It is utterly unfair that lowly soldiers face homicide trials and IRA leaders, who orchestrated terror over decades, never will.
• Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter editor