Bloody Friday police officer: ‘They didn’t care who they murdered that day’

Reflecting on that day in July 1972 he will never forget, Ray Fitzsimons is adamant the Provisional IRA bombers were targeting civilians and “didn’t care who they murdered”

As a young constable, he raced from one bomb alert to another but – due to the sheer volume of both genuine and hoax bomb calls – didn’t once manage to search a location before a device exploded.

“It was the sense of helplessness that really got to you. You were rushing to the scene hoping to do something, to clear the area, but there was nothing you could do,” he said.

Nine people were killed in the most intensive day of bombing to take place during the Troubles – when the Provisional IRA detonated more than 20 devices across Belfast in an 80-minute period on July 21, 1972.

Five men, two women and two children were killed in the explosions. More than 130 people were injured. No-one has ever been convicted for the attacks.

Mr Fitzsimons has rarely spoken about the horrors of Bloody Friday, not even to his wife, but agreed to speak to the News Letter before trying to put the mental imagery out of his mind once again.

It was one of those days that when you live through it you never forget it.

“The first [bomb call] we went to was in the Smithfield area. By the time we got there the police had cleared Garmoyle Street but there were still a few vehicles there so I got the dog out to start searching. I had no sooner got the dog out of the van when there was an enormous bang, then there was chaos everywhere as you can imagine.

“The call was that there was a car bomb in the street and I was just about to take the dog down for a search around all of the vehicles. Had I arrived five minutes earlier I could well have been searching when it exploded.

“No sooner had that happened when my colleague shouted at me that we had another call to go to, and that was basically repeated for the next hour or so.

“We were chasing our tails around Belfast trying to get to one in time to clear it. But everywhere we went we seemed to be five minutes behind the explosions. They were just going off one after the other. It really was bedlam, and the carnage was horrific.”

Mr Fitzsimons – who is the current chair of the NI Retired Police Officers Association – had joined the RUC seven years before Bloody Friday in 1965.

He said that in those early years of his service, in Londonderry where a single officer would perform duty at the Brandywell greyhound racing, he could never have envisaged anyone carrying out atrocities such as Bloody Friday just a few years later.

“And I could never have envisaged myself being in the position I was on Bloody Friday – in the middle of Belfast seeing the carnage that was all around me.”

Commenting on the coping strategy of the police officers who were on duty, Mr Fitzsimons said: “I was the only one of my immediate colleagues who had an explosives dog, but some of the others [not directly involved] would say to me ‘is everything all right, did you get through it all right?’ I did not discuss it much with them as I suppose I was still suffering from a bit of shock at the time.

“I just said ‘it was horrible, you wouldn’t want to have been there’. The guy that was with me that day was the same – neither of the two of us really talked about what we had seen that day to anybody.

“I didn’t come home and discuss it, and even to this day I haven’t even talked to my wife about it. If I was to sit in the dark and think back on it – and just recently with it all coming into the news again – you can still see the whole picture in your mind of what happened on that day. And I can still remember the smell – it just comes back at you.”

Having first hand experience of the how the Provisional IRA operation was carried out, he remains in no doubt that their aim was a mass casualty event.

“They knew people would be killed and the couldn’t have cared less,” he said.

“To those who were involved in planning it, I would like to ask them, ‘why did you do that? What did you hope to achieve?’

“People did not count. Those bombs were planted and they went off without sufficient time to get everybody out of those locations. They didn’t care who they murdered that day. They really didn’t.”

READ: ‘Phoney defence’ justification for excluding IRA reference from Bloody Friday event