EVENTS LEADING UP TO BLOODY SUNDAY:THE DECISION to deploy the first battalion of the parachute regiment in Derry on Bloody Sunday was taken by a senior British army officer, who had earlier suggested that young republican activists should be shot as an example.
However, the Saville inquiry reports that the suggestion to shoot ringleaders was not put forward as part of any security plan to deal with the banned march.
The Saville report also confirms that chief supt Frank Lagan (1916-2005), the senior police officer of the Royal Ulster Constabulary for the Derry area, advised that the banned civil rights march be allowed to proceed to its intended destination at Guildhall Square. His advice was rejected for fear that “flouting of the ban would undermine law and order and would be likely to lead to a violent reaction from unionists”.
A plan was devised to erect barriers on the roads leading to Guildhall Square, manned by British soldiers.
The report explains how “Londonderry in January 1972 was a troubled city with a divided society, in a troubled and divided country”. There were “deep and seemingly irreconcilable divisions” between nationalists, who were the majority in Derry, and unionists who were the majority in Northern Ireland as a whole.
In the years preceding Bloody Sunday there were many violent clashes between the two communities and with the police. On August 14th, 1969, after there had been particularly violent clashes between civilians and the police, the authorities brought into the city units of the British army “as an aid to the civil power”.
Two factions of the IRA, the Provisionals and the Officials, were active in Derry and “there were also those on the unionist side of the sectarian divide who organised and used armed violence”.
“The situation in Londonderry in January 1972 was serious. By this stage the nationalist community had largely turned against the soldiers, many believing that the army, as well as the RUC, were agents of an oppressive regime.
“Parts of the city to the west of the Foyle lay in ruins, as the result of the activities of the IRA and of rioting young men [some members of the IRA or its junior wing, the Fianna] known to soldiers and some others as the ‘Derry Young Hooligans’.
“A large part of the nationalist area of the city was a ‘no go area’, which was dominated by the IRA.”
Internment without trial was introduced on August 9th, 1971, and at the same time a ban on marches and processions was imposed. By January 1972, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association had decided to defy the marching ban.
The report states: “At the beginning of January 1972, maj gen Robert Ford, then commander of land forces in Northern Ireland, had visited Londonderry. He wrote a confidential memorandum to lieut gen Sir Harry Tuzo, his senior and the general officer commanding Northern Ireland, in which he expressed himself disturbed by the attitude of the officers commanding the resident troops and that of chief supt Lagan.
“He recorded that they had told him that the area of damage in the city was extending and that even the major shopping centre would be destroyed in the coming months.
He referred in particular to the “Derry Young Hooligans” as a factor in the continued destruction of the city, and expressed the view that the army was “virtually incapable” of dealing with them.”
The report states that what happened on Bloody Sunday “strengthened the Provisional IRA, increased nationalist resentment and hostility towards the army and exacerbated the violent conflict of the years that followed. Bloody Sunday was a tragedy for the bereaved and the wounded, and a catastrophe for the people of Northern Ireland”.
