Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

More Enquiries

Predictably the Unionist side and their sympathisers are calling for enquiries into various atrosities from the years of strife to be investigated to balance Saville. Although there may be a case for some sort of  Truth and Reconciliation  commission on the South African model, the call for more enquiries is misplaced.

Nobody argues the suffering and grief the years of bloodshed brought, nor that the IRA did terrible things, nor the ruination of lives from loss that follows the death of loved ones or the terrible maiming and disabling of those who survive. But in the end it was known that the IRA in its various forms and the Unionist paramilitaries were in a state of armed conflict where the tactic was terrorist attack upon civilians or assassination at gunpoint of so called enemies. They saw themselves as fighting for a cause. They were seen by the country as terrorists, which classification denotes criminals not warriors.

Bloody Sunday was quite different. Here the British Army, in support of the Civil power and acting as armed police to protect the innocent from terrorist attack, was wrongly deployed under the wrong orders and as a consequence lost discipline and ended gunning down unarmed civilians without proper cause and when itself not under lethal threat. This was a catastrophic failure not of a known terrorist organisation, but of an essential pillar of the State which has a Constitutional duty to to uphold the rule of law and protect from assault the population of the United Kingdom,  of which Londonderry is an historic constituent City.

To fire indiscrimiantly upon its own citizens causing death and injury is the greatest crime an army can commit. It is for this reason the Saville Enquiry stands alone. This is why David Cameron, to his very great credit, yesterday uttered on behalf of us all his very deep sorrow for the unjustified and unjustifiabe events of that dreadful day.

Bloody Sunday

Whilst I do not see how the cost of this enquiry can be justified, I have no doubt at all that it is one of, perhaps the, most conclusive and healing outcomes to any enquiry in our history. It confirms what most always suspected, that the Army had gone badly wrong on that fateful day. Unarmed teenagers being shot in the back never squared with the Army’s assertions of responding to life threatening attacks.

There is a powerful lesson in this for both the Establishment and the Army leadership. I have to confess I have never been impressed with the leadership of the British Army down through the pages of history. There have been a few giants, Marlborough, Wellington, Montgomery among those, but the regular run of the mill leadership has been poor and the record mixed. The Navy and the RAF are much less in the news but much better organised with generally better minds.

Both the Army itself and the Establishment must, or certainly should, have known what had happened in Londonderry within days of this calamity. It should have conducted a proper inquiry which would have come to similar conclusions to Saville and should then have  brought those whose conduct appeared to fall short before a court marshal, including and especially relevant officers. Civil proceedings may also have been appropriate.

Failure to do this, allowing the families of the victims, from the  disadvantaged Catholic community of those days, to continue to live for decades under the cloud that their loved ones were guilty of conduct deserving of summary violent death, did more than any other thing to fester and inflame  IRA hatred and boost recruitment. Countless numbers of innocent people died in the violent years that followed.

For leading Generals to come on the airwaves now and say we must remember how well all the other troops have behaved since, is beside the point. Of course our troops behave or we would disband the Army and start again. But on that fateful Sunday they did not and their leadership was flawed. The  cowardice of the military authorities and their craven establishment backers over Bloody Sunday is a stain upon the record of the British Army. It is an indictment of the belief that a cover up is the route to follow in difficulty. Like the glow of our great historic victories, the shadow of this sorry episode will remain. So it should.