At least Private Lee Clegg had to wait for the advent of a British General Election before the British moved to reward him for his services to Unionism by referring his slap on the wrist sentence to appeal. In fact, their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Derek Wilford, was awarded an OBE later that year. They might have been "reckless", but that was all. The Paras were found note guilty of anything even remotely resembling the deliberate and unlawful taking of life. Unsurprisingly, Widgery's conclusions amounted to an important, if temporary, "victory" for the British in that propaganda war. "It had to be remembered that we were in Northern Ireland fighting not only a military war but a propaganda war." Why Widgery could be so unbelievably selective becomes explicable when one reads the confidential Downing Street minute of the briefing direction given by the then British Prime Minister, Ted Heath, to Lord Widgery, two days after the massacre. At least three of the dead were shot by a soldier or soldiers unknown from a hideout above Derry's walls.Īnother key piece of research is the fact that Widgery himself only looked at fifteen of the five hundred eyewitness statements submitted. In the first place, he has discovered that lethal fire was directed at the demonstrators by British Army units other than the Paras. His twenty five year ambition to bring out the truth about what he saw has now established a number of damning facts central to an understanding of what happened. On that day Mullan was a fifteen year old participant in the march. Certainly the whitewash "investigation" carried out by Lord Chief Justice Widgery into Bloody Sunday did nothing to enlighten him, or anyone else.īut murder will out, and the effect of this excellent book by Don Mullan, his collaborator, John Scally, and the preface writer, Jane Winter, will be finally to discredit the official account of Bloody Sunday.
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"They shot well," was the verdict of a Telegraph correspondent to Wade an hour or so after the slaughter.ĭisturbed by the approach to Ireland, Wade transferred to Washington without his, or anyone else outside the British Army, realising just how "well", or deliberately, the army had shot. But this was not how it was seen by the Daily Telegraph.
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The soldiers opened fire on the demonstrators, killing thirteen of them. When, seven days later in Derry, Wade saw the same Paras being unleashed from army vehicles with rifles in their hands - their officers calling out "Go on, Paras, get them" he knew instantly that something appalling was about to occur. Some of the hyped up Paras had batons broken over their heads before they released their victims. They chased demonstrators into the icy seas and only ceased beating them when hauled off by their baton wielding NCOs. Wade had been horrified by the brutality of the Paras on that occasion. The "lamb laidir" policy was still in place on January 30th, 1972, in Derry when an illegal, but peaceful, parade of Nationalists was held to protest against internment.įor my book on the Troubles I interviewed Nigel Wade of the Daily Telegraph who covered both Bloody Sunday and a previous march along the shore at Magilligan a week earlier. These eventually led to London's being taken before the Court of Human Rights by Dublin, on torture charges.
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However, the British continued to sing out of the Unionist hymn book, and the following year, on August 9th, 1971, internment was introduced to the accompaniment of "deep interrogation" techniques. The "softly softly" Labour policy on security which Roy Hattersley had been pursuing went out the window with the Falls Road curfew - the "Rape of the Falls", as it is still referred to in West Belfast.īy the time that search and ransack operation was over, deaths, destruction and provocations had unleashed a tidal wave of IRA recruitment.
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#Day of infamy dismemberment series#
The first of the three major rough handed operations which were like a series of rocket propulsion thrusts for the emerging Provisional IRA occurred on July 3rd, 1970, within a few days of the Tories taking power after the June 20th General Election. It occurred as part of the Tory "get tough" security policy in the six counties which at the time, as now, was heavily influenced by the traditional alliance with, and reliance on, the Unionists. BLOODY Sunday was one of the defining moments of the North of Ireland conflict.