9

The Trouble with Ireland

The Price Sisters, the Bloody Sunday Inquiry

In the English criminal-justice system you’re innocent until proved Irish. And the trouble with Ireland has been the English.

For the last nine centuries Ireland has been invaded and occupied by the English, starting with the Anglo-Normans in 1171, through Oliver Cromwell’s vicious repression in 1641 and the Black and Tans in the 1920s, to the British Army, until the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. British rule has been marked by massacre, death and destruction. Land has been confiscated; absentee English landlords have mercilessly exploited the indigenous population. Small wonder, therefore, that Theobald Wolfe Tone, an Irish Protestant lawyer who trained at the English Bar, had this to say at his trial before an English court martial in Dublin on 10 November 1798, when he was facing execution on charges of treason and leading an insurrection by the United Irishmen:

To subvert the tyranny of our execrable government, to break the connection with England, the never failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country – these were my objects. To unite the whole people of Ireland to abolish the memory of all past dissentions and to substitute the common name of Irishmen in place of the denomination of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter – these were my means.¹

The so-called ‘Troubles’ in the north of Ireland stem from the 1920–23 period, with the establishment of the Irish Free State or the Republic and the separation of the six counties of Ulster. There, Protestants outnumbered Catholics by two to one and maintained a perpetual majority in government at Stormont. This fed down into every aspect of life, where Catholics found themselves at a serious disadvantage and constantly discriminated against in employment, housing, higher education, welfare and medical facilities – and even on the High Court bench, where in the 1960s there were six Protestants and one Catholic.

Although my own upbringing in suburban Whetstone was a world away from the experiences of the young people whose civil rights had been severely oppressed in Northern Ireland – bad housing, unemployment, prohibited protest marches, internment, and so on – I have always been fascinated by Irish history, and a whole new world opened up when I started representing Irish clients.

On 8 March 1973 a rail strike forced me to drive from my home off the Archway Road to the Old Bailey. It was a miserable, damp London morning and my old car, a second-hand Triumph 2000, was having trouble getting started. By the time I had driven into central London, I was very late and took a chance on finding a parking space near the court. To my surprise, the usual parking restrictions had been waived because of the strike, so I gleefully left my car on the road outside the main court entrance and galloped up the steps into the building.

Two hours later an IRA bomb exploded in a car right in front of mine, and the Triumph was blown to smithereens. I was showered with glass while reading by the window in the library on the top floor. It was one of four bombs planted that day, two of which exploded, the other being at Whitehall army recruitment centre, injuring 180 people. I could so easily have been one of them. It was both frightening and edifying.

What remained of my car was towed home to the leafy suburbs of Highgate and left outside the house to await the loss adjuster. Late that night there was a loud knock at the front door – what now? – I opened the door (stark naked, my customary sleeping attire) to a policeman who apologised sincerely for disturbing me, but he was ‘sorry to report, sir, that your car has been vandalised’. ‘I think not, officer,’ I replied, ‘it’s more a case of exploded.’ Shocked, he immediately got out his notebook as if to track down the culprits.

Within hours, ten people were arrested and then charged in connection with the bombings, and a few days later I was asked by Bernie Simons to defend two of them: Marian and Dolours Price. Because of the atmosphere surrounding the case – the first Irish

bomb attack on the mainland since 1939 – it was difficult to find anyone to represent them, but as I had been in the Angry Brigade case the year before, Bernie knew I’d be up for it. Nevertheless I was filled with trepidation about taking on a case that had gener­ated so much public hatred. The feeling amongst colleagues and even neighbours was one of outright hostility – they really thought it was treacherous of me to represent these people. But that didn’t stop me, and I was madly curious the first time I went to meet the Price sisters.

Dolours and Marian were beautiful dark-haired women from Belfast, not that much younger than me. At the time they were student teachers and were well educated, intelligent, and taught me so much about life on the edge that I have always felt indebted to them. It was impossible not to be attracted to these two passionate and committed people. I remember sitting for hours and hours in the claustrophobic, distempered gloom of Winchester Prison visiting room, as they each sat balled up on a plastic chair, with their arms wrapped around their knees; I found myself drawn more and more into their lives, slipping into their shoes. Listening to their experiences, teased out of them with skill and wry humour by David Walsh, actor turned outdoor clerk,² I felt a tide of rising anger on hearing how their basic human rights were being denied as Catholics. They spoke graphically of the discrimination and oppression their family encountered daily: of their homes being burned down by Protestants; the anguish they felt at witnessing civil-rights protesters ambushed and bludgeoned by Protestants while the RUC looked on in passive collusion; the loss of close friends and neighbours; the introduction of an ill-thought-out policy of internment (detention without charge or trial) in August 1971, which targeted Catholics and well-known Republicans – and the final straw was Bloody Sunday on 30 January 1972, when British soldiers killed thirteen innocent protesters on a peace march in Derry.

Hearing at first hand about all this spurred me on to represent the sisters with commitment, in recognition of their history. The ten-week trial was held in the Old Shire Hall in Winchester beneath a replica of King Arthur’s Round Table, and saw some of the strictest security precautions in British legal history. The court was heavily guarded throughout, with four rows of plain-clothes detectives sitting behind the dock while Dolours and Marian sat with their six co-conspirators surrounded by at least fifteen prison officers. All doors to the court were bolted.

The sisters were famously indomitable in court, ironically amused at pictures of my wrecked car. I was less amused to know I could have been in it. At one point during the trial the car became a matter of mild merriment. Stephen Sedley cross-examined the senior investigating officer about the time at which they thought the bomb car had been parked. The officer revealed that they had originally had reliable information about a different time. When asked for the source, he answered that it was very close to those present in court. Under a little extra pressure, he was pleased to disclose that it was Mr Mansfield who had incorrectly informed them about the time he had arrived at the Old Bailey. This was a real lesson in how witnesses may be mistaken initially and how, when confronted with what everybody else says, they may begin to change their account, as I did when I attended Snow Hill police station to make a further statement.

Despite my best efforts, the sisters were convicted on 14 November 1973, and although originally sentenced to life imprisonment, their sentence was eventually reduced to twenty years. They spent four years as Category A prisoners. Both went on to put themselves through a living hell in the fight to be transferred to a prison back in the north of Ireland. They were the first Irish hunger strikers on English soil, coming near to death in Brixton Prison before being force-fed for 200 days.

I remember visiting them with Bernie on more than one occasion, and Marian describing the process:

‘Four male prison officers tie you into the chair so tightly with sheets you can’t struggle. You clench your teeth to try to keep your mouth closed, but they push a metal spring device around your jaw to prise it open. They force a wooden clamp with a hole in the middle into your mouth. Then they insert a big rubber tube down that. They hold your head back. You can’t move. They throw whatever they like into the food mixer – orange juice, soup, or cartons of cream if they want to beef up the calories. They take jugs of this gruel from the food mixer and pour it into a funnel attached to the tube. The force-feeding takes fifteen minutes, but it feels like for ever. You’re in control of nothing. You’re terrified the food will go down the wrong way and you won’t be able to let them know because you can’t speak or move. You’re frightened you’ll choke to death.’³

It was harrowing to see their condition, so emaciated and weak, but the sisters didn’t give up and finally won their demand to be repatriated.

Yet again the clients I represented were educating me in the politics of real life in our own back yard. I repeatedly had to ask myself the simple question: what would I do in the same circumstances? Deprived of basic rights, what would I be driven to do? This was a steep learning curve – they were ordinary young people like me, brought up to believe in fairness and the power of democracy as the means of change. If this is denied or fails, what other options are available? It’s a perennial dilemma: the one faced by Mahatma Gandhi in his struggle against British imperialism; by Nelson Mandela in his struggle against the apartheid regime; and by Yasser Arafat in his struggle on behalf of the Palestinian people. There is a very fine line between the collective civil disobedience espoused by Gandhi and the armed struggle espoused by the others, a line drawn between the use of force and the use of passive resistance. Both are in defence of the communities they represent, and it is recognised in international law that you are entitled to use force in self-defence. This is where the freedom fighter may, for some, become synonymous with the terrorist (see Chapter 13). For example, how do we view the founders of the Israeli state who fought the British using the tactics of the terrorist? In 2008 the situation in Zimbabwe was redolent of this dilemma. How would we view an armed insurrection by a battered, bruised and mutilated people? More to the point, given its history, how could the ANC justify its inaction on this issue?

I have thought about this long and hard, and in principle I am utterly opposed to the infliction of any harm upon innocent civilians, for whatever reason. But I recognise that I have not been on the receiving end of systemic brutality at the hands of a state, and I’m really not sure what I would be compelled to do, any more than a resistance fighter in occupied France during the Second World War.

The Price sisters’ experience also brought me face to face with the problems attached to representing people who were generally regarded as subversive and undesirable. I faced open hostility, abuse and ostracism, both within the professional arena and in the community at large, and things got so bad that I received death threats – not a unique occurrence during my working life.

Yet again there are echoes from my childhood. During the war Father had been ambivalent towards the O’Learys, who lived next door in Naylor Road, and despite their having invited us into their Anderson shelter during air raids, they were only fully accepted when their son was killed in the Battle of Britain and suddenly became a war hero. Even in 1973 my mother thought it unthinkable that I should represent Irish terrorists. It was as if I had become Irish myself.

In a sense the antagonism has remained with me throughout my working life. I am aware that members of the judiciary regarded me as a dangerous radical. Such perceptions were fuelled by the fact that I did not adopt the customary surgical approach to my work; a barrister is not supposed to get close to the client, let alone identify with their feelings or beliefs. In other words, each case is seen as just another body to be operated on. I felt, in order to properly represent and reproduce the feelings and responses of my client to the circumstances in which they were placed, I had to get inside the shell of the person, which meant spending long periods of time in conferences with the client, listening very carefully to what they had to say. But listening is not enough; you have to take what they say seriously and follow it up, however bizarre that may appear. Truth can be stranger than fiction.

For fellow members of the Bar in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the habitual response to a client’s claim was usually one of disbelief. Leaders at the Bar would often begin a trial without having met their client. In some cases they wouldn’t even go down to the cells during the trial to discover what the latest instructions were. All of this was a matter for the solicitor to deal with. I found this was the most common complaint that lay clients had about the Bar – it was aloof, arrogant and unsympathetic. Although this has largely changed, government policy on publicly funded criminal legal aid runs the risk of returning to this somewhat prehistoric approach by not paying sufficient regard to the need for time spent with a client, building trust and understanding.

After the Price sisters’ trial came a series of other alleged IRA cases, one of which involved a conspiracy to blow up the ocean liner QE2. Another concerned the bomb early in the morning of 12 October 1984 at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where many politicians, including Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, were staying for the Conservative Party conference. And I represented two more young women, Martina Anderson and Ella O’Dwyer, accused of conspiracy to bomb other seaside towns in the UK.

The defendants in all these cases were highly political and articulate. The unspoken rationale which undoubtedly underlay these conspiracies was that every other democratic means had been tried and had failed, and it is notable that since their release a number of them have played an active and constructive role in the peace process in the north of Ireland. Significant among them is Gerry Kelly, who is now a junior minister in the Stormont government.

The origins of their grievance lay in the struggle of the civil-rights movement to achieve its aims, a struggle that had its most graphic expression in 1972 with the appalling events of Bloody Sunday.

There were two investigations into what happened that day. Two days after Bloody Sunday, the then Prime Minister Edward Heath (whom I cross-examined at the inquiry) announced that the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, was to preside over a tribunal – and Widgery’s swiftly produced report, published within eleven weeks of the events on 19 April, duly supported the army’s account, largely clearing the soldiers and British authorities of blame, and was criticised as a whitewash. Then the Saville Inquiry (which came to be known colloquially as the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, or BSI) was established by Tony Blair in January 1998, under the chairmanship of Lord Saville of Newdigate, with John Toohey, QC, a former Justice of the High Court of Australia with an excellent reputation for his work on Aboriginal issues, and Mr Justice William Hoyt, QC, former Chief Justice of New Brunswick and a member of the Canadian Judicial Council.

Between 1999 and 2004 I represented three families who had suffered bereavement or serious injury that day, and I was immediately aware that the inquiry was a vital part of the ongoing peace process in Northern Ireland, which has recently led to the remarkable achievement of Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley – who, at the height of the Troubles, had occupied entrenched positions on opposite sides of the bitter divide between nationalists and loyalists – working together in government, and to the final withdrawal of British troops from the north of Ireland in 2007.

In my view the inquiry came close to performing the same role as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission under Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa. There has been unwarranted and ill-informed criticism, mainly about the BSI cost – as if the truth can be measured in monetary terms – but it is absolutely vital for the establishment of peace that there should be a clear foundation in justice. You cannot have one without the other.

I made some very good friends in Derry during the time I stayed there. The three solicitors I got to know best were Des Doherty, Paddy McDermott and Greg McCartney, an amazing trio whose undoubted trademark was their rapid, rapier-like, withering wit. They spoke so fast most of the time I had difficulty understanding what they were on about, and their one-liners would put Bob Hope to shame. They were all steeped in political history and experience, and brought both passion and humanity to the proceedings. A regular rendezvous was on Wednesday night at The Clarendon; by the time I arrived, there was always a queue of pints of Guinness on the bar waiting for me. I couldn’t down the quantities they did (save Des, who is teetotal) and to begin with even a couple of pints had me losing my wits. So much so that on one occasion I found I had been escorted to another late-night bar without realising where I was, until someone said, ‘We’d best get you home before the next police raid – there’s no licence here.’ My two juniors, John Coyle and Kieran Mallon, both members of the Northern Ireland Bar, kept me on the straight and narrow (and their knowledge of law wasn’t bad, either).

But what I found really tricky was the enduring divide that still existed in Derry, where some families would not cross the River Foyle from the Catholic Bogside to the Protestant Waterside, or vice versa. I was invited to join Allan Green, QC, and some other barristers for dinner one night at a restaurant in the Waterside; it was a lovely summer evening, so my colleague Michael Topolski, QC, and I decided to walk there. Michael took a taxi home, but I walked back alone. The next day I was given a right old dressing-down for being so stupid and tempting fate. People were still being killed for doing less.

I should have been more circumspect, because lawyers have not been immune to attack. On Sunday 12 February 1989 in Belfast two masked gunmen forcibly entered the family home of the well-known and respected civil-rights lawyer Pat Finucane, who lived there with his wife Geraldine and three young children. He was shot fourteen times in front of his wife, who was also wounded. It was a cold-blooded assassination carried out by paramilitary loyalists under the banner of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), who were in fact British Special Branch agents. In 1982 a unit within the British Army Intelligence Corps was established, the Force Research Unit (FRU). This unit recruited members of the UDA, like Brian Nelson, a former British soldier, who stood trial in 1992 in the wake of the Stevens Inquiry into collusion, and pleaded guilty to a range of charges arising from that investigation.

I have come to know Geraldine and her family well, helping them to campaign for an independent, thorough public judicial inquiry, which has been promised and recommended, but has not yet been implemented. Such an unprecedented attack on a lawyer, with all the predictable fallout, requires an examination of who authorised it and how far up the chain of military and political command it went. In February 2009, on the twentieth anniversary of Pat’s murder, Geraldine made clear to an audience of international observers in Dublin her unrelenting determination that she would never settle for anything less.

On 15 March 1999, Rosemary Nelson, another solicitor in the North, was killed at the age of forty by a car bomb outside her home in Lurgan, County Armagh. She too had three children. Another loyalist paramilitary group calling itself the Red Hand Defenders claimed responsibility, and this is being currently investigated in a judicial inquiry. One of the issues to be determined is the extent to which there was official collusion.

I was particularly affected by this murder, as I had met Rosemary in London shortly before her death to discuss yet another murder, this time not of a lawyer, but of Robert Hamill, following a violent assault in Portadown, County Armagh, on 27 April 1997. I attended Rosemary’s funeral and was deeply moved by the outpouring of communal grief for her.

I also became aware of the need for protection when chairing an inquiry in Cullyhanna in 1991 into whether there was a shoot-to-kill policy being operated by the British Army in Armagh, following the shooting on 30 December 1990 of twenty-year-old Fergal Caraher by British troops. I was grateful that my hosts provided an entourage of bodyguards, who were careful to chaperone me everywhere.

The plight of lawyers and the rights of citizens affected by the Troubles has been the main concern of a charity that I have sponsored since its foundation in 1990: British Irish Rights Watch (BIRW). It is strictly non-sectarian and independent. The director Jane Winter won the Beacon award for Northern Ireland in 2007 and the Irish World Damian Gaffney award in 2008; in March 2009 BIRW became the first human-rights group to win the new and prestigious Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) Human Rights Prize for its outstanding work. In the early years we faced a good deal of scepticism and some hostility in relation to this work, because such an organisation was only thought necessary in countries abroad, not in the heart of Western democracy. There was denial and obfuscation, particularly in relation to allegations of harassment, intimidation, death threats and the murder of lawyers.

Bearing all this in mind, I took greater care about my own security in Derry by changing the places where I stayed and by regularly altering my routes. Even so, on one memorable occasion a Derry citizen walked up alongside me, grabbed my cases and marched off into the distance. Was this the start of some kind of kidnap attempt, or had I become paranoid? The latter. The man had very kindly taken my cases on ahead to the Guildhall, where the hearings were taking place.

On 30 January 1972 – Bloody Sunday – twenty-seven civil-rights protesters had been shot by members of the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, led by Lieutenant-Colonel Derek Wilford, during the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march in the Bogside area of Derry. Thirteen people, six of whom were minors, died immediately, while the death of John Johnson (aged fifty-nine) a few months later has been attributed to his shooting in William Street on the day. Many witnesses, including bystanders and journalists, testify that all those shot were unarmed, while five of those wounded were shot in the back; fourteen others were injured. I represented two who were killed and two who were injured.

The campaign by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) to unite the north with the south of Ireland had begun two years prior to Bloody Sunday, but as a result of the day’s events its membership was significantly boosted, and Bloody Sunday remains among the most significant events in the recent troubles of Northern Ireland because it was carried out not by paramilitaries but by the British Army, and in full view of the public and press.

Many details of the day’s events are in dispute, with no agreement even on the number of marchers present that day. The organisers claimed that there were 30,000 marchers; in his tribunal Lord Widgery said there were only 3,000–5,000; in Parliament, Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, MP, estimated the crowd at 15,000. Whatever the true number, a measure of the importance of the day is the amount of material that has been produced about it – copious books and articles, as well as several documentaries and two major feature films.

The march’s planned route was to the imposing Derry Guildhall, but because of army barricades it was redirected to Free Derry Corner. A small group of teenagers broke off from the main march and, throwing stones and shouting insults at the troops, tried to break through the barricades, intent on marching to the Guildhall. At this point a water cannon, tear gas and rubber bullets were used to disperse the rioters. Such confrontations between soldiers and youths were common in Northern Ireland, and at no time in the past had a civil-rights march ever been used as cover or an excuse for IRA or paramilitary activity. Observers reported that the rioting was not intense. However, two people were shot and wounded by soldiers on William Street.

At a certain point, reports of an IRA sniper operating in the area were allegedly given to the army command centre. In response, the order to fire live rounds was given, and one young man, Jackie Duddy, while running alongside a priest named Father Edward Daly, was shot in the back as he fled down Chamberlain Street away from the advancing troops. The photograph taken that moment – of Father Daly waving a white handkerchief while trying to escort the mortally wounded Duddy to safety – is seared into my memory.

Those who died were:

John (Jackie) Duddy (17) was shot in the chest in the car park of the Rossville Flats.

Patrick Joseph Doherty (31) was shot from behind while attempting to crawl to safety in the forecourt of the Rossville Flats.

Bernard [Barney] McGuigan (41), whose family I represented at the Saville Inquiry, was shot in the back of the head when he went to help Patrick Doherty, who was lying on the ground injured. McGuigan was waving a white handkerchief at the soldiers to indicate his peaceful intentions.

Hugh Pius Gilmour (17) was shot in the chest as he ran from the paratroopers on Rossville Street.

Kevin McElhinney (17) was shot from behind while attempting to crawl to safety at the front entrance of the Rossville Flats.

Michael G. Kelly (17) was shot in the stomach while standing near what was termed the ‘rubble barricade’ in front of the Rossville Flats.

John Pius Young (17) was shot in the head while standing at the same barricade.

William Noel Nash (19), whose family were my clients at the inquiry, was shot in the chest near the barricade. In his case there was telling film evidence of his father, Alexander Nash (a further client of mine), waving whilst at the barricade in an attempt to get the paratroopers to stop firing. He too was shot and injured.

Michael M. McDaid (20) was shot in the face at the barricade as he was walking away from the paratroopers.

James Joseph Wray (22) was wounded and then shot again at close range while lying on the ground.

Gerald Donaghy (17) was shot in the stomach while attempting to run to safety between Glenfada Park and Abbey Park.

Gerald (James) McKinney (35) was shot just after Gerald Donaghy. Witnesses stated that McKinney had been running behind Donaghy.

William A. McKinney (26) was shot from behind as he left cover to try to help the older man, Gerald McKinney (no relation).

The third family I represented was that of Danny Gillespie, whose head was grazed by a bullet as he left Glenfada Park. He survived.

The city’s coroner, retired British Army Major Hubert O’Neill, issued a statement on 21 August 1973, at the completion of the inquest into the killings, declaring:

It strikes me that the Army ran amok that day and shot without thinking what they were doing. They were shooting innocent people. These people may have been taking part in a march that was banned, but that does not justify the troops coming in and firing live rounds indiscriminately. I would say without hesitation that it was sheer, unadulterated murder. It was murder.⁴

The official army position, backed by the Conservative British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling in the House of Commons the day after Bloody Sunday, was that the paratroopers had reacted to the threat of gunmen and nail-bombs from suspected IRA members. No British soldier was wounded or reported any injuries from gunfire or nail-bombs, nor were any bullets or empty cartridge cases or exploded nail-bombs recovered to back up their claims – though there was one soldier who accidentally and literally shot himself in the foot. But even he couldn’t bring himself to tell the truth about what happened, and it was agreed amongst a number of his platoon to pretend that it had occurred when he accidentally fell down some steps. All eyewitnesses present (apart from the soldiers), including marchers, local residents and British and Irish journalists, maintained that the soldiers fired into an unarmed crowd, or were aiming at fleeing people and those tending the wounded.

The Saville Inquiry was to be more comprehensive than the Widgery Tribunal, interviewing a wide range of witnesses, including local residents, soldiers, journalists and politicians. The inquiry sat for 434 days, hearing over 900 witnesses, with an additional 1,555 witness statements. Yet there were some glaring omissions. For example, more than 1,000 army photographs and original army helicopter video footage, plus some of the guns used on the day by the soldiers, which could have been evidence in the inquiry, were lost by the Ministry of Defence, which claimed that the guns had been destroyed.

I spent four years taking a plane from Stansted to Derry at 5 a.m. every Monday morning, returning on the 6 p.m. flight every Friday evening. It was tough being away for so long from Yvette and our son Freddy, but I kept reminding myself that this was nothing compared with the hardship endured by my clients. By 2004, Mrs McGuigan, for example, had waited thirty-two years to find out what had really happened to her beloved Barney.

There is one matter upon which a large measure of agreement had been reached by the time of the inquiry: that the four individuals whose interests I represented were not terrorists and posed no threat to anyone. They were innocent Derry citizens, as were all those who suffered death and injury that day. This much had already been made clear by both John Major and Tony Blair, endorsed by William Hague, when explaining the need for a public judicial inquiry. It was also the logical inference to be drawn from the position adopted by the military at the inquiry: that they only shot at those perceived to present a lethal threat, either as gunmen or as bombers.

This gives rise to a conundrum, which no doubt Lord Saville will address in his report. I raised it in my opening and closing addresses, and with a number of senior military personnel. According to the soldiers’ versions, there must be two groups – the terrorists whom they shot, and the innocent whom someone else shot. The question is, therefore, where are all the dead and injured terrorists, and who shot the innocent civilians?

I cross-examined General Ford,⁵ in London, and in short form his replies came to this:

Question, MICHAEL MANSFIELD: Why were the thirteen shot at by paratroopers?

Answer, GENERAL FORD: I do not know, that is presumably what this inquiry is going to find out.

Q: This inquiry has one duty, I suggest you have another. It has always been your duty, as Commander of Land Forces, to be able to come here where there are relatives, and in Derry now where they are watching the screens, so that you finally would be in a position to explain why thirteen apparently unarmed people were shot by paratroopers?

A: I am not in a position to explain why thirteen apparently unarmed people were shot by paratroopers. It is obviously a long and complex question.

A small insight into the military psyche and perception on the day arrived in an anonymous brown envelope. It was a tape recording, which has subsequently been authenticated, of a conversation between two soldiers in radio communication on Bloody Sunday itself. It has not been possible to discover who recorded it or where it had been kept over the intervening years, but it was played at the inquiry; it had never been heard in public before. I have further anonymised the identified voice as ‘A’; the other voice, ‘B’, has never been traced.

A: The whole thing’s in chaos . . .

B: Obviously.

A: I think it’s gone badly wrong in the Rossvilles. The doctor’s just been up the hospital and they’re pulling stiffs out there as fast as they can get them out.

B: There’s nothing wrong with that.

A: Well, there is, ’cos they’re the wrong people. Erm, there are about nine – between nine and fifteen – killed, erm, by the paratroopers in the Rossville area.

B: Yeah.

A: They are old women, children, fuck knows what and they’re still going up there. I mean their – their Pigs [armoured personnel carriers] are just full of bodies, erm, there’s a three-tonner up there with bodies in.

B: Yeah, we saw it. Stiffs all over the place.

Towards the end of the conversation voice B names a senior officer, General Ford, who was ‘lapping it up’.

A: Was he?

B: Yeah. He thought it was the best thing he’d seen for a long time.

A: Interesting, isn’t it?

B: ‘Well done, First Para,’ he said, ‘look at them, twenty-four of them wheeled off.’

A: Good, excellent.

B: And he said, ‘You know, this is what should happen.’

A: Yeah.

B: He said we are far too passive and . . . I’ll tell you later.

A: Yeah. OK. Bye-bye.

B: Ciao.

When this was played to General Ford at the inquiry, he said, ‘Well, quite honestly there is no truth in what they said at all. It is highly emotional and exaggerated.’ Another matter for the inquiry panel to accommodate.

A classic illustration of why re-examining long-held assumptions is so important arose during the BSI. Back in 1972, once the shooting was over, there was clearly an urgency amongst the military to obtain accounts from the shooters in 1 Para. Allegations were surfacing in public about indiscriminate firing and undoubtedly questions were going to be asked in the House of Commons. In any event, the military authorities themselves would need to conduct an investigation.

A senior officer, Major Loden, said that he collated a list of engagements from shooters who attended his command vehicle in Clarence Avenue, Derry, between 17.30 and 18.30 on the day of the shooting on 30 January. This list, which became known as the ‘shot list’, was attached to his report dated 31 January, and then became his statement for the purposes of the Widgery Tribunal.

Although it was available to Widgery, the shot list never featured in any of the evidence, nor was it the subject of any question, nor was it referred to in Lord Widgery’s report. Furthermore, neither the families nor their representatives appear to have been aware of it. Nevertheless, it was to provide the basis for the public position adopted by the army, and then by the government, later on 30 January and on subsequent days.

It was not until the BSI shifted to Westminster to hear the soldiers’ evidence that it occurred to me that this list should be subjected to intimate scrutiny, which for some reason had never occurred.

Under the heading ‘1 Para gun battle 16.17 to 16.35’ the list itemised fifteen engagements with eighteen targets by means of grid references (GR) on a military ordnance map. Each target was described as a nail or petrol bomb, or gunmen with pistol or rifle. Although the position of each shooter was given a GR, significantly there had been no attempt to identify the soldier in question by name or number.

Together with my solicitor, Des Doherty, I painstakingly translated each engagement onto maps. Once the GR for the shooter and the GR for the target were plotted, lines of trajectory could also be calculated.

Upon completion, serious discrepancies began to emerge between this version and the descriptions given by the soldiers in written statements and oral evidence to the Widgery Tribunal. Some shot lines were impossible, some engagements unattributable and, above all, there was little or no relationship to the known civilian dead and injured.

It will be for Lord Saville to grapple with the implications of these points and to make the final determinations, if possible, about the individual incidents.

One of them involved Soldier F, who was a key witness for my clients the McGuigans and was the soldier they firmly believed to be responsible for Barney’s death. It was clearly going to be a highly charged and important moment for the family to be in the same room as this man. My difficulty was how to get Soldier F to admit his responsibility after all these years. I remember the day well, because before lunch ‘F’ was questioned by a number of other counsel before my turn came. Over lunch I disappeared to a small room on my own, in order to sort out competing thoughts. On the one hand, ‘F’ would have been forewarned to expect a grilling from me; on the other hand, he had already been put through the mill by others – so I had to find a different approach. I have a strong belief that everyone has the capacity to regret, to come clean and in a sense to feel compassion, given the chance, and as I was pondering, I knew that ‘F’ too would be sitting in another room with a certain amount of mental turmoil of his own.

What follows is an extract from the verbatim transcript of my cross-examination of Soldier F at the Bloody Sunday Inquiry. It was a remarkable ten minutes.

Question, MICHAEL MANSFIELD: Soldier F, I represent three families, and the first thing I want to mention to you is the Nash family and their father, who appeared at the time to all observers as an elderly man, went across to the barricade to try and assist his son, Willie Nash, who had already been shot dead by a paratrooper. He then got shot in the arm himself, and I suppose you cannot help about any of that?

Answer, SOLDIER F: No.

Q: I represent a second family, Gillespie. He is still alive to tell the tale, Danny Gillespie, he was in Glenfada Park, his head shaved by a bullet, as you heard yesterday; and I suppose you cannot help about that, either?

A: That is correct.

Q: I also represent the family of a man called Barney McGuigan, shot dead at the end of Block 1 of the Rossville Flats. So you appreciate what I am going to do, I am going to focus on that one because, I suggest, that is certainly one that you can help about; do you follow?

A: Yes.

I then asked a number of scene-setting, introductory questions.

Q: What I want to do – I am afraid it will take a few minutes to do it – I want to carefully take you through why you are the person who shot him, not because of anything you began to remember yesterday, but because you were seen doing it. Did you know that?

A: No, I did not.

Q: You have never been told that other people saw you do it?

A: No.

Q: Does that concern you?

A: The thing is – as far as I am concerned, in the statement I made on that day, I shot a person with a pistol and that is it.

Q: You did not make a statement on that day saying—

A: All right, on the few days afterwards or whatever.

Q: A few days afterwards, yes, quite a long time . . .

A: Whenever it was mentioned.

Q: Yes, whenever it was. Well, we will have to come to that, I am afraid. I am going to do it carefully, so there can be no misunderstanding. Do you appreciate I will not be asking you to remember anything much, because you do not?

A: That is correct.

Q: Except scenes, possible places. Before I do, can I establish this: you realise, perhaps now, that so far as we can tell you are the only soldier who has admitted firing from the corner of Glenfada Park North?

A: That is correct.

Q: All right. Could we have on the screen, please, first of all photograph 429. This is not a photograph taken on the day, but it is just to get your bearings again because your memory is so bad. This is Glenfada Park North and you will see the corner where there is a lamp post and the entry goes out on to Rossville Street with Block 1 in the distance; all right, is that fair enough?

A: Yes.

Q: Could we have another photograph, please, 431. Again, this time there are people there, the same corner, a bit closer, the same lamp post. Again you can see Block 1 in the distance and Block 2 beyond that all right, you can see the general layout if you look at the photograph. Never mind the people for the moment, just getting the feel of it, and finally, 433. This is looking back into the mouth of Glenfada Park North, taken on the day with the lamp post there on the right-hand side; do you see?

A: Yes.

Q: It is that corner, near that lamp post where you were in a kneeling position; is that right?

A: No, I do not think so.

Q: You tell us where you think you were, then?

A: According to my statement, I was over on this side (indicating).

Q: Just point on the screen where you say you were?

A: Just there (indicating).

Q: So you put yourself on the other side, or mouth, of the entry to Glenfada Park, do you?

A: According to the – um – documents I was shown yesterday that indicate where I was actually positioned.

Q: Was anybody else in a kneeling position in the mouth to Glenfada Park, so far as you know? That is not exactly the corner of Glenfada Park?

A: I do not recollect.

Q: You do not recollect. No one else has admitted being in a kneeling position there; do you follow?

A: Yes.

Q: Could we go back to that last photograph again, 433, because it was taken on the day? The lamp post at the corner of Glenfada Park North where you have indicated, or where it is indicated on the plan, is near that lamp post; do you see?

A: OK, yes.

Q: Right. So that is where you were, in a kneeling position.

A: Yes.

Q: According to you.

A: Yes.

Q: In that position you were seen by a number of soldiers; did you realise that?

A: No.

Q: Up on the walls, that is beyond the Rossville Flats, there were observation points; did you know that?

A: No.

Q: And those observation points were manned, not by paratroopers, but in the main by members of the Light Air Defence Regiment. You did not know that, obviously?

A: I did not.

Q: I am not going to go through them all, there are a number of them, but one in particular gives a graphic description of what I suggest is you firing, because you are the only one on that corner in a kneeling position, so it has to be you; do you follow?

A: I do.

Q: This is an officer; he is known as 227, in the Light Air Defence Regiment. Before I tell you what he says, you better be shown the view that he says he has of the corner, and so on. Could we have 2204.033. This is roughly the view, nothing can replicate it precisely, that he had from the walls, where you can see the end of Block 1. You can see Block 2 and you can see the corner of Glenfada Park that we have just been talking about, with the lamp post. Can you see it?

A: Yes.

Q: That is roughly the view: 2204.034 is a photograph closer; this time there is an armoured personnel carrier which is there, which I appreciate was not there when you were there. In the distance is that same lamp post with two people standing by it; all right?

A: Yes.

Q: In the foreground is the same body that you have been shown before, of Barney McGuigan. Again, he [227] has identified these photographs. Finally, 2204.035. This is a photograph, and I would like – I am sorry to put figures to you – you to bear in mind this figure is also known as EP25/17, and I have to come back to that, but this photograph he, 227, also identified. That is the general scenario. I take it, therefore, that you had never been shown what he said about these incidents at the time?

A: That is correct.

Q: He said it many times and he repeated it here last week. He is an officer. He was in charge of the observation post. Could we have 2189, please, paragraph 8. I am going to read it to you, because it may be you have not seen it before: ‘I then heard two or three rapid pistol shots from the area of the Rossville Flats. The kneeling soldier [that is, I suggest, you, because he has already described that] fired two deliberate shots towards my right and downwards [he is up on the walls] aimed, I believe, in the direction of the near end of Block 1. As he did this I saw a man falling. He was a few paces out from the end of Block 1, where a small group of people were gathered. I have seen EP25/17 [that is the photograph I have just shown you, all right?] and EP25/18 [that is another one in the same series] and identify the foreground figure as the man I saw fall. I should add that the Pig [an armoured personnel carrier, otherwise known as a Saracen] appearing in the photographs was not there when the paratrooper fired. I saw nothing in the hands of the man who fell.’ That is a very clear description; is it not?

A: Yes.

Q: By someone, of officer rank, whose job it was to observe that day and nothing else much; do you follow?

A: I do.

Q: And he is not alone. This is not just civilians, but other soldiers who saw the kneeling paratrooper fire in this way. So bear that in mind. He gave evidence at Widgery, just so there is no doubt at all, can we have one passage, 2196, please. This is what he told Lord Widgery at letter A onwards, please: ‘Question: When he fired [he is talking about you again] how many shots did he fire?’ ‘Answer: Two shots, sir.’

‘Question: When he fired those two shots, did you see any man who may have been his target?’ ‘Answer: Yes, sir, I did.’ ‘Question: Where was that man?’ ‘Answer: By the bottom end of Block 1.’ ‘Question: Was that near the telephone kiosk?’ ‘Answer: Yes.’ ‘Question: What did you see?’ ‘Answer: I saw a man fall, sir.’ ‘Question: Did a small group of people gather?’ ‘Answer: They stood away there as soon as he was hit.’ ‘Question: Would you look at EP25.’ Then I will not trouble you with the rest, because he goes on to the same photographs again and he identifies the man in the photograph, in the foreground, Barney McGuigan, as being shot by the kneeling soldier, whose name he obviously did not know, but it was you. I am not for the moment going to trouble you with other soldiers who saw a very similar scene; I want to switch, if I may, to the civilians, for this purpose a series of photographs, please. Could we have on the screen 813, please? Photograph 3 813, it is given a different number, but it is the same photograph you have already seen before, only now what we have in this sequence are photographs taken in sequence by this one photographer. 813 is EP25/17 with Mr McGuigan there in the foreground, which he [227] identified, and you will see behind there is a group of civilians by a telephone kiosk and the corner where the lamp post was and you were just off the picture, of course, in the mouth of Glenfada Park; do you follow?

A: Yes.

Q: Could we have 814, a very similar picture, again the civilians; you see more of them this time. 815 is the other photograph shown during the Widgery hearings to this soldier, and in his statement, it was EP25/18. Again, he [227] identified the man he saw you shooting as Barney McGuigan. You will see again the same people in the background. 20 816, please, the same people in the background. 21 817, a shot taken along the wall of Block 1, the gable end, towards the telephone kiosk. This Tribunal [Saville] has heard from witnesses who were there on the receiving end; do you follow?

A: Yes.

Q: 818, I suggest you can see there in the faces of these unarmed civilians the terror being inflicted, I suggest, by you; you can see it, can you not?

A: I see the picture, yes.

Q: You can see the terror, can you not?

A: I can see the picture.

Q: Come on, I am only asking for a very obvious comment, the woman on the right-hand side there. Fear, terror, upset, anguish; it is all there, is it not?

A: Yes.

Q: You could say that in the first place, and we would save a lot of time. 819, please, the same sort of scene, I do not go further. They are all in sequence. One of those – I am only going to deal with one – but there are several who have given evidence from the gable end. One of them, her name is Geraldine McBride, only she was not known by that name then, she was not married, Geraldine Richmond, provided a statement to the Inquiry of what she saw because she knew Barney McGuigan. Could we have AM45.5, please. She is one of the ones in the photograph, I will not trouble you with which one, just two paragraphs, 25 and 26. I presume you have never seen this before, either?

A: That is correct.

Q: I am going to read it with you . . . except for the second paragraph, which I am going to ask you to read to yourself – paragraph 25:

‘Barney McGuigan, one of the men huddled at the wall with me, was a community man and was generally looked up to. After a short time (although I do not know how long) Mr McGuigan said that he could not stand the sound of the man calling any longer and that if he went out waving a white hanky, they would not shoot at him. We tried to dissuade him from going out. We told him they would shoot him. However, he was brave and he stepped away from us holding the white hanky in his hand. Although I cannot be certain, I think he held it in his left hand. He walked out slowly sideways in an arc towards where we thought the sound was coming from. He stepped out about ten to twelve feet away from us. All the time he was walking I could see the left-hand side of his face. We were calling to him all the time to come back. He kept looking back towards us. I could see bullets going past us and Mr McGuigan from all directions, although I did not hear automatic fire. The bullets sounded the same as those I had heard when I had been running down Rossville Street earlier.’

I do not wish to read the next paragraph out in public, it is there for you to see; would you read that to yourself, please.

(Pause.)

A: Yes.

Q: You will accept, I think, that the injury suffered by this man, who had no more than a handkerchief in his hand, was truly horrific; was it not?

A: Yes.

Q: I want, in this context, for you to see two photographs, and there is a reason for showing them to you, but I do not ask that they are put on the public screen, I want you to see them, however. Could we have P180? That is the entry wound at the back of the head towards the left ear; do you see?

A: Yes.

Q: Shot, I suggest, by you when his head was facing at least at an angle away from you; you follow?

A: Yes.

Q: Could we have the next photograph, 181, and that is the result of what you did. I am going to ask you because, as you fully recognise and have been informed many times, it is virtually the last occasion this family can expect from you, at least recognition of what you have done; are you prepared to make that recognition?

A: As I have said in my previous statements, the person I shot from that corner had a pistol in his hand; that was it.

Q: If you have noticed, I have not relied on a memory that does not exist; you do not have a memory, do you; do you?

A: If you say so.

Q: No, you have said so.

A: At that particular time I have no recollection of it, that is correct.

Q: If you have no recollection, there is no way that you can stand here today and suggest you did not shoot this man, Mr McGuigan, is there?

A: No.

Q: Would you, for the benefit of his wife, who is here, and his six children, finally accept and recognise – we will come to whether you meant to do it in a moment, but that is what you did; are you happy to, or are you prepared to at least accept that?

A: Yes.

(Pause.)

Q: I want to take you through what must have happened. When you came to make your very first statement, where you do not mention this at all, I am going to suggest clearly, but there are some reasons I want to develop, why you had left it out. You left it out, I suggest, not because you had forgotten, but because you recognised that what you had done in killing the man with no pistol, but only a handkerchief, really could not be justified; that is why it was left out, all right, was it not?

A: Not in my opinion, no.

Q: Not in your opinion. I want to just demonstrate to you why I suggest you did not forget it.

LORD SAVILLE: Just wait one moment, Mr Mansfield.

(People crying, leaving the gallery.)

Mrs McGuigan had collapsed on finally hearing a soldier admit to killing her husband after so many years. She was carried outside into the foyer of Central Hall, Westminster, and when she recovered she just said, ‘Thank you, that’s enough. I don’t need to hear any more.’

The hearings were concluded in November 2004, and the family is still waiting for Lord Saville’s findings.

Those findings will embrace many more and much wider issues than I’ve chosen to describe here, and I do not feel it would be appropriate to pre-empt the inquiry’s report by elaborating any further, save to set out what the families I represented wanted to know and still want decided. Who pulled what trigger when is but a small part of the picture. The real and the central question is how this was ever allowed to happen. The planning, the decision-making and the rules of engagement are at the core of the answer. Each of the major witnesses, senior army officers and politicians, was provided with written notice by me of our basic points so that they were not caught unaware or ill prepared. The core propositions upon which witnesses were asked to comment, and upon which the inquiry has been asked for determinations by us, are: first, whether the role of 1 Para on 30 January 1972 had as its primary objective the inception of a process to reassert military authority in the Bogside no-go area in Derry – in short, to teach Bogsiders a lesson, but not to reoccupy at this stage, which would be accomplished by Operation Motorman in July 1972; second, whether the arrest operation was merely a pretext for legitimising what was, in simple terms, a frontal assault or incursion into the no-go areas; third, whether these objectives explain why the arrested persons, the dead and the injured were all innocent civilians; fourth, whether the Parachute Regiment was selected to perform this role because of the manner in which it acted as a hard-and-fast response unit in Belfast; and finally and most importantly, whether the whole operation had been sanctioned at the highest level by the Cabinet in Whitehall, recognising that such an exercise necessarily involved an inevitable and foreseeable risk of serious injury or death to innocent civilians . . . and innocent the four citizens I represented most certainly were – at least on that there was, and can be, no dispute. From the outset it was never suggested, on behalf of the soldiers, that any of them were terrorists or posed a threat of violence. My central point throughout was that if the soldiers persist in claiming they only shot persons who were posing a violent threat, then who shot the innocent civilians? I eagerly await the result of the inquiry’s assiduous, time-consuming labours.

One of the most heartening and humbling moments for me, during the whole of the period I was involved in the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, came with an unexpected meeting organised by my solicitor, Des Doherty. We went out to dinner one night to meet a friend of his, Richard Moore. Des told me little or nothing about Richard in advance, and as the meal progressed I came to the slow realisation that he was totally blind. He was so proficient at ordering, eating and directing his conversation that his disability was not obvious to me. Far more extraordinary was the story he told, which stemmed from the year of Bloody Sunday in 1972, when, aged ten, he was blinded by a rubber bullet fired at point-blank range into his face by a British soldier in Derry. Richard was not consumed by bitterness and hatred; indeed, quite the reverse. He has devoted his life to reconciliation and education. He has gone out of his way to trace and meet the soldier who shot him; to establish an organisation called Children in Crossfire, which has raised millions of pounds to provide food, housing, schools and clean water in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Gambia, Brazil, Colombia and Bangladesh. By going into schools across the religious divide in Northern Ireland, by showing them what is possible in environments far worse than theirs, he has brought young people together with a sense of purpose that is not infected by bigotry and prejudice: an indisputable model for integrated education. Wolfe Tone would have been proud.