Introduction
to the Haymarket edition

One of the loudest cheers I ever heard in the Bogside came in response to the cry: ‘The whole black nation has to be put together as a black army. and we’re gonna walk on this nation, we’re gonna walk on this racist power structure and we’re gonna say to the whole damn government—STICK ’EM UP MOTHERFUCKER, this is a hold up, we’ve come for what’s ours . . .’

The declaration was the last item in the ten-point programme of the Black Panther Party, enunciated in rich, booming R&B tones on the soundtrack of a film projected against the gable which was later to become Free Derry Wall, in the small hours of a riotous night in 1969.

The cheer had as much to do with the daring of the language as with the sentiment of the slogan. But it also signalled the extent to which civil rights campaigners at that time felt an association with the Panthers, then under murderous assault by the feds and local police forces across the US.

The international dimension has virtually been written out of history. The North is scarcely mentioned in accounts of sixties revolutionism, even by some who came among us to be pictured at barricades, clenched fists on militant show.

To insist now on the relevance of internationalism is to venture onto ground which has been little disturbed by the stride of standard-issue chroniclers who assume that Northern Ireland can be understood entirely and in no other terms than Protestant versus Catholic, Orange against Green. This applies particularly to players and commentators who marched lock-stepped and bulging with self-satisfaction towards the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of April 1998, perhaps hymning Harry Chapin’s “Flowers Are Red”: ‘Flowers are red, young man / Green leaves are green / There’s no need to see flowers any other way / Than the way they always have been seen.’

The main Unionist and Nationalist parties, the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein, are, naturally, insistent that the construction of mainstream politics around the idea of communal identity is natural, inevitable, unchangeable, and that any alternative perspective—based, say, on class—is fanciful and futile.

Given the dominant politics of the architects of the Agreement, it’s scarcely surprising that it was shaped so as to allocate every citizen of the North to either the Orange or the Green camp and then to build a system of checks and balances, blandishments and vetoes, to ensure that neither side could take advantage of the other in the future. It required and formalised sectarianism, now to be characterised by peaceful competition rather than hostile confrontation.

To argue that the settlement was pre-programmed to deadlock, and that abrasion of the interfaces would always have a potential to spark off new conflagration, was to invite denunciation that you were an opponent of peace. The war was over. We now had the tools to create a contented peace. Stop stirring.

True, the level of violence plummeted after the Agreement and this is widely advertised as having resulted from the pact. On the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Agreement in April 2018, the notables involved in its negotiation were hailed as heroes of peace as they paraded across the front pages. These included the greed-fuelled warmonger Tony Blair and notorious sex abuser Bill Clinton. The fact that prominent feminists were among the delighted crowd as Clinton was made a Freeman of Belfast testified to the depth of the awe in which the Agreement was held.

‘Say what you like, he helped bring us peace.’

Peace is precious. But it’s fair to say that virtually all who questioned the Agreement on account of its consolidation of sectarianism, including many who were not neutral between supporters and opponents of the Northern State and the British interests which sustained it, had never been in favour of armed conflict in the first place.

The main reason the Agreement came about is that the section of society which had borne the brunt of the conflict, the working class, Catholic and Protestant, had no stomach for continuation of the slaughter. The peace process was a bottom-up phenomenon rather than handed down by a beneficent elite.

The hope of the Derry activists who had triggered the civil rights campaign in the late 1960s that we could obliterate the colour-coding of Northern politics had apparently come to nothing. The glimpse we thought we had had of possibilities beyond the old limits of political thinking seemed to have been an illusion induced for our own comfort. My great friend Johnnie White, a socialist fighter all his life, including within Republican organisations, managed a tight smile through terrible pain in the last conversation we ever had: ‘Back then, McCann, 1969, that was the best.’

Back then the American connection had been important to us. I recall bringing back to New York the golden key to the city which Bernadette McAliskey (née Devlin) had received from Mayor John Lindsay and, on my first night in town, presenting it to Panther leader Robert Bay at a ceremony in Harlem which attracted a little media coverage. My friend the novelist Jimmy Breslin told me immediately that that had been ‘stupid. . . . You shoulda done that on your last night, not the first!’ By next morning, all thirteen of the speaking engagements arranged for me had been cancelled by their Irish American sponsors. One crusader for equality and civil rights in the North explained from Boston that I had associated the cause of Irish civil rights with ‘niggers’ and that this would prove disastrous. What US campaigners who had risked their lives and saw lives lost in voter-registration drives in the badlands of Alabama and thus inspired the movement in the North would have made of this isn’t hard to imagine: Up against the wall, motherfuckers.

The argument of the Left was that our natural allies in the United States ought surely to be those who, like us, were fighting against oppression. The counter-argument, not just from Irish Americans but from many civil rights ‘moderates’ at home, too, was that it made no sense to alienate powerful US interests, that to gratuitously introduce issues of injustice in the US would, as one prominent Bogside Republican put it to me, ‘split our support’. The effect was to strengthen significantly the argument that demands which went wider than a rebalancing of community advantage were wrong-headed and to be discouraged.

The same consideration has more recently led supporters of gay rights in Ireland to travel to the US to march shoulder to shoulder with homophobe bigots on Paddy’s Day parades. Some who had railed against the occupation of Iraq sang dumb and stood grinning at shamrocked photo opportunities alongside George W. Bush. We need the White House to press the British to put pressure on the Unionists to make concessions to Nationalists, ran the same decrepit logic as we’d encountered in the sixties.

(The most sensible line on St. Patrick’s Day in the US that I’m aware of came from the splendid Sarah Silverman: ‘I go into my apartment, lock the door and spend the day laughing at Angela’s Ashes.)

On the morning after Donald Trump’s election as US president in November 2016, John Hume’s successor as leader of the impeccably moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), Colum Eastwood, announced that he would not be attending the annual March 17th shindig at the White House while Trump remained resident. Within hours, Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams announced that he’d certainly be at the party. (In the event, he wasn’t invited.) Sinn Fein members proclaimed that Eastwood had exposed his own naïvety. ‘We have to be strategic.’ Strategic—the favourite word of flannel merchants everywhere.

Similarly, there are those who style themselves anti-
imperialists but who couldn’t bring themselves to say boo to an arms company urging imperialist war for profit. When the Raytheon 9, members of the Derry Anti-War Coalition, myself among them, occupied and ‘decommissioned’ the arms company’s Derry plant in August 2006 in a successful effort to disrupt production of military equipment being used in Israel’s assault on Lebanon at the time, both the SDLP and Sinn Fein, self-proclaimed opponents of the arms trade and Israeli aggression, rejected all pleas to show support—because of the risk of alienating US business interests.

As with solidarity with the victims of racist inequality in the 1960s, opposition to imperialism and war profiteering is subjected to the needs of ‘our community’ vis-à-vis ‘the other side’. Not that ‘our community’ has benefited much—although, naturally, there have been political and personal benefits for some reformed radicals who managed successfully to flip-flop into the arms of the US ruling class.

To this extent, the flip-floppers can be said to have prospered. In contrast, the socialist adventurism of the late sixties is commonly presented as a brief flurry of sanguine naïvety. But that’s not the only possible analysis.

The ideas of internationalism and revolt from below which animated young people fifty years ago are, I dare say, more relevant in the globalised present than they were in the gone days of gas and barricades. It’s the current relevance of the global context which makes it important to see Northern Ireland in the late sixties not just in the perspective of Irish history but also against the background of war, tumult, and repression across the world.

As Johnnie had recalled in reverie in his last days of life, rampaging down Rossville Street shouting the same slogans as were rising from demonstrations in Chicago, London, Paris, Sydney—‘Two, four, six, eight / Organise and smash the state!’—had been a heady experience which all involved had hoped could be sustained. There had, no doubt, been an element of willed optimism in our high expectations. Maybe we’d been dizzied by the vastness of what seemed possible. But there was, too, reason to believe.

January 1968 saw uprisings in every city in Vietnam and the seizure by the National Liberation Front—‘Viet Cong’—of part of the US embassy in Saigon. The fact that an army of poor peasants could push back the forces of the greatest power on earth boosted the morale of anti-imperialists everywhere.

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in April. Thousands of young people stormed out from African American neighbourhoods to tear down symbols of the system and engage in hand-to-hand combat with the police. A few weeks later, at a sit-down protest on the lower deck of Craigavon Bridge across the Foyle, Finbar Doherty struck up a chorus of the song most associated with the US civil rights movement, ‘We Shall Overcome’. By the end of Roddy’s rendition, the crowd of a couple of hundred (it’s a very easy song to learn) was singly lustily along.

A week after King’s murder, there was a spasm of street demonstrations in West Germany following an attempted assassination of student leader Rudi Dutschke. In May, Paris erupted. Students built barricades in the streets around the Sorbonne. Factories and offices emptied as workers struck in solidarity. The ten-million-strong stoppage was the biggest strike ever in Europe.

The following month, demonstrators in Yugoslavia laid siege to parliament in Belgrade—‘Down with the Red bourgeoisie’.

In August, thousands of Chicago cops attacked Vietnam War demonstrators outside the Democratic Party convention in Chicago. Norman Mailer’s blood-and-guts account of the clash remains one of the great vivid pieces in the canon of American journalism. But the anti-war voice of the grassroots was drowned out by a roar of pro-war patriotism. Convention delegates with an anti-war mandate took the view—the same as that taken by Barack Obama in opposing the invasion of Iraq and then voting repeatedly for appropriations to fund the slaughter—that once the die was cast, no attitude was patriotically permissible other than to ‘support our boys’.

On October 2, students were massacred in droves by paramilitary police when they marched for democracy in Mexico City. A square near the university was left carpeted with corpses. Three days later, as I hesitated before speaking at a moment of incipient riot on our first civil rights march, a heckle came from a teenager: ‘What about the Mexican students, McCann?’ which psyched me into sudden realisation of how high the stakes were.

Each upsurge of struggle sent out a flurry of sparks which helped ignite struggle elsewhere. Everywhere, some who had become involved in protest politics on account of grievances particular to their own community or group saw that they were not alone.

Contrary to the views of the many who ditched their radicalism so as to reach respectability, internationalism is more relevant now than then—not because anti-capitalists wish it so but because capitalism itself, the never-ending source of our political ills, is more integrated on a global scale than ever. For socialists, the basis of internationalism has never depended on fellow feeling with struggles which coincide with or parallel our own—although that sentiment would be a good start—but in understanding that because those who run the world in the interests of the rich are organised across countries and continents, so must opponents of capitalism be if we are to confront them in appropriate array. We must see and understand those who struggle elsewhere along the same lines as ourselves not only as campaigners we sympathise with but as elements of the same entity, pitched against the same force, seeking the same end.

In this perspective, the idea of hobnobbing with the main architects of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan while avoiding contact with the US anti-war movement represents not a subtle strategy—‘They are not using us, we are using them’—but outright betrayal of the anti-war cause.

The same point emerges from consideration of the widening inequalities between the rich and the rest of us. The crisis of capitalism which shuddered the world in 2008 and brought the lines of class division into sharp relief is not amenable to solution in one country. The same banks, the same bail-outs, the same interlinked issues.

Likewise with the fight against racism and homophobia, for abortion rights, for the defeat of imperialist incursions by the United States, in solidarity with Chechens and others yearning for freedom from Russia, in defence of civil rights, jobs, wages, working conditions, and so on, in every struggle for liberty and justice, we are weakened when we shape our strategy to keep powerful interests onside.

This is particularly true in Northern Ireland, where neither the US nor any major power has a compelling strategic interest and so can feel free to give or withhold backing from this or that faction according to how they have behaved themselves.

You put your own struggle above all else, seek support from any interest willing to back your particular cause, irrespective of their record and role in other arenas, and you find yourself soon on the wrong side of the barricade.

It was a point made with sharpness and humour at a packed meeting commemorating the civil rights movement in Sandino’s pub on 4 November 2008—the night of Barack Obama’s election—by Emory Douglas, minister of culture in the Black Panther Party back in 1968 and one of the producers of the film projected onto Free Derry Wall. He and Billy X, the party’s archivist, were in Ireland for a series of meeting marking the fortieth anniversary of the parallel events in the North and across the Atlantic.

‘It’s a wonderful night, full of hope, and we have to hold on to the hope, so we can push for the things he (Obama) promised would come when he fails to deliver, as he will. Real change, if it comes, will come from below, just like here, just like anywhere.’

Billy X added: ‘Wall Street will still be there. The Israeli lobby will still be there. The chiefs of staff and the CIA, the industrialists, oil barons, the owners of the media, all of them still there. . . . All Obama has won is the presidency.’

We went back into the warm, where a couple of last-ditch drinkers of a certain age had moved on to a straggly verse of Phil Ochs’s great song about another US invasion we’d once marched against: ‘The fishermen sweat, they’re pausing at their nets, the day’s a-burning / As the warships sway and thunder in the bay, loud the morning / But the boy on the shore is throwing pebbles no more, he runs a-warning / That the marines have landed on the shores of Santo Domingo.’

If we hold on to the memory, draw out the lessons, the best is still to come.

The massacre in Derry of civil rights marchers by members of the Parachute Regiment on 30 January, 1972—fourteen dead, fourteen wounded—had a more powerful effect on politics in the North, especially in Derry, than any other incident since the foundation of the State in 1921.

A determined campaign by the families of the victims, the surviving wounded, and their supporters kept the issue alive until, in the late 1990s, the Dublin government took it on as its own. Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, under relentless pressure from the families and other campaigners, eventually accepted that formal talks on new political arrangements could not begin in earnest without Bloody Sunday being first gotten out of the way.

The result came in January 1998 when Tony Blair announced a new Bloody Sunday Inquiry. This time, given the total lack of trust in British law following the 1972 ‘Widgery Whitewash’, the inquiry was to have an international dimension. The British law lord, Lord Saville of Newdigate, was to chair, alongside former New Brunswick (Canada) chief justice William Holt and former Australian High Court judge John Toohey. The holding of a second inquiry into events which had already been disposed of under the same legislation—the Tribunals of Inquiry (Evidence) Act, 1921—was unprecedented: indeed, according to many legal experts, it was constitutionally impermissible. But then, when needs must, politics always trumps constitutional law.

The politics of Bloody Sunday arise from the way the atrocity differed from all the others commemorated on the gravestones which stand as milestones along the Via Dolorosa of our Troubles. The massacre was perpetrated not by any Orange or Green faction but by men of an elite regiment uniformed to represent the British State. It happened not by hidden bomb on a lonely road or furtive ambush in the dead of night or eruption of death into a crowded pub, but on open ground in broad daylight on a clear crisp day, closely observed by hundreds of witnesses, local residents and marchers who had converged on the area and now watched in distraught horror from windows and balconies or crouched around corners.

In the immediate aftermath it was widely believed, including by me, that the atrocity had been perpetrated at the prompting of the Unionist government at Stormont, where Prime Minister Brian Faulkner was under intense pressure both inside the party and outside it, in the person of Ian Paisley. They were demanding daily that something drastic be done to deal with the ‘no-go area’, aka Free Derry.

In fact, no evidence was to be found in the thousands of documents released by Saville to back this belief up. In contrast, there was no shortage of evidence that the operational plan had been drawn up by senior army officers, with no thought, good or bad, about Faulkner’s predicament. Bloody Sunday was a very British atrocity.

Memos between senior officers spelt it out that their rage against the Bogside had to with the damnable presumption of ‘hooligans’ in taking over an urban area and excluding the forces of law over a period of months. This was a profound insult to everything senior British officers held dear.

The Inquiry was a mammoth affair. Hearings began in March 2000, first in the Guildhall in Derry, then in London to facilitate soldiers and others who claimed that their lives would be at risk if they ventured to Derry. Statements were taken from 2,500 people, 924 of whom gave oral testimony. One hundred and sixty volumes of evidence running to 25 million words were considered, as well as thirteen volumes of photographs, 121 audiotapes, and 110 videotapes. The final cost was close on £200 million. Most of this went to lawyers. The message pounded out was that no stone was being left unturned in the assiduous search for truth.

Saville’s five-thousand-page report was published on 15 June 2010. It left a slight shadow of doubt over one victim but found positively that all the casualties had been innocent: none had been carrying a weapon or offering any threat when struck down. Without exception, the shooters who gave evidence were found to have perjured themselves.

The sea of shining faces that were gathered in Guildhall Square to watch the announcement from the Commons on a giant screen could have lit up a continent. Here, at last, was acknowledgement that the Bloody Sunday killings had been unlawful. This was the vindication that the families and their supporters had trekked towards for decades, and it was sufficient unto the day.

The fact that the phoney findings of the Widgery Inquiry had been overturned induced a sense of achievement as well as delight. But in time, calmer consideration and a colder eye put the report into different perspective. Saville, while giving the families almost all that they’d asked for, manipulated evidence to let senior politicians and military chiefs off the hook. The report was thus along more traditional lines than was allowed at the time. It didn’t deny British culpability but loaded the blame onto those at the bottom and protected those at the top. Thus, Prime Minister David Cameron, to wild applause in Guildhall Square, felt able to welcome the report while insisting that the reputation of the British army itself remained unsullied.

Cameron couldn’t have described the killings as ‘unjustified and unjustifiable’ had a finger of blame been pointed at, for example, Major General Robert Ford, Commander of Land Forces, Northern Ireland, at the time, or at Michael Jackson, adjutant on the day to Lt. Colonel Derek Wilford, commander of the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, the unit which had carried out the killings.

Saville’s case against the shooters was that they’d breached orders in targeting citizens who posed no threat. He indicted Wilford for sending two companies too deep into the Bogside and allowing them to fight ‘a running battle’. According to Saville, these acts of indiscipline provided as full an account of the reasons for Bloody Sunday as it was possible to assemble from the evidence.

As ever, Kipling’s ‘poor bloody infantry’ was to take the rap.

Back in 2010, few Bloody Sunday campaigners had energy left to fight on, or even readiness to admit that there was anything left to fight on for. We’d had a result. We had been on the road for thirty-eight years. This was as good as it was going to get. In the moment, by and large, I shared this view. Anyway, it felt wrong to rain on the families’ parade. And yet . . .

I had missed fewer than a dozen of the 484 days of evidence and was uneasily aware that there was something missing. I spent a day and most of a night rereading the relevant transcripts, checking my memory against the record.

In a document included in the bundles of evidence released by the Inquiry, written on 7 January 1972 after a recce to Derry, Ford had declared himself ‘disturbed’ by what he regarded as the soft attitude of local army and police chiefs to the Bogside, and added: ‘I am coming to the conclusion that the minimum force necessary to achieve a restoration of law and order is to shoot selected ringleaders amongst the DYH (Derry Young Hooligans).’

Ford asked Belfast commander Frank Kitson—the British army’s top expert on counter-insurgency, author of the standard manual Low Intensity Operations—to release 1 Para to go to Derry to police the planned civil rights march and rally. Kitson readily agreed.

A fortnight later, six days before Bloody Sunday, Ford overruled objections to the use of paratroopers by Derry commander Brigadier Pat MacLellan and local police chief Frank Lagan. He remained obdurate as other senior Derry-based officers expressed alarm, to the startling extent in one case of phoning the aide de camp to the chief of the General Staff, Sir Michael Templar, in London to plead for Ford to be overruled.

On the day, although with no operational role, Ford travelled to Derry and took up position at the edge of the Bogside, shouting ‘Go on the paras!’ as they charged through a barbed-wire barricade towards Rossville Street.

Saville ruled that Ford ‘neither knew nor had reason to know at any stage that his decision would or was likely to result in soldiers firing unjustifiably. . . . It was also submitted that . . . the authorities . . . (the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland Governments and the Army) tolerated if not encouraged the use of unjustified lethal force; and that this was the cause or a contributory cause of what happened on Bloody Sunday. We found no evidence of such toleration or encouragement.’

This was perverse. Local newspapers were carrying regular complaints and editorial condemnations of unjustified violence by paratroopers. Numerous incidents suggested toleration if not encouragement of unjustified lethal force, specifically by 1 Para. The most egregious had occurred six months earlier when the same unit had been involved in killing eleven unarmed civilians in the Nationalist Ballymurphy area of West Belfast. There was no inquiry, apology, admission of guilt for that massacre.

What were the paras to believe but that what they’d done in Ballymurphy and elsewhere was acceptable to their commanders? Saville’s explanation that ‘we found no evidence’ of a ‘culture of tolerance’ of unlawful violence would be unremarkable if by ‘evidence’ he meant evidence to the Inquiry. But he had declined to examine prior events, flatly rejecting submissions from the families’ lawyers that he should take account of Ballymurphy.

The reason he had found no evidence was that he had decided not to look for such evidence.

When he read Saville’s report, General Sir Michael Jackson, too, must have heaved a heartfelt sigh of relief. Jackson was the man who had organised the cover-up. He had first testified to Saville in April 2003. Neither in his statement to the tribunal nor in oral evidence did he mention having compiled a list of the shots fired or of having written any account of the day.

The following month saw Major Ted Loden on the witness stand. He had been the commander of Support Company of 1 Para, which had fired all of the shots which killed or wounded. He described how, shortly after the killing spree ended, he had, one by one, taken down in his own hand statements from the soldiers who had fired rounds and in each case had plotted map references showing the location of the shooter and of his target and had noted the soldier’s account of why he had fired.

Loden said that he had interviewed the soldiers as he sat in the back of an armoured vehicle a few hundred yards from Rossville Street with a map spread out on his lap, by the light of a battery-powered lamp. He was handed a type-written document detailing the shots, and said this must have been typed from his handwritten notes, no copy of which had survived. The following morning, Saville’s lead barrister, Christopher Clarke QC, announced that a handwritten copy of the document had been discovered overnight! An employee of the Ministry of Defence had called in to the hearing the previous day out of casual interest and had happened to hear Loden’s evidence. (The MoD’s HQ was on Whitehall, a few hundred yards from the inquiry venue.) The typed document mentioned in evidence, he thought, seemed reminiscent of a handwritten document which he had seen somewhere . . .

Loden, still on the witness stand, looked at the freshly discovered document and said that while he recognised the content, the handwriting wasn’t his. Asked whose it might be, he suggested perhaps General Jackson’s. But if he had written out the list himself, how come the document was in Jackson’s hand? Loden replied: ‘Well, I cannot answer that question.’

Jackson was recalled and took the stand again in October. He had been a 26-year-old captain in 1972. His subsequent ascent had been spectacular—commander of the paras’ Second Battalion, commander of British Army on the Rhine, NATO chief in Kosovo. He was now chief of the General Staff, Britain’s top soldier.

None of the shots described in the list which we now knew had been written out by Jackson conformed to any of the shots which evidence told had been fired. Some of the trajectories showed bullets passing through brick buildings before finding their targets. The map references given as the positions of the shooters bore no relation to the positions in which the soldiers giving evidence had placed themselves. None of the locations where uncontested evidence showed the victims had fallen was recorded as such in the map references. It wasn’t that the list contained inaccuracies: from start to finish, it was inaccurate in every detail.

None of the soldiers said to have related their experiences to Jackson in the back of a battery-lit vehicle had mentioned this surely memorable episode in their witness statement.

Other documents in Jackson’s hand, also discovered by the fortuitous MoD man, were produced—accounts of the events by the commanders of each of the three para companies present and by the battalion intelligence officer. Taken together with the ‘shot list’, these represented a substantial handwritten dossier which it must have required a number of hours to produce. Jackson had made no mention of any of this in his statement to the Inquiry or in his earlier oral evidence.

Jackson explained now that he had entirely forgotten producing the documents when first giving evidence but had since recovered a ‘vague memory’. On more than twenty occasions, he used phrases along the lines of ‘I cannot remember,’ ‘I do not recall,’ and ‘I am afraid I cannot help you there.’

In his report, Saville resolved one of Jackson’s difficulties by accepting both Loden’s original claim that he had written out the shot list and Jackson’s subsequent explanation that he must have copied the script verbatim—although he could offer no explanation why he might have done this or recall the circumstances in which it had happened. The Inquiry heard no evidence as to who had asked or ordered Jackson to compile or transcribe this detailed account. In a supplementary statement, Jackson stated: ‘I am confident that the statements resulted from an order from 8 Brigade (which in turn would almost certainly have been on instruction from HQNI) . . . It is even possible that the requirement may have been instigated in London, but that is pure speculation on my part.’

It was not put to Jackson on the witness stand that an alternative explanation for this witch’s brew of falsehood was that a lying account of events was urgently needed and that he had been chosen by his superiors as the man for the job.

Saville rejected suggestions that ‘the list played some part in a cover-up to conceal the emerging truth’ and went on: ‘The list did play a role in the Army’s explanations of what occurred on the day.’ He cited an interview on BBC radio at 1 a.m. on the day after Bloody Sunday in which the army’s head of information policy in the North, Maurice Tugwell, had used the list as his basis for explaining the ‘shooting engagements’.

Saville reported that ‘information from the list was used by Lord Balniel, the minister of state for defence, in the House of Commons on 1 February 1972, when he defended the actions of the soldiers’.’ Saville also referred to evidence that the shot list had been distributed to British diplomatic missions around the world as a guide for answering questions on the killings.

Most commonsense people would see this not just as evidence of a criminal conspiracy to conceal the truth but as a practical account of the conspiracy in action—with General Sir Michael Jackson at its heart. But if Saville had reported that the man at the very apex of Britain’s armed forces had concocted a series of lies to cover up ‘unjustified and unjustifiable’ killings, and then perjured himself to conceal his role, Cameron would not have been able to speak in the Commons in terms which won cheers of delight in Derry while bringing smiles of relieved satisfaction in the circles where military chiefs gather to chuckle over killings.

In the decent world which socialists strive for, Michael Jackson would be in prison.

The business of the shot list remains mysterious. Just as puzzling is the fact that none of the barristers thought to ask that the man from the MoD who had come across the documents after chancing on the Inquiry at the very moment when Major Loden on the witness stand was struggling unsuccessfully to explain himself should be called and asked where he might originally have spotted this key piece of the Bloody Sunday jigsaw.

Then there’s the question of where the shot list had lain all unnoticed for decades. Christopher Clarke explained. A corporal based at Ebrington Barracks, the army’s Derry HQ, had chanced upon the document in August 1998 while clearing out a cupboard in an administrative office. The corporal was involved at the time in a debate with his brother about Bloody Sunday. Believing that the document supported his view, he made copies and sent them to his brother. However, he left the original behind in the photostat machine, where it was discovered. The corporal was court-martialled, convicted of ‘conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline’,’ reduced to the ranks and discharged in disgrace. At the time of writing he remains the only soldier to have been convicted of any offence relating to Bloody Sunday.

The full truth about Bloody Sunday remains to be told.

Over the last dozen or so years of his life, Martin McGuinness and I lived around the corner from one another. We might meet in the corner shop for our papers in the morning. The encounters could be edgy. But we never bumped heads in anger. There were always safe subjects to resort to.

Martin died on 21 March 2017 at sixty-six from a rare genetic disease, amyloidosis. He was buried two days later after requiem mass at the Long Tower Church. The coffin was draped in an Irish tricolour as it lay before the altar. An hour after the mass, his body was interred nearby in the city cemetery. Gerry Adams delivered the funeral oration. There hadn’t been two Martin McGuinnesses, he averred, meaning one who had unflinchingly ordered and supervised killings and another devoted to peace, who and become a hail-fellow-well-met with unionist leaders, prime ministers, Taoisigh, US presidents, Queen Elizabeth.

Others may have been pleased to interpret Martin’s new respectability as representing a fundamental break with the past, suggested Adams. But Martin would have felt it a frictionless transition, not a rude change of direction. ‘Martin McGuinness was a freedom fighter. . . . The British government has no right whatsoever to have any involvement in Ireland,’ Adams said.

There had been none of that sort of palaver at the Long Tower, where an impressive congregation of notables had listened in rapt awe to Bill Clinton delivering a professionally crafted panegyric. We must, he explained, ‘finish the work which [Martin] started . . . honour his legacy’. He must not have had Martin’s legacy of armed resistance to the British presence in mind.

In terms of Republican ideology, however, neither the Adams nor the Clinton analysis was as significant as the fact of the flag on the coffin as it lay in state in the church—marking the end of a thirty-year protocol whereby institutional Catholicism had eschewed association with the IRA.

In response to questions on the day after the funeral, Bishop Donal McKeown explained the Church’s change of position: ‘Mr McGuinness was former deputy first minister; President Michael D. Higgins and Taoiseach Enda Kenny were attending; British government representatives were attending; leaders of the main Stormont parties were in attendance; and the Tricolour was flown at half-mast over the Houses of the Oireachtas (parliament) in Dublin, even though Mr McGuinness had not been a member of the Oireachtas. . . .

‘It was decided that the deceased should be given a comparable honour to that which would have been accorded to a former or serving head of state or government of Ireland.’

This came close to acceptance of the status which the IRA had claimed for itself, as a legitimate force authorised by a competent authority to wage war in the name of Ireland. At the least, it signalled that the horrors perpetrated by the IRA in the name of Ireland could be put in the past, now that the Movement was said to have a firm purpose of amendment. Bygones be bygones, slate wiped clean, time to move on.

This was the moment the Provisional IRA campaign was enfolded into the approved narrative of what former international footballer and contrarian commentator Eamon Dunphy has defined as ‘Official Ireland’.

McGuinness’s strength derived from his authenticity. Unlike most of those who emerged as leaders of the Provisional IRA, particularly in Belfast in the early 1970s, he didn’t come from a ‘Republican family’ with a fully formed ideology reverently passed down from preceding generations. As a sixteen-year-old apprentice working in a local butcher’s shop, he had had the self-confidence to take up a front-row position in the early civil rights marches. When marches were attacked, he took readily to rioting. When the shooting war loomed, he joined the IRA. His pattern of development followed the political trajectory of many working-class Nationalists in Derry. Martin was a brother off the block.

Having taken his place in the ranks of the IRA, Martin went about the business with ruthless dedication, rigidly adhering to what Republicans held to be the diktat of history. The killing of Patsy Gillespie was a case in point.

In October 1990, Gillespie, forty-two, was a married man with five children living in the Shantallow estate. He was watching television with his family when an IRA gang burst in. Patsy was taken outside at gunpoint and ordered to drive a van which had been packed with a thousand pounds of explosives to a British army checkpoint at Coshquin, a short distance from the border with County Donegal. His family was held hostage to ensure he followed instructions. As the van pulled into the checkpoint, the explosives were detonated by remote control from a position in Donegal within sight of the army emplacement. Patsy and five soldiers of the King’s Regiment were blown to bits. Martin was the top-ranked IRA member in Derry. The operation could not have taken place without his say-so.

Patsy’s crime was that he worked as a cook at the Fort George army base on the Strand Road. This was accounted ‘collaboration with the enemy’. His killing caused widespread revulsion. Even some who were sympathetic to the IRA took the view that he had been a family man in an area of high unemployment working to put food on his family’s table. And, anyway, it was surely a stretch to describe working in a kitchen as ‘collaboration’.

But Martin, like all members and close supporters of the IRA, would have had none of it. Patsy Gillespie ought to have known, must have known, that working for the British army in any capacity would put his life at risk. He had made himself a legitimate target.

My father, Edward, was a lifelong trades unionist and a socialist. He was a devotee of James Connolly and also a devout Catholic: socialism for justice in this world, the Church for salvation in the next. He was known around the area as ‘a labour man’, secretary of the local branch of the Electrical Trades Union and a long-standing member of the Derry Trades Union Council. He worked for about 10 years until his retirement in the mid-sixties as a maintenance labourer at Fort George. Would they have killed him, too? I suppose they would, and that Martin would have reckoned the killing a defensible act.

The ideology behind the killing of Patsy and others dubbed ‘traitors’ differed in one significant respect from the movements with which it has commonly been compared—the African National Congress, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Basque ETA, etc.—in that it has seen the Republic not as an objective to be aimed at but as an actually existing entity. The basis for this has to do with the Proclamation of the Republic on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin at Easter 1916 and its endorsement in the 1918 general election—the last all-Ireland poll before partition. In Republican perspective, the 73 Sinn Fein MPs that were elected then, out of 105 Irish seats, constituted a clear majority in the first and only legitimate Irish parliament, with the right, therefore, to form a government. The 1919–21 War of Independence was fought not in pursuit but in defence of the Republic. As successive leaderships—Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera, etc.—abandoned the rocky road of armed struggle for the primrose path of compromise, the IRA Army Council became the repository of the 1916 tradition and the de jure government of Ireland.

I mention in the first edition of this book that this idea of the IRA leadership as the sole source of political legitimacy in Ireland will seem fantastical to many. But it has been this conception of its status that sustained the IRA through lean years when it could find little sustenance in the world around it. And it provided the moral basis of all its actions.

Collaborators with the enemy in time of war can expect death. Hence the fate of Patsy Gillespie.

Which raises the question: how, then, was Martin—and Adams et al—able to call off the war in return for a settlement which left the North within the UK and still not only retain the loyalty of the majority of the IRA rank and file but also see their popularity swell to the extent of passing the SDLP to become the largest Nationalist party in the North?

Gerry Adams won the West Belfast seat in the 1983 Westminster general election. His first words to delirious followers on the Falls Road afterwards were: ‘Even de Valera couldn’t win the Falls.’ The reference was to the 1918 election, when West Belfast emerged as one of only two seats in Ireland where the Irish Parliamentary Party, in the person of ‘Wee Joe’ Devlin, defeated the president of Sinn Fein and future Taoiseach and President of Ireland, Eamon de Valera.

West Belfast, with the Falls Road at its heart, is frequently referred to in media reports as a ‘traditionally Republican area’. But it is not. Adams in 1983 was first Sinn Feiner ever elected in the constituency.

Eddie Gallagher, an IRA leader from Donegal and one of the Movement’s most likeable and charismatic leaders in the 1980s, remarked to me years later that, ‘Those fellows from Belfast were never really Republicans. They were only fighting for their streets.’

Fighting for your street, of course, is not necessarily an ignoble thing to do. In certain circumstances—Belfast 1969, when Catholic streets were being burnt down by mobs while the police stood idly by—it can be no more than a neighbourly duty. Most of the people I know who joined the IRA at the time did so for decent reasons. Not out of sacred duty to vindicate the Republic but because they wanted the bigot’s boot off their necks and the British Army off their backs. If these deep grievances could be remedied short of the achievement of the Republic, if equality could be won within existing constitutional structures, then there was the basis for a deal which could be presented as a stepping stone—Michael Collins’s phrase—towards the Republic. Thus the popularity with its supporters of Sinn Fein’s endorsement of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA).

Sinn Fein banners and posters quickly began to appear claiming, ‘All we ask for is equality.’ Speeches at commemorations for volunteers now spoke in ringing tones of the demand for equality which, implicitly, had driven the man or woman in question to take up arms. This may explain why individuals joined the IRA. But it wasn’t the motivation of the Movement itself, certainly not of those who had been persuaded to regard Republican ideology as gospel and go out to kill or be killed in its name.

The reason the party got away with this manoeuvre is that for practical purposes the GFA consolidated the civil rights victories which Sinn Fein had sneered at in the 1970s but which history had shown had lain at the heart of the aspirations of the majority of Northern Catholics. The IRA campaign had been fought under false colours.

Twenty five years before the GFA, in 1973, a power-sharing deal and a North/South Council of Ministers’ ‘harmonising functions’ had been negotiated between the Ulster Unionists, the SDLP, the Alliance Party, and the two governments at Sunningdale in Berkshire—the ‘Sunningdale Agreement’. Londonderry
Corporation had been abolished and plans made for the redrawing of ward boundaries. A points system for housing allocation had been introduced. Jobs and housing discrimination had been outlawed. The routine carrying of guns by the Royal Ulster Constabulary ended (so it was announced: it never happened) and the B Specials, an all-Protestant part-time militia, had been abolished.

Sinn Fein rejected the Sunningdale Agreement deal as a sell-out. Martin declared that only the ‘cutting edge’ of the IRA campaign could deliver progress. The IRA fought on for a quarter of a century of blood and grief before accepting the GFA—memorably described by SDLP deputy leader Seamus Mallon as ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’.

In socialist perspective, the major flaw in the GFA was that it parcelled Catholics and Protestants into separate electorates and laid down that the biggest party in each community would jointly head an Executive. When politics are constructed around the idea of communal identity, the party which can present itself as the more vigorous and uncompromising representative of its ‘own’ community vis-à-vis ‘the other side’ is more or less bound to succeed. This is what happened.

The GFA ruled that elected representatives of parties which defined themselves as neither Nationalist nor Unionist wouldn’t have a vote when it came to ‘key’ issues.

The Executive collapsed in January 2017 when Sinn Fein walked out in protest against their Coalition partner’s involvement in a ‘Renewal Heat Incentive’ (RHI) scheme through which tens—maybe hundreds—of millions of pounds had been scammed from the public purse. Within weeks, however, Sinn Fein’s bottom line for refusing to return to the Executive was no longer the RHI but the refusal of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to back an act to make Irish an official language of the State. RHI was not an issue affecting one community only. But the question of the language was well-suited for maintaining a high level of Catholic indignation.

The chronic underfunding of schools and the National Health Service, cuts in welfare, privatisation of public services, denial of trade union rights—none of these was advanced by Sinn Fein as a red line for a return to Stormont. Each of these issues affected the working class without distinction between Catholic/Nationalists and Protestant/Unionists. No relevance to ‘equality’.

On top of which, conventional politicians frequently quite like association with ‘extremists’. At a crucial time, Sinn Fein became the British Government’s favourite Irish party. One Unionist talks participant said of Blair’s chief of staff and lead negotiator, Jonathan Powell, ‘He really loves the whiff of cordite.’ Mark Durkan, who had followed John Hume as leader of the SDLP, has recounted an incident in Downing Street during the GFA talks when he complained to Blair that his government was favouring Sinn Fein at the expense of the SDLP. According to Durkan, Blair replied: ‘Your problem is that you don’t have any guns.’

The Republican Movement lost the war but won the peace and in the process, together with its soon-to-be partner, the Rev. Ian Paisley–led DUP, consolidated the sectarian division as the focus of Northern politics. The GFA was pre-programmed to deadlock.

Martin wouldn’t have been at all happy with this analysis. But I think that towards the end of his days he might have nodded in agreement that the delivery of the civil rights demands which had first brought him onto the streets of the Bogside would be an appropriate place for a pause in the struggle, the Republic postponed until an indefinite future date. Just a few years previously, Martin would have regarded this as national apostasy. This is the view of many ex-members of the IRA, some of whom had served long sentences and lost friends and comrades in a struggle to sustain the Republic presented to them by their leadership as the only acceptable outcome of the conflict.

The GFA was a poor return on the investment of pain, endured and inflicted, by members of the IRA.

The most successful strategy had not been armed struggle or parliamentary politics but people power. It wasn’t the rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns which had delivered many of the civil rights demands but the sound of marching feet. This lesson is as relevant as ever, and not just in Northern Ireland.