89 Sunday, Bloody Sunday

In the late 1960s, a population of young, educated, and unemployed Catholics looked west and saw the success of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. They created the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), intending to use peaceful protest to bring attention to discrimination in employment and housing.

One of NICRA’s first efforts at peaceful protest was the Derry March of 1968, which many people consider the start of the Troubles. The protesters planned to march from Belfast to Derry, imitating Martin Luther King’s 1966 march from Selma to Montgomery. The 600 marchers proceeded peacefully for four days, but when they reached Derry, a mob of Protestants attacked them with stones, nails, and crowbars. The RUC escort—which was composed primarily of Protestants—did little to protect them. Riots broke out in the Catholic Bogside neighborhood, which the RUC put down brutally.

The Derry March was an inauspicious beginning to the Unionist-Republican debate. It established an unfortunate precedent of mass violence between the sides, and it told the Catholic population that it could not trust the RUC to look after its safety. When Protestant paramilitary groups subsequently launched campaigns of arson and intimidation against them, the Catholics turned to a group that was more than willing to fight back—the IRA.

The IRA had kept calling for a united Ireland since the War of Independence, although its agitation hadn’t been taken seriously for years. The outbreak of violence in Derry was exactly what its members had been looking for: an excuse to strike back at the Unionists and the police forces, which the IRA saw as the agents of British imperialism.

The IRA took on the role of police and defense force for Northern Ireland’s Catholics. If someone sold drugs in a Catholic neighborhood, he could be maimed or even killed by the IRA. If Unionist paramilitaries burned down a Catholic house, the IRA would bomb a Protestant pub.

A stream of guns and bombs started flowing into the neighborhoods of Belfast and Derry.

The Unionist paramilitaries, meanwhile, were waging their own campaign of terror. Groups like the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Red Hand Commandoes used the same tactics of murder and bombing. The UDA’s attacks were generally meant to intimidate activist Catholics or to retaliate for IRA killings, which were usually in retaliation for UDA murders, which were generally retaliations for earlier IRA murders . . . and so on.

Of the paramilitary groups, the IRA always received the lion’s share of news coverage. There were two reasons for this. First, Irish descendants in other countries have tended to sympathize with the IRA cause, even while condemning its methods. The news plays to them. Second, the IRA chose the United Kingdom as its enemy, whereas the UDA targeted neighborhoods and individuals. When the British government tried to control the Troubles, it moved against the group that had targeted it—the IRA. This led to increasing coverage of the IRA’s role in the conflict, and it also led many Catholics to perceive that the British government was biased against their side. This perception of British bias grew much worse after one of the most notorious events of the Troubles— Bloody Sunday.

To control the increasing power of the IRA, the British government sent its army into Northern Ireland and began a policy of internment. This meant that police or soldiers could seize a suspected terrorist without formal charges and hold him or her indefinitely. By 1972, hundreds of Irish Catholics were being detained on these terms.

NICRA protested internment by holding a march through Derry’s Bogside neighborhood on January 30, 1972. The local RUC chief recommended that the march be allowed to proceed as planned. An unnamed authority, however, decided instead to use the event to send in British paratroopers to arrest IRA members.

The march went on as planned and was relatively uneventful until around 4 P.M., when the soldiers arrived. They moved past the barricades and opened fire on the crowd. The march immediately dispersed in panic, and the troops followed to pursue the “arrest operation.” The precise order of events that followed has been disputed for the last three decades, but the indisputable fact is that the soldiers shot thirteen civilians dead on the spot and injured another man who later died of his wounds.

After the troops had moved out, British authorities immediately issued statements that the men killed were IRA members who had fired on the soldiers. But in the days that followed, these claims were retracted. Subsequent investigations determined that none of the men killed were carrying weapons. Investigations also failed to establish that there was any concentrated IRA presence at the scene or that the soldiers had been fired on first. What is clear is that not a single soldier was injured during the operation.

Bloody Sunday was the first time in the Troubles that British soldiers had opened fire at unarmed civilians. People throughout Ireland were outraged by the atrocity; on February 2, a mob attacked and burned the British embassy in Dublin, and in Australia, dockers refused to unload British cargo ships. The British government appointed Lord Widgery, lord chief justice of England, to investigate. Widgery determined that none of the victims could be proved to have had weapons and that while some of the soldiers might have acted irresponsibly, they did not act illegally. In compiling this report, Widgery reviewed the reports of soldiers and RUC officers but ignored the statements collected from more than 500 civilians at the scene. No soldiers were punished. The Widgery report was met with outrage—some even refer to it as the “Widgery Whitewash.”

Bloody Sunday ignited Catholic fears of government bias. The British government decided that the situation in Northern Ireland had gone beyond the local government’s ability to control. It suspended the Northern Ireland Parliament in Stormont and imposed direct rule from London. The fifty-year experiment in home rule was over.