30 January 2022 was the 50th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday massacre when British troops in the occupied North of Ireland shot 26 unarmed demonstrators, killing 14. Despite a £400m inquiry, no British soldier has been punished. This extract from FRFI 216, August/September 2010 gives the context and political significance of the events.
In August 1969 the Labour government sent British troops to the Six Counties, ostensibly in a peacekeeping role, but in reality to quell the civil rights struggle and the nationalist uprising against British rule. Over the next two years, the Army’s presence worsened the crisis. On 9 August 1971, the introduction of internment without trial saw 342 men detained. Chief-of-Staff of the British Army, Brigadier Marston Tickell, claimed that 70% of the IRA leadership had been captured and that the IRA was ‘virtually defeated’ – all of which proved to be nonsense. The overwhelming majority of internees were not involved in any armed campaign. The purpose of internment was to destroy leading Republicans and terrorise the nationalist community. Across the north, Loyalist mobs attacked nationalist areas; in the four days after the start of internment, 22 people were killed, 19 of them civilians. The result of internment was not pacification but an intensification of the uprising.
The internees suffered a planned regime of physical torture and sophisticated psychological ill treatment. Evidence of sensory deprivation, hooding, electric shock treatment, systematic beatings, stress positions and being blind-folded and thrown out of hovering helicopters soon emerged. In response to media reports from internees and their families, the Home Office hastily commissioned an inquiry chaired by Sir Edmund Compton. Compton quickly exonerated the RUC and British Army, and could only find instances of ‘unintended hardship’. The Compton Report concluded that internees were put in stress positions and made to run obstacle courses ‘to keep them warm’. Prime Minister Heath announced that the Report was hopelessly deficient in not defending the reputation of the British Army well enough. The mood in the Republican communities became, rightly, incandescent.
While at its outbreak the struggle was united around the issue of civil rights, internment concentrated the anger of the mass of the nationalist working class against British rule. In the hope of preventing more civil disorder, the Stormont government imposed a ban on all demonstrations for a year after internment. Divisions over the direction of the civil rights campaign began to open up between constitutional nationalists and revolutionary nationalists, as the civil rights campaign threatened to become a mass uprising against British rule. This is the context in which the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, in order to maintain its leadership on the ground, called the demonstration against internment in Derry on 30 January 1972.
The events of that day are well documented. The 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, fresh from suppressing opposition to British rule in Aden [in Yemen], opened fire on unarmed demonstrators, some of whom were running for cover. The bloodbath was televised across the world. Just as the 1976 Soweto uprising in South Africa would become a watershed in the struggle against apartheid, the aftermath of the massacre on Bloody Sunday saw support for the revolutionary national struggle led by the Provisional IRA grow as thousands were drawn into the struggle.
For Republicans, Bloody Sunday was further evidence of the nature of British imperialist rule in Ireland. As former IRA volunteer Tommy McKearney put it: ‘the state was beyond being reformed and there could not be a peaceful solution’.*Another former IRA volunteer, Eammon McDermott, stated: ‘In the immediate aftermath I was clear that it was a planned systematic operation by the British. It was not a situation that went out of control … The paratroopers were entirely disciplined and deliberate. The firing was controlled, ordered and under control at all times.’ On the question of responsibility, he continued: ‘Evidence would tend to indicate that the British Cabinet was involved. [Reginald] Maudling, Home Secretary, had a special briefing at Lisburn in the days leading up to the march and Foreign Secretary [Alec] Douglas-Home drafted a memo to the British Cabinet before Bloody Sunday on how to handle the public relations situation internationally as a result of British operations against the march. It was planned.’
Paul Mallon
* Quoted in K Bean, M Hayes, Republican Voices, Seesyu Press, Monaghan, 2001, p40.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 286 February/March 2022
