Bloody Sunday and the Irish Republican Army
Bloody Sunday and the Irish Republican Army
The story of what the British army did in Londonderry on 30 January 1972 is well-known. As then-Prime Minister David Cameron said in June 2010, after the report of the twelve-year inquiry led by Lord Mark Saville of Newdigate was released, the First Battalion, Parachute Regiment (1 PARA), had entered the Bogside on a mission to arrest rioters “as a result of an order which should not have been given” and once there they were guilty of “losing their self-control”, killing thirteen civilians and shooting thirteen more, one of whom died four-and-a-half months later. They had also “put forward false accounts to seek to justify their firing” in the aftermath.
In his speech, Cameron said: “[Saville] finds that there was some firing by Republican paramilitaries”. This is much less well-known. As Cameron noted, “none of this firing provided any justification for the shooting of civilian casualties”. What it does highlight is terrorist groups’ willingness to use mass events to recklessly endanger civilian lives to score political victories. This is a factor far outside Northern Ireland.
CONTEXT OF A CATASTROPHE
The Irish Republican Army (IRA), formed in 1913, has been through a number of iterations, and almost always drawn on foreign support. The original IRA took part in the failed Easter Rising in April 1916, which had assistance from the Kaiser’s Germany. The nationalist rising that followed the Great War, bolstered by considerable public sympathy after the execution of the Easter Rising’s leaders, succeeded, concluding with a treaty in 1921 that granted de facto independence to what is now the Republic of Ireland. The pro-treaty IRA became the army of this new state; the anti-treaty forces, who wanted to continue fighting for the whole island, initiated (and lost) a civil war in this new polity.
Though defeated, the anti-treaty IRA lived on. It sought and received Soviet sponsorship in the late 1920s; the relationship fizzled in the 1930s, though the IRA did send volunteers to Spain during the civil war (1936-39) to fight on the Soviet side. The IRA’s most ambitious effort after the independence of Eire to achieve Irish unity was with the support of the Nazis in the early 1940s. The death of the IRA’s chief of staff, Seán Russell, aboard a German U-boat as he travelled back from Berlin to Ireland hindered the plan, and the danger this alliance posed triggered joint action by Britain and Ireland against the IRA that crippled the organisation for a decade and more. The unpopularity of the IRA even among republicans, not least because of the taint of fascism, meant the IRA’s “Border Campaign”, begun in the 1950s, did not achieve much support, and the group itself called a formal end to it in 1962.
In the mid-1960s, the Catholics of Northern Ireland sought to break the Protestant ascendancy through peaceful civil rights activity. Londonderry—as a prime example of the injustice of this system, a Catholic-majority town kept under Protestant rule by various discriminatory practices—had been one of the centres of activism. In 1966, Protestant paramilitary organisations, most infamously the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), were created to try to block this process, and they had a lot of sympathisers in the devolved administration, especially its police.
In October 1968, a civil rights march supported by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) in Londonderry had been met with police brutality, and in August 1969 a terrible round of inter-communal violence led to eight people being killed and 750 wounded, while displacing 1,500 Catholic families and 300 Protestant families.
The 1969 Londonderry clashes touched off rioting in other cities in Northern Ireland and led to the deployment of British troops under Operation BANNER, the beginning of what is euphemistically called “The Troubles”. BANNER lasted for thirty-eight years, until 2007, the longest British military operation in history; a quarter-of-a-million British soldiers served in it, one thousand were killed.
Though many saw the political avenues that had opened up, however imperfect they were, as preferrable means of achieving their goals, the tensions that had been surfaced by the public discussion of the wrongs done to Northern Irish Catholics and how to put them right provided a renewed opportunity for the IRA to claim that “armed struggle” was the way. After the August 1969 “Battle of the Bogside”, many Catholics were at least prepared to give a hearing to the idea that they needed a capacity for violence on their side, if only for self-defence.
It was in the language of self-defence in November 1969 that the IRA phrased its request for weapons to the Soviets, relayed through the secretary-general of the Irish Communist Party, Michael O’Riordan. The Soviets agreed, and the first weapons shipment was delivered in 1972, once KGB chief Yuri Andropov was sure the IRA could keep its Moscow connection secret. The IRA split into the Official IRA (OIRA) and the Provisional IRA (PIRA) in December 1969. Initially, the Soviets were closer to OIRA, the group responsible for the worst atrocities into the early 1970s. As the Provos eclipsed the Officials later in the 1970s, the Soviets transitioned. The PIRA would become part of the interlaced network of international terrorist groups that received Soviet support during the last thirty years of the Cold War. This was a synergistic ecosystem, where the PIRA could receive weapons and money from the Soviets and in turn, for example, provide bomb-making training to one of the Soviets’ most loyal groups, the African National Congress (ANC).
The KGB’s role in global terrorism was, with the exception of the KGB’s role in controlling the “fraternal” Communist Parties around the world, its most closely guarded secret. While both facts were obvious to anybody who wanted to see even at the time, the Soviets engaged in elaborate efforts to hide their hand and most Western media and academic coverage dismissed such suggestions as “conspiracy theories” or “McCarthyism”. With the terrorist groups, the Soviets used a two-factor method to distance themselves: a lot of the operations were delegated to the Captive Nations, particularly the East Germans, and the Stasi and others then used secondary intermediaries, notably the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and states like Hafez al-Asad’s Syria and (notoriously in the case of the PIRA) Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi’s Libya. It is no accident, as the comrades used to say, that it was in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union had collapsed, that groups like the PIRA and the PLO found themselves in positions where they even had to pretend to engage in “peace processes”.
“BLOODY SUNDAY” 1972
By late 1971, the IRA insurgency was gathering steam and the introduction of internment became another grievance to be used against the British. Rallies were now organised as “anti-internment” events. Several dozen British soldiers had been killed by IRA snipers and bombers by this time, and a large IRA bomb was detonated on Callender Street in Belfast on 3 January 1972, wounding sixty people. With order slipping, especially in Londonderry, where the IRA had set up checkpoints around “no-go areas”, the Northern Irish Prime Minister Brian Faulkner banned all further parades and marches on 18 January. This was immediately met with calls for defiance: a large protest march against internment was held at Magilligan strand in County Londonderry on 22 January and another was scheduled for 30 January. In the meantime, on 27 January, the IRA murdered two policemen from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), Peter Gilgun and David Montgomery, on the Creggan Road in Londonderry.
The atmosphere was thus very fraught in Londonderry when the 10,000 or so people gathered at Bishop’s Field on the Creggan housing estate just before 15:00 on 30 January. The leaders of the march had abandoned their intention to march to Guildhall Square, the seat of the local council, because of the government’s pressure—the worry was that at Guildhall the Republicans would devolve into sectarian rioting with Loyalist groups—though it seems not everyone in the march was informed about this. Security forces set up barricades to reroute the last phase of the march, and instead these barricades became the site of rioting as mostly young man began throwing stones and bricks; teargas was fired, and the cannisters thrown back at troops, after which water cannons began to be used.
1 PARA had been brought in from Belfast that morning and stationed near the Presbyterian church on Saint James’ Street, with orders to go over the barricades and arrest rioters if trouble started. The hope was to separate and detain the rioters while most of the marchers continued on peacefully to Free Derry Corner, the new endpoint for the march, where there were to be speeches.
Around 15:55, near William Street, soldiers from 1 PARA shot Damien Donaghy, 15, in the thigh, believing he was about to throw a nail bomb, and accidentally shot John Johnston, 59, a bystander uninvolved with the march, who died months later. Near-simultaneously—it remains unclear whether it was just before or just after—a bullet from a hidden IRA gunman was fired towards the soldiers and shattered a drainpipe on the church. As “Soldier O” later said, “This shot had a significant effect on the operation. … As we knew there were gunmen operating in the area, most of the men carried SLRs [self-loading rifles].” Without the shot, he said, most of the men would have carried batons and rubber bullet guns, with only a couple of Paratroopers carrying SLRs to protect the squad.
The order for the Paras to go over the barrier was given at 16:07. They were told to arrest the rioters on William Street and specifically: “Not to conduct running battle down Rossville Street” [emphasis original]. Most of the rioters fled as the two armoured vehicles crossed the barricade driving down Rossville Street; the first vehicle turned off part-way down the road to the Eden Place waste ground, while the second continued on to the carpark in front of the Rossville Flats, where some of the marchers had ended up. Some arrests were made by the soldiers at the Flats, who fired some rubber bullets.
A soldier from the second vehicle, “Lieutenant N”, found himself in an alleyway between Eden Place and Chamberlain Street confronted by a crowd. “Lieutenant N” would claim he fired two shots into the air to protect himself and the other soldiers. The Inquiry concluded it was “most likely … that he decided that this would be an effective way of frightening and moving on the people”, an unjustifiable reason to use live fire. Surrounded by the old city walls and the Flats, the soldiers were essentially at the bottom of a large echo chamber, and these shots led the Paratroopers “to believe that they had encountered paramilitary activity”.
The fatal shoots that took place that day, which still have such an enormous resonance half-a-century later, took place over the ten minutes between about 16:10 and 16:20. (Other shots were fired that day until about 16:40.) The victims had been killed near the barricades at the side of the flats, behind the flats, and across the road at Glenfada Park.
The British had little choice but to issue a response quickly—if they did not say something, the only version would be from the IRA—but at the press conference an hour later Major General Robert Ford gave a version of events, which broadly speaking would be passed to Lord Chief Justice John Widgery during the first inquiry in 1972, that simply did not stand up to minor scrutiny. Ford said his men had walked into an ambush of IRA gunmen and nail bomb and acid throwers. There was a single person among the dead and wounded, Gerald Donaghey, 17, killed between Glenfada Park and Abbey Park, who had been a member of an IRA organisation, Fianna, its youth wing, and was discovered to have nail bombs in his pockets. But Donaghey had not been in the act of throwing a nail bomb when he was shot. Indeed, Donaghey had not even been the target of the shot from “Private G” that killed him: the bullet went through (and killed) Gerard McKinney, 35, who left behind eight children. If this had been a firefight, why—apart from two soldiers injured by acid thrown down on them from the flats—were there no injuries? Why were so many of the victims shot while facing away from soldiers? And why was the kill-to-wounding ratio 1:1, reflecting a very accurate firing pattern?
The Saville Inquiry answered:
We have concluded that the explanation for such firing by Support Company soldiers after they had gone into the Bogside was in most cases probably the mistaken belief among them that republican paramilitaries were responding in force to their arrival in the Bogside. This belief was initiated by the first shots fired by Lieutenant N and reinforced by the further shots that followed soon after. In this belief soldiers reacted by losing their self-control and firing themselves, forgetting or ignoring their instructions and training and failing to satisfy themselves that they had identified targets posing a threat of causing death or serious injury. … Our overall conclusion is that there was a serious and widespread loss of fire discipline among the soldiers of Support Company.
One of the soldiers who drove this breakdown in discipline was “Lance Corporal F”, who fired thirteen bullets and killed at least four people. Among the last of the victims that day was Patrick Doherty, 32, a member of NICRA and father of six, whom “F” “shot in the buttock and mortally wounded as he was attempting to crawl to safety” on the south side of the Rossville Flats. The bullet tore apart Doherty’s insides and exited his body through his chest. When Bernard McGuigan, 41, another father of six, tried to go to Doherty, while waving a white handkerchief, “F” got to one knee and shot McGuigan through the head. “F” was given an opportunity, with the reassurance of amnesty, to tell the truth about how and why he had killed British subjects on a British street, and perjured himself—again, as he had to the Widgery Tribunal. There are efforts underway to have “F” prosecuted for murder and there can be no complaint if this happens, despite the grotesque situation where the terms of the Belfast Agreement mean the IRA murderers Britain held have been released and all future prosecutions against these terrorists have been dropped.
THE IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY
The fact that there were armed members of the IRA in the Bogside and that they did fire at British soldiers on “Bloody Sunday” has been an extremely sensitive subject. Marian McMenamin, who saw a gunman on Rossville Street as the Paras drove through the barricades and she began to run away, told the Saville Inquiry: “I hate myself for saying this … I feel disloyal to the innocent men who died on ‘Bloody Sunday’.” A lot of the witnesses who testified on this point caveated with similar sentiments.
There were two further, related problems in getting evidence on this front.
First, the IRA made only a handful of witnesses available to Saville. The Provos, in particular, created difficulties, and only started allowing their people to testify after Martin McGuinness had spoken to the Inquiry in October 2002 and laid down a “line” they all strictly followed. McGuinness was a senior IRA official in 1972 and became the Officer Commanding (OC) of the Londonderry section either weeks before or after “Bloody Sunday”. McGuinness then rose to sit on the PIRA’s executive committee, the Army Council. By the time McGuinness was testifying to Saville, he had been the lead negotiator, nominally for Sinn Fein, on the Republican side of the 1998 Belfast Agreement and under its terms—despite Sinn Fein/IRA refusing to sign it—had become a minister in the Northern Irish government.
Second, it was not just personal guilt that restrained people from telling the Inquiry what they knew. The story of Bloody Sunday as an unprovoked rampage by British soldiers against Republican civilians was so central to the martyrology, recruitment strategy, and justification of the “armed campaign” for the IRA—it was noted in their “Green Book” training manual as key to what we would now call the information war—that any civilian who complicated this narrative was considered an enemy, and the IRA had a short way with enemies, real and imagined.
It is, then, remarkable just how many witnesses told the Saville Inquiry they had seen IRA gunmen present and shooting on the fateful day. Monica Barr saw a gun fired out the window from the ninth floor of the Rossville Flats and saw the British troops fire back at the window. William Harley recognised (though would not name) an IRA operative, who, he watched from his balcony fire “five or six shots” from a revolver around a wall on Rossville Street “before I saw any soldiers on foot and before I saw or heard any gunfire from the soldiers”—probably before they had arrived. Charles McGill saw a man with a rifle in Glenfada Park, and only provided this to the Inquiry by accident because he did not realise there was no ability to be selective about what was on and off the record with the lawyers. Bernard Gillespie had seen a “civilian” gunman with a rifle at Columbcille Court but had been “very angry” and did not want to “give any help to the British army in saying that anyone had provoked what they did”, so kept this to himself for decades.
More remarkable still, the man who fired the drainpipe shot at the church in the first seconds of the shooting—either right before or right after Damien Donaghy and John Johnston were shot—personally testified. “OIRA 1”, a member of the Official IRA Command Staff in Londonderry, had fired a rifle over the heads of the marchers at the Paratroopers, from the flats at Columbcille Court, not the Rossville Flats, as most of the soldiers on the day assumed. Inevitably, “OIRA 1” says this was retaliation for the British shots seconds earlier. Saville remarks at one point: “we place little reliance on his evidence, since in many respects … we consider that he has not told the truth to this Inquiry”. “OIRA 1” and his Command Staff colleague “OIRA 2” got into a confrontation on their way down the stairs at Columbcille with residents and had a “heated exchange of words” with “PIRA 1”.
It should be said that whether “OIRA 1” shot first during the crucial period on “Bloody Sunday”, the first shots in the Bogside that day had come from the OIRA. There is the gunman Harley saw, and there is the statement of Joe Carlin that he saw a shot before Donaghy and Johnston were killed: the Inquiry says simply that it is possible he is confused and referring to “OIRA 1’s” shot, but “it is at least equally possible that he did hear a shot from a gunman in the crowd at ground level”. Moreover:
[T]he evidence of paramilitary gunfire in Sector 1 is confusing. However, we have no doubt that OIRA 1 fired the shot that hit the drainpipe on the side of the Presbyterian church; and we equally have no doubt that there was other paramilitary gunfire in this sector before soldiers of 1 PARA went into the Bogside. The evidence suggests to us that this was probably firing by members of the Official IRA.
After “OIRA 1” had fired his shot, he took his rifle to a car parked in Glenfada Park, where there were half-a-dozen other OIRA members and the boot was stacked with “weapons … that were accessible to members of the Official IRA”. The other OIRA members confirm that there were several more weapons caches close by. “[O]n Bloody Sunday there were 12–15 [OIRA] men on patrol, 8–10 of them in cars containing arms”, Saville notes, despite assurances to community leaders that members of both factions of the IRA would not go on the march and that all weapons would be cleared out of the area. (“OIRA 1” denied such an assurance had been given, though the Inquiry, again, assessed him as unreliable.)
“OIRA 4”, another Command Staff member, went on the march, took a loaded pistol with him, and ended up in the Rossville Flats carpark, where—by his own account—he fired three times at British soldiers in the brief interval after John Duddy, 17, and Michael Bridge, 75, had been killed. Bridge was shouting at the Paratroopers for shooting Duddy when they killed him. “OIRA 4” is sometimes known as “Father Daly’s gunman” because he was seen by Father Edward Daley, who screamed at “OIRA 4” to get out of the situation as the priest administered last rites to Duddy.
“OIRA 4” testified to his luck in not being killed: “I was shooting in a westerly direction towards the Saracen [armoured vehicle] in front of me, and the Paras near to the Saracen. … Someone told me later that at the end of the wall, around the corner where I couldn’t see, were a couple of paras and I know now that I was very lucky not to be seen and to have got out of the whole situation alive.”
Shortly after the fatalities had been inflicted, an OIRA operative, Michael Doherty or “Red Mickey” (named for his hair, not his politics) fired three shots at British troops in Barrack Street, hitting one soldier, who luckily for him had a flak jacket on, and Doherty was wounded in return fire. The rough timing of this was 16:40, which was as the Paras were preparing to depart, perhaps explaining why they did not follow-up to ensure he was dead. Doherty was treated at a safehouse by Dr. Domhnall MacDermott, rather than a hospital, so was not counted among the casualties of the day. In this same period, an OIRA group arrived in a car and Reg Tester, the OIRA’s Quartermaster, fired a rifle at the Paratroopers in the Rossville Flats carpark.
The Inquiry sums up on the OIRA, “We have no doubt that there was significant Official IRA activity in the five sectors during Bloody Sunday”, and agrees with the assessment of one witness that this more Marxist of the two factions was particularly “gangsterish” and reckless, viewing with “scepticism” their claims to have kept tight control over who had access to weapons that day and what they were allowed to do with them.
The Provisional IRA clearly had a large presence in the Bogside that day, potentially larger than the Officials’, although is difficult to properly assess because the Provos played hardball with the Inquiry to ensure they testified last, when they would not have to reveal anything new, and their message discipline over what they did say was very tight. Still, there are indications. The PIRA had men stationed in strategic positions throughout the route of the march and were certainly involved in the rioting when it began at the barricades. Even the man who drove the lorry at the head of the marchers, Thomas McGlinchey, was a member of the PIRA.
“PIRA 17” admits that the PIRA had “two M1 carbines, two Thompson sub-machine guns, 11 Lee-Enfield .303s, and six handguns. Of these, eight weapons were issued on Bloody Sunday”. The Inquiry generally accepts that PIRA had “more volunteers than weapons”, though the actual ratio is unclear, and “PIRA 24” concedes that there were weapons stocks the rank-and-file did not know about. The Provos would not, even thirty years later, say how many or where their weapons dumps were in Londonderry in January 1972, and there was disagreement about who had access to what. The PIRA effort was to say they kept strict control of their weapons. Sean Keenan, the PIRA Explosives Officer in Londonderry, says the Provos at the time only had a small amount of gelignite—no more than fifteen pounds; McGuinness says maybe thirty—and that no nail bombs or other explosives were prepared that day. The Inquiry concluded that this was untrue: “we do not accept the evidence that suggested that the Provisional IRA had no nail bombs available for use on Bloody Sunday”. There were other nail bombs at Glenfada Park and it is likely the PIRA had intended them to be used in the riot they knew would follow the march. No nail bombs ended up being thrown because of the course of events.
The Inquiry found that it was “likely that Martin McGuinness was armed with a Thompson sub-machine gun on Bloody Sunday and we cannot eliminate the possibility that he fired this weapon after the soldiers had come into the Bogside.” A key figure in the evidence, who became something of a story of his own, is INFLICTION, a British agent to whom McGuinness confided that he had indeed fired the machine gun from the Rossville Flats and “precipitated the ‘Bloody Sunday’ episode”. INFLICTION said McGuinness had “talked to me a few times about it” and felt guilty. McGuinness and the Provos, of course, dismissed INFLICTION as a British stooge if not invention. The Inquiry found the agent credible. (The evidence over the identity of INFLICTION is fascinating and has some threads that point to a person McGuinness knew very well.) Nonetheless, the Inquiry concludes McGuinness was “mistaken in this belief”: his shot could not have been the precipitating factor in the Bogside disaster.
During the ten minutes when fatalities were being inflicted, alongside McGuinness’ probable shot, there was at least one other shot that “a Provisional IRA member fired at soldiers on the City Walls”. And there is no dispute about the Provos firing on British soldiers after the killings: McGuiness—describing these as “symbolic” shots—is quite open about giving the order for them to be carried out, though, as ever, it seems he partly lied even about this. The Inquiry finds that there were probably two rounds of “symbolic” firing by the Provisionals on British positions.
The evidence of the Inquiry, then, is that there was a considerable presence of armed IRA terrorists in the Bogside area that day:
We have no doubt that on Bloody Sunday there were in the city people armed with guns and in possession of, or with ready access to, bombs. Thus, the soldiers’ claims that they came under or were about to come under attack from armed people posing a risk of causing death or serious injury cannot be rejected out of hand on the basis that there were no gunmen and no nail bombs, and therefore no possibility that the soldiers could have come under attack from gunmen or bombers.
The OIRA are known to have fired at least eight shots at British soldiers on “Bloody Sunday”, four of them during the crucial period when civilian fatalities were being inflicted. The PIRA fired at least two shots during the crucial period and an unknown number during the “symbolic” shots afterwards. As the Inquiry documents, this means “soldiers did not shoot people who were posing a threat of causing death or serious injury, but did shoot people who were not posing any such threat”. The Inquiry notes: “It is a well-known phenomenon that, particularly when under stress or when events are moving fast, people often erroneously come to believe that they are or might be hearing or seeing what they were expecting to hear or see.” Ultimately, nobody except the soldiers involved can say why this happened—and they did not.
IMPLICATIONS
“Bloody Sunday” was not the cause of “The Troubles”, nor was it the reason for the IRA’s existence or tactics. The event was, however, of significant use to the IRA as retrospective legitimation, domestically and abroad, for its use of indiscriminate violence and its future recruitment prospects. There was nothing automatic about this; people still had to make a decision, and some who had more excuses than most to give into the most ruinous temptations refused.
After the August 1969 riot in Londonderry, which in many ways created favourable conditions for the IRA, there were some dark mutterings about the organisation itself and its failure to protect Catholics. Some had started joking that IRA stood for “I Ran Away”. The political landscape after January 1972 dramatically changed, and the IRA was quick to see it. William Breslin, one of the founders of the socialist Derry Labour Party in 1965, was at the home of journalist Nell McCafferty hours after events listening to the radio reports when they were visited by an Official IRA operative, who bluntly said, when informed about the casualties: “It may be the best thing that has ever happened. … [The British will] be condemned the world over.”
Breslin’s interlocuter was clearly correct, but it is interesting to reflect how close he came to perhaps not being. So much of history turns on luck. In the case of “Bloody Sunday”, had “OIRA 4” lingered moments longer and been discovered and killed by one of the Paratroopers, or had “Red” Mickey Doherty died at the scene from his wounds, the collective memory of that day would likely be different: there would have been an armed IRA terrorist among the dead. It would hardly erase the civilian killings, but it would have made undeniable something that the IRA spent decades denying—that they had armed operatives in the Bogside that day firing on the Paras—and complicated the story in ways that would probably have made it less easy and effective as a recruitment tool for the IRA in the years afterwards.
The mystery will remain why 1 PARA acted as it did, but what they did is now clear: though there were legitimate targets in their surroundings, they only (with one exception) shot civilians who posed no danger to them. At least one of the Paratroopers, “Soldier F”, seems to have been guilty of more than just a loss of discipline, and his continued lies about his actions only compound his culpability. There is a lot of resistance to prosecutions of soldiers for actions taken decades ago; this is a perfectly sound, patriotic position, and it is a bitter pill indeed that the IRA’s operatives—men for whom mass murder was the feature, not the bug—will never face any reckoning because of the odious “Good Friday” Agreement. It is on patriotic grounds, however, that “Soldier F” is most easily condemned: not just for shaming Britain on the day and lying to his country ever-afterwards; he played directly into the hands of the IRA, making the political outcome most in the interests of the United Kingdom more difficult and making the environment for his fellow soldiers in Northern Ireland more dangerous by helping swell the ranks of the enemy.
Derry Kelleher, a former Vice President of the IRA’s political front, Sinn Fein, said after the events of “Bloody Sunday”:
[T]he ‘Provos’’ strategy was to use the march to provoke the British Military Forces into firing their weapons and thereby create the appearance that the violence and mayhem which would follow had been caused by the British Military Forces acting in a seemingly unprovoked way
The Inquiry rejects this conclusion, not least because the “march was more or less over by the time the first shooting occurred”. But this is where things get murky. The Inquiry is adamant that it “very important” to distinguish between the march and the riot, and is satisfied that “there were no plans to use the march itself in order to mount an attack on the security forces”, partly because they accept that the assurances given along these lines by the PIRA to Father Daley and others were “in good faith”. Questions about that to one side, the Inquiry itself notes: “this left entirely open what might happen after the march was over … when rioting broke out”. As is obvious, the march being “more or less over” means it was not, in fact, finished when the rioting began and “OIRA 1” fired his shot at British soldiers. The contention of “OIRA 1” that his was a retaliatory shot is also open to serious question. Though there was some effort to deny this, three PIRA officials concede that “riots were regular occurrences and were used to provide cover for civilian snipers”.
Whatever the exact details, what it underlines is that “Soldier F” and his colleagues could not have acted in a way more helpful to the IRA. In this sense, “Bloody Sunday” is different to the more contingent blundering on all sides that led to the Sharpeville tragedy in South Africa in 1960 and episodes that were directly instigated by terrorists like the Jaleh Square fiasco in Iran in 1978 and what HAMAS did at the Israeli border fence in 2018—albeit they all had the same effect. Terrorism is a tactic adopted by weaker parties in a conflict they are unlikely to win militarily against stronger state enemies. There are cases of total military victory over terrorists—the most notable recent case is Sri Lanka overcoming the “Tamil Tigers”—but in general wars with terrorist-revolutionaries are dominated by the political aspect: the military picture ebbs and flows, but political victories last. What terrorists can do is change the balance of power through propaganda, not in the narrow sense of messaging but “propaganda of the deed”: creating events, specifically state overreaction, which can mobilise recruits from their “own” community—those people they claim to represent—and gain international sympathy that in turn brings in recruits and money from abroad, as well as fosters political pressure on the government they are challenging to accept their demands. State agents who play into this, whether through incompetence or malice, are working for the enemy.