The Bitter Road from Bloody Sunday

THE attention of all Ireland was focused last weekend on the predominantly Catholic town of Newry (pop. 15,000) in Ulster. As Sunday approached, thousands of demonstrators --and newsmen as well--poured into the town in expectation of another bloody confrontation between British troops and Ulster Catholics participating in an illegal protest march. Only 40 miles south of Belfast and a 15-minute drive from Dundalk, a major south-of-the-border refuge for Irish Republican Army gunmen and arms smugglers, Newry is well known to be an I.R.A. town. The British expected the gunmen--some even disguised in stolen army uniforms--to be there in force for the march.

Anticipating trouble, the army reinforced its troops in the province with the 550-man 2nd Battalion of The Light Infantry and threw up roadblocks in an intensive search for arms and terrorists. Civil rights leaders called the presence of the troops a provocation --a word that the British and Ulster Protestants thought might be better applied to the scheduled demonstration. Appeals to call off the march came from the Prime Ministers of Britain and Ulster and the Roman Catholic Primate of All Ireland, William Cardinal Conway, but all went unheeded. The fuse was lit, and the fire was ready.

The previous Sunday--Jan. 30, 1972--had already been inscribed in the terrible dark memories of the Irish people as "Bloody Sunday." On that bright, wintry afternoon, a march in the Catholic ghetto of Londonderry called the Bogside suddenly turned into a brief but violent battle between the marchers and British troops. When the shooting stopped, 13 people lay dead in one of the bloodiest disasters since the "troubles" between Ulster's Protestant majority and Catholic minority began almost four years ago. The incident seemed to end almost all hope of a peaceful settlement in Northern Ireland. Not since the executions that followed Dublin's 1916 Easter Rising have Catholic Irishmen, North and South, been so inflamed against Britain and so determined to see Ireland united in one republic at last.

Direct Defiance. The Bogside demonstration, which was organized by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, was a Catholic protest against the internment of I.R.A. suspects. It was also a defiant challenge to Prime Minister Brian Faulkner's twelve-month extension of a ban on parades in Ulster by Catholics and Protestants alike. Somewhere between 3,000 and 15,000 Catholics had gathered in Londonderry, where British troops in 1969 were first called in to protect Catholics from rioting Protestants. Last week, as the demonstrators moved down William Street toward the Bogside, they sang, among other songs, We Shall Overcome, the anthem of U.S. civil rights marches during the '60s. In burned-out buildings and on nearby rooftops along the route, British soldiers watched and waited.

Precisely how the shooting started is not clear, and the matter is now subject to a judicial inquiry undertaken by Britain's Lord Chief Justice, Sir John Widgery. What is certain is that trouble began as the march was ending, and just as the first speaker, Member of Parliament Bernadette Devlin, began to address the crowd. At the foot of William Street, where British troops had blocked the entrance to Londonderry's main business district with armored cars and barbed-wire barricades, there was the clatter of stones, bottles and bits of steel as the troops were attacked by what the army described as "200 or 300 young hooligans." The army responded, first with gas grenades and rubber bullets--ugly black projectiles half as thick as beer cans--then with water cannons that sprayed the crowd with purple dye.

Soon Saracen armored cars roared into the Bogside, and out jumped paratroopers wearing camouflage suits and red berets. Some of the paras, swinging their clubs, charged at the retreating crowd and arrested 43 men and boys. Meanwhile, other soldiers took up positions beside buildings and began firing. As bullets whistled down the long stretch of Rossville Street toward the Free Derry corner where a lorry used as the speaker's platform stood, people ran, dived and crawled for cover. The speakers and march organizers flattened themselves against the top of the lorry to keep from being hit. Around them the air was filled with the cries of the wounded and dying.

The shooting lasted 18 minutes, and it ended with dreadful statistics; 13 Catholics had died and 17 others had been wounded. Among the victims, all between the ages of 16 and 41, was a father of seven children.

Lord Widgery's inquest will try to establish who fired first, whether the paras were justified in their actions, and whether, as the Catholics firmly believe, the troops were acting under specific orders from Stormont, seat of the hated Ulster government. A British army spokesman insisted that the paratroopers had been attacked first with nail bombs and "a total of 200 rounds of ammunition fired indiscriminately in the general direction of the soldiers." He also said that the troops had fired only at "identified targets" --meaning gunmen and terrorists of the outlawed I.R.A. The British claimed that four of the dead men were on their "wanted" list, but they were not named, nor were their alleged weapons produced.

The army's immediate report was later corroborated by Lord Balniel, Minister of State for Defense, in an address to Britain's House of Commons. According to his account, as the soldiers were arresting rioters, "they came under fire from gunmen, nail bombers and petrol bombers. Between 4:17 and 4:35 p.m., a number of these men were engaged. Some gunmen and bombers were certainly hit and some almost certainly killed. The soldiers fired in self-defense, or in defense of their comrades who were threatened. I reject entirely the suggestion that they fired indiscriminately into a peaceful and innocent crowd."

Other witnesses insisted that that was precisely what the soldiers had done. They denied that any shots had been fired at the troops before the killing began. The militant Provisional wing of the I.R.A., which vowed revenge, inferentially admitted that it had been involved in the later stages of battle. But the I.R.A.'s Derry command issued a statement: "At no time did any of our units open fire on the British army prior to the army's opening fire." The statement added that the Derry command had specifically "ordered all weapons out of the total march area" that Sunday morning in order to avoid civilian casualties.

The First Shot. Another witness was Bernadette Devlin, the only Westminster M.P. present at Bloody Sunday. In her account of the incident to Commons, she insisted that "the first shot fired came from the British army wounding a civilian below the knee." Then she spoke of the panicked people, who were fleeing and falling. "It was a sight I never want to see again: thousands and thousands of people lying flat on their faces on the ground. I was lying on my mouth and nose." While prone, she tried "to tell the people to keep their heads down and on no account to rise any higher than their knees, but to crawl--crawl on the streets of their own city, on their hands and knees--out of the line of fire. That is what they did."

Bernadette's account of Bloody Sunday was delivered in low, almost theatrically whispered tones. The day before, though, she was the noisy protagonist of a highly unusual parliamentary drama. To a packed and impassioned Commons, Home Secretary Reginald Maudling, who is responsible for Ulster affairs, announced that the government was setting up an inquiry into the tragic events in Londonderry. However, Maudling echoed the army's argument that the troops "returned the fire directed at them with aimed shots and inflicted a number of casualties on those who were attacking them with firearms and with bombs." At this point Devlin leaped to her feet on a point of order. When her objection was curtly dismissed by the Speaker, she shrieked, "Is it in order for the Minister to lie to the House?" As pandemonium broke loose, Laborite Hugh Delargy bellowed that the paratroopers would go down in history "with the same odium" as the hated Black and Tans of the 1920s.

Glasses Askew. Maudling tried to continue, but Bernadette was up again, yelling, "Nobody shot at the paratroopers, but somebody will shortly." She also called Maudling "that murdering hypocrite." Suddenly, as the Speaker of the House struggled to maintain order, Bernadette stalked to the center of the chamber and threw herself bodily on the Home Secretary. Arms and legs flailing, she punched, scratched and spit at Maudling, knocking his glasses askew and tearing at his hair. For a few seconds, the stunned House sat and watched. Then Tory M.P.s pulled Bernadette away from the embattled Home Secretary. As she was escorted from the chamber, a group of women in the visitors' gallery shouted "Murder! Murder!" In less than five minutes, the civil-righteous little spitfire returned. Defending her attack on Maudling,* she shouted, "I did not shoot him in the back, which is what they did to our people!"

The debate in Commons produced little more than bitterness and disagreement. It also indicated that Bloody Sunday had radicalized many of the Ulster moderates--notably members of the nonviolent Social and Democratic Labor Party--who until then had still hoped for a rational political solution. A case in point is Gerald Fitt, 45, a Catholic who represents both a district in the Ulster Parliament and the constituency of Belfast West in Britain's Commons. "Until last Sunday," Fitt told the Commons, "I regarded myself as a man of moderation. I have consistently condemned violence." But because of Bloody Sunday, he said, "whether we like it or not, the British army is no longer acceptable in Belfast, Derry or anywhere else in Northern Ireland. It is seen as acting in support of a discredited and corrupt Unionist government." (The Unionist Party favors continued ties with Britain.) And he added, "I tell the Home Secretary that the marches will continue. They will continue next weekend in Newry, and then the following week and the week after that, until the internment problem is tackled by the Westminster government, because it is the only government that can tackle it."

Futile Exercise. Bloody Sunday made it clear to all that the 15,000-man British army force, which is technically under Stormont's control but is independent in practice, has not yet reduced violence in Ulster to "an acceptable level," as Maudling recently described its aim. The Londonderry killings, moreover, succeeded only in polarizing still further Ulster's divided Catholic and Protestant communities --and in strengthening the hands of extremists on both sides. The recently split Unionist ranks now have closed behind Faulkner and his no-nonsense rejection of any form of Irish unification. From Stormont came cold statements blaming the marchers for "a meaningless and futile terrorist exercise." The typical Protestant worker's reaction was expressed by one laborer in a Belfast pub last week when he said, "I wish it had been 1,300 of the bastards."

On the Catholic side, the killings immensely increased the influence of the I.R.A. terrorists, who now have more applicants than they can possibly train. Internment had confirmed the Catholics' worst fears about the Protestant-dominated Stormont government: that its ultimate answer to Catholic political and civil rights demands would be naked sectarian repression. No Unionist Prime Minister, they feel, can ever survive while ignoring the extremist Orangemen's call to "make the Croppies [Catholics] lie down." For Catholics, the Derry shootings have now added weight to the I.R.A.'s claim that the real enemy is the British government at Westminster. Says Oliver Napier, vice chairman of the nonsectarian Alliance Party: "Sooner or later, [the I.R.A.] has been saying, British troops would put the boot in good and hard. People have been half expecting this. Sunday in Derry has fitted the piece of the jigsaw in. My personal view is that the risk of civil war here has never been greater."

An all-Irish civil war is also feared by Eire's Prime Minister John Lynch, who decried the Derry killings as an "unprovoked attack on unarmed civilians." Just last month Lynch started a crackdown on I.R.A. gunmen who have been making raids across the border from hideouts in the Irish Republic. Two weeks ago, Eire police arrested seven gunmen after a shootout between the Provos and a British army patrol near the Ulster border at Dungooley. Faced with rising popular support for the I.R.A. in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, Lynch will find it very difficult to continue his antiterrorist campaign. Instead, he recalled his ambassador to Britain for consultations, and dispatched Irish Foreign Minister Patrick J. Hillery to U.N. headquarters in New York, in hopes of pressuring the British there to change their policy in Ulster. "We do not intend to go to war," Lynch warned at week's end, "but the activities of British soldiers could lead to a war situation."

"Hitler Is Alive." Underscoring Lynch's fears was an outbreak of anti-British violence in Eire last week. As the country observed a day of mourning on Wednesday for the 13 Derry dead, a mob of Dubliners estimated at as many as 30,000 stormed and burned the British embassy in Merrion Square. Police stood by helplessly as petrol bombs rained down on the 18th century Georgian building, which had been vacated the previous day for fear of attacks. The crowd shouted "Burn, baby, burn!" when the roof caved in, and a placard read ADOLF HITLER IS ALIVE AND LIVING IN 10 DOWNING STREET. Lynch apologized for the in incident, which he said had been carried out by "a small minority" of subversives. He offered to reimburse the British government for the $255,000 in damages, but he could not promise to control the anti-British sentiment.

That feeling was running strong in the Republic all week long. A bomb damaged Dublin's monument to the Duke of Wellington. Airport workers refused to service British airplanes, forcing flight cancellations. Toward the end of the week a mob of more than 1,000 badly damaged the British Rail ways office in Cork with fire bombs.

Black Flags. To demonstrate Ireland's sense of solidarity with the Catholics in the North, five members of Lynch's Cabinet, as well as mayors of nine Eire cities, attended the mass funeral in Londonderry for the 13 victims of Bloody Sunday. Cardinal Conway presided over the hour-long service at St. Mary's Church. Outside, 10,000 mourners prayed in a bleak, icy rain. As the throng murmured in unison, "May the angels lead you into paradise, martyrs await your coming," a woman groaned, "No, no, no." "Jimmy, my lover boy," sobbed another woman, upon seeing one of the 13 identical hardwood coffins." He was only 17," moaned a third.

In town, all shops were closed, and from almost every window in the Bogside and Creggan ghettos black flags were displayed. In Stewartstown, some 50 miles away, a Catholic pub that stayed open was bombed and one man was killed -- thereby raising to 234 the number of dead in Ulster since the summer of 1969. Mourners also marked the spots where the victims had fallen and died with flags, crude crosses and rosaries.

Londonderry remained quiet that night; it was said that the I.R.A. was ob serving a truce until the obsequies were finished. But the violence did not stop completely. In Belfast, a sniper killed a British sentry. A 100-lb. gelignite bomb exploded in a downtown department store, wounding nine civilians and two policemen. Two soldiers were slightly injured by sniper fire in the Catholic Andersonstown district. After the funeral it was business as usual for the terrorists and their sympathizers. In the Lower Falls Road district of Belfast, Catholics rioted for more than four hours and pelted army patrols.

During the week there were more than 200 such incidents. Then came last Sunday and Newry. And next Sunday? One of the bleakest realities of Ulster now is that almost every week end can produce yet another Bloody Sunday -- as long as the marches go on and the troops are there and the gun men are seeking revenge.

* The next day Hansard, the official record of parliamentary debates, reported the incident in a single word: "Interruption."

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