Bloody Sunday Inquiry

Lord Bramall Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bramall]

My Lords, the inquiry, headed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, aptly summarised that the events of that January afternoon 38 years ago were indeed a tragedy. They were a tragedy, of course, for the 13 civilians, who in the course of a civil rights march lost their lives when they had done nothing that could have justified their shooting, and for the widowed and bereaved. But they were also a tragedy for the British Army, in that, albeit in one small area, some soldiers from one company and one battalion failed to come up to the very highest standards of discipline and restraint for which the British Army is rightly admired. As has been said, that increased nationalist hostility towards it, thus making its very difficult job even harder. Also, the events were a tragedy for the people of Northern Ireland as a whole.

An earlier, contemporary inquiry, conducted by Lord Widgery, tended to take the view that under the circumstances and in the noisy confusion prevailing at the time, in which security forces were clashing directly with demonstrators in a highly emotive area, some error of judgment by individuals as to which targets should be engaged when intent on protecting themselves and their comrades was almost inevitable. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, however, considered quite categorically that the failure of certain soldiers in that one company, properly and beyond all reasonable doubt, to identify the targets being engaged as posing a direct threat of death or serious injury to themselves or their comrades—that is, à la yellow card—was so serious as to constitute a totally unjustified and therefore unjustifiable use of force.

This assessment was fully accepted by the right honourable gentleman the Prime Minister on behalf of the Government, the British Army and the whole country. In a masterly Statement that he made in another place, he gave a fulsome, heartfelt apology to all those who had suffered and to the bereaved. To this, all who mind about the rule of law, just as much as the high reputation of the Army, would wish to subscribe. I believe that the Prime Minister’s Statement has also had a good reception in Londonderry.

The least that your Lordships’ House should do is to take note of the Bloody Sunday report. However, I believe that it is important that noble Lords should be mindful of what the inquiry did not say or imply. For instance, it had no truck with and specifically rejected any suggestion that there might have been a sinister predesigned plot actually to cause casualties among the rioters and any, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, described them, paramilitaries “pour encourager les autres”. The inquiry did not deny the right of the chain of command to order, if it thought it appropriate, arrests of troublemakers during the march, which, although organised as a civil rights one protesting against internment, had in fact been banned and involved rioting.

The inquiry did not consider that there had been any general breakdown of discipline and indeed made it clear that most soldiers throughout the area behaved with a high degree of responsibility and in accordance with the yellow card. I am glad to say that the battalion that I once had the honour to command, the 2nd Battalion, the Royal Green Jackets, as it was then, positioned at Barrier 14 to prevent the march from reaching the heart of the city, was particularly singled out for praise for the restraint and proportionality of the force that it used in dealing with intense rioting.

What did go seriously wrong, as both inquiries pointed out—and this of course is the nub of the whole business—was the spontaneous action that was taken when the vehicles and men of the Support Company of 1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, appeared in Rossville Street. The commanding officer of the battalion had in fact exceeded his orders in sending the Support Company into the march from the north to make arrests—as well as one ordered by his brigadier from the east through Barrier 14—and in allowing the Support Company to follow the march down the now revised route, virtually chasing both the marchers and the rioters back into the Bogside and making it difficult to separate one from the other, an action that he had been ordered by his brigadier to avoid. So it was that at that point, at 4.30 pm, the arrest operation, although six arrests had been made, took second place for that company if it was not forgotten altogether, while the soldiers, believing that they were under fire, turned their attention to engage their imagined assailants, firing, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, put it,

“with a serious and widespread loss of fire discipline and control”,

with the tragic consequences that we now know.

There had been shots from both sides in other areas, and these continued, but the first shots in this particular area were probably fired for rather obscure reasons by an officer with Support Company itself, a point made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville. This would in no way have prevented other members of the company from believing that that shot and the others that followed might be directed at them. In street fighting, as I can confirm from very personal experience, because of echoes, ricochets and the short time lag between the crack of the bullet and the thump of the gun firing, it is extremely hard to differentiate between fire that is going and that which is coming your way.

That would be particularly the case on the edge of the Bogside, where the expectation of hostile fire would have been so great. After all, in 1972 we were in the middle of an intense insurrection, which had every intention of toppling the structure of government, with no-go areas, massive destruction of property and numerous assassinations of security forces personnel and civilians to give expression to that policy. Certain areas of West Belfast and Londonderry, particularly the Bogside, were highly dangerous places, where the security forces could invariably expect resistance of one sort or another. It was all so different from what we can imagine today. This knowledge would be quite enough, on the occasion of this noisy and sometimes violent march, at least to induce a high level of apprehension even in hardened troops, particularly as that battalion was unfamiliar with the area.

Perhaps I may, as an old soldier with some experience of that sort of tension and stress, ask noble Lords for a moment to put themselves in the shoes of those young men of 1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, back in the entirely different environment of 1972. To help in that, I cannot do better than to quote the report’s own description of their predicament:

“We appreciate that soldiers on internal security duties, facing a situation in which they or their colleagues may at any moment come under lethal attack, have little time to decide whether they have identified a person posing a threat of causing death or serious injury; and may have to take that decision in a state of tension or fear. 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 … It is also possible that in the sort of circumstances outlined in the previous paragraph, a soldier might fire in fear or panic, without giving proper thought to whether his target was posing”,

a direct threat. Under such circumstances, the temptation must have been very great to see any figures who might be sheltering behind suspicious areas such as barricades, as some were, or on the balconies of the Bogside flats, from one of which acid was indeed thrown down, or throwing things that could be loosely imagined to be nail bombs—one of the casualties was found to have a nail bomb on his person—or crawling purposefully holding something that could conceivably be thought to be a rifle, as posing some sort of future threat and therefore a target to be engaged before worst fears could be realised. It might even, in their opinion, have justified some sort of prophylactic fire into potential ambush areas to deter hostile and perhaps lethal resistance, which is absolutely common practice in normal street fighting. In that part of the United Kingdom particularly, of course, it is not possible to condone such judgments when close adherence to the yellow card could have prevented them. However, in this stressful, untidy situation, it should be possible for open-minded people to appreciate why this lapse of fire discipline could have occurred.

There I hope we can leave the matter. When you consider that 651 service personnel have been killed and 6,307 wounded since the start of the Troubles, not to mention the grievous police and civilian losses—many inflicted in absolutely cold blood—and the leniency in terms of early release, pardons, amnesties and so on subsequently given to the perpetrators of these crimes, it would be a great abuse of even-handedness and justice to single out these unfortunate soldiers of this one company, who should not have been in that area in the first place. Whatever their shortcomings, they were trying to do their duty as they thought fit in support of the civil power and the interests of the law and order for which we should always be grateful. Specific action against them is bound to be difficult and time-consuming and would cause the opening up of old scores and prejudices. This would not benefit in any way the peace process, which our Armed Forces helped to bring about, and the hoped-for coming together of the various communities. If this inquiry by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, can at last bring this whole tragic incident—and the past—to a decent and emphatic conclusion, then the time and public money spent on it may at least be said to have been in the national interest.