A decision on Bloody Sunday prosecutions is due to be issued on Thursday, and the day will mark a key moment in a 47-year-old campaign for justice.
A Public Prosecutions Service team has been assessing evidence against 17 Parachute Regiment soldiers who were involved in the Bloody Sunday massacre, in which fourteen civilians were killed by British Paratroopers, and a further 22 were injured.
Relatives of Bloody Sunday victims have said the passage of time cannot be used as an excuse to deny justice for their loved ones.
Kate Nash’s brother William was shot dead on January 30, 1972 and her father Alex was seriously wounded attempting to come to his son’s aid. Speaking to Derry Now, she rejected a campaign by Tories and unionists to ensure the perpetrators are protected from the courts
“There’s absolutely no reason why these people should not be prosecuted,” she said.
“I mean, there have been various people that we’ve heard like Boris Johnson that these soldiers should not be prosecuted because of their age.
“They are asking ‘is this how we treat our national heroes?’ Well, I can tell you should treat national heroes very well, but these guys are not heroes. They committed the atrocity on Bloody Sunday.
“My only complaint about the whole thing is how long it took. It should never have taken all this time. We are talking about almost half-a-century. It seems to have gone in the blink of an eye.
“Also, they should be joined in the dock by the officers who were they. People talk about the soldiers having been ordered in as some sort of excuse not to prosecute them, but as ordinary soldiers they are still responsible for their actions. However, the fact of the matter is that their officers left these soldiers by themselves. They were described as ‘bad apples’. But, of course we know that that’s the establishment looking after itself. Is that fair?
“I think the PPS should be questioned on theft that squaddies are being charged but their officers are not with them.
“But, that’s not the conclusions that Saville came to. He concluded that the atrocity was carried out by nine ‘bad apples’. Well, I don’t agree with that because they’ve spent a long, long time in their cover up.
“We’ve had the Widgery whitewash and then Saville and the whole truth still didn’t come out there either. Look at the Ballymurphy case, and thankfully after all these years they have an inquest. But during Saville our legal teams did refer to Ballymurphy which happened only a few months before Bloody Sunday, but Lord Saville wouldn’t touch that.
“What he did touch on however was looking into the background relatives of some of the witnesses and whether or not they were republicans. So, why show interest in that? To me that seemed like an information gathering operation instead of concentrating on the Ballymurphy case which had more relevance.”
The justice campaigner also said that even with regard to the arrests of soldiers during the PSNI investigation, the system was skewed in favour of the former soldiers.
In 2015, the soldier referred to be the cipher Lance Corporal J was arrested. It is believed he was the man responsible for wounding Kate’s father Alex.
Kate continued: “I am told that when Soldier J was arrested he was terribly shocked. What we learned from that was that his family were made aware that he was involved in Bloody Sunday and he was ashamed. So, if you like, he didn’t want that known to his family.
“My question is then, why would heroes be hiding their actions in the past?
“That perception has always been out there that all Catholics were republicans when they are not. We know that there were deals done with the IRA and the British Government over the ‘On The Run Letters’ (OTR).
“Families then have had to answer this, and I’ve had to answer it myself sometimes, and I’ve had to say what have OTR letters got to do with innocent people being murdered?
“It has nothing to do with it. Perhaps that was done to ensure that soldiers wouldn’t be prosecuted because they have tried every dirty move in the book.
“This has created stories about hounding soldiers-we haven’t hounded soldiers. We have been accused of seeking vengeance for years. Never-we simply want the same thing for my brother that everybody else would expect in law.
“We want whoever killed him to be made responsible. But, there are officers thereto. There are more questions there and plenty more to be answered.
“They got medals. They were lauded for what they did on Bloody Sunday. An officer received an OBE. We don’t even know if he’s one of the soldiers that may be prosecuted.”
The former British Army officer Kate Nash referred to is Derek Wilford who received his award in the New Year’s honours list in January, 1973 almost exactly a year after Bloody Sunday.
She said: “I applied a few years ago to the Forfeiture Committee in England to have those medals returned. What kind of an insult is that to innocent victims who were murdered that someone got a medal for killing them? What was brave about that? What was heroic about that?”
There are many reasons you might think Karen Bradley should resign, but the Derry Girls may not be the first one that comes to mind.
You may already know this, but Derry Girls is a comedy television series set in the 1990s. It is in its second series, and it is not hard to see why it works. It is well written and manages to present a comedic view of an awful time in Derry’s terrible history, from the view of some innocent, and some not-so-innocent, schoolgirls.
It is black, gallows humour, but it is all in good fun, despite the number of silly jokes that would have been considered inappropriately sectarian in the past.
In the past. People have moved on. But not the Tories, not the NIO, and and definitely not Karen Bradley, who spent this week trying to indemnify the murders of Irish people by the British state.
The statement she made to MPs on Wednesday are of the kind made at private luncheons and dinners by those that were regularly sent over to Ireland to direct the killing. The words could as easily have come from General Tuzo or Kitson or Jackson, or from Ted Heath or Margaret Thatcher themselves. In the context of Britain’s Dirty War, and their propaganda war, she delivered the kind of guarantee that would have been intended to boost the mercenary killers as they set about the slaughter of innocents.
The people of Ireland, North or South, Protestant or Catholic, have every right to be in a blind, burning rage over her statement, because it applies to all of us equally, regardless of creed or political persuasion. They are colonial in nature. They put all Irish people on a lower level of humanity to the British.
The British government has always viewed this island as a colony, inhabited by the equivalent of Hutus and Tutsis, warring natives who can be set against each other for England’s own advantage.
Despite this, what we have seen for the past 25 years is people in the north of Ireland trying to make peace with each other. And what we see very clearly this week is that they have been doing this in the absence of any understanding or concern by the British government.
But we are still here, and we are still trying to move on. Just like the Derry girls, we can laugh at the crazy misconceptions which Catholics had for Protestants and vice versa, the half-baked ideas about each others’ taste in music or our imagined customs.
The truth of the situation, as republicans have always said, is that we are no different from each other than the people of Ballybofey are from those in Stranorlar, or the folk of Norwich are from those in Ipswich. Barely enough to inspire an energetic game of football.
And the fact that people can laugh about these imagined differences, now, is testimony to the efforts of those pacifists who believed that peace by itself could be the solution to the conflict here.
But into this just enterprise, we see once again a British government which appears hell-bent on conflict. Not just with such statements, which seek to justify the heinous massacres of their past, but also future killings; and not just with their callous disregard of the peace process; but now, more clearly than ever, their plan to reimpose their border, which has always been the primary source of conflict in Ireland, and retains the potential to reignite it.
It might be tempting to believe the Tories are just flailing towards disaster because of some ineptitude or misunderstanding or short-sightedness. Karen Bradley, in her own defence, has tried to present herself as some sort of political Bridget Jones, a female Boris Johnson whose incompetence is meant to be proof of her blue-blooded sincerity.
But there was nothing accidental about her statement. Her message, and the Brexit agenda which the Tories are implementing, are the direct result of a singular need to stay in power through the support of the DUP and the most xenophobic elements of their own party.
It is not right that the people of Ireland must pick up the pieces of a conflict imposed on us, only to have them kicked away by the short-termism of a bloodthirsty Tory regime which has zero mandate here.
Unless someone shouts stop, the victims of such a trajectory will be Catholics and Protestants alike, and perhaps another generation of British soldiers of the kind Bradley thought she was defending.
Set against the thousands of lives lost, regardless of how you calculate the victims or the combatants, it is something that should not be tolerated for a day by any of us, regardless of our politics.
And that is why Catholics and Protestants, Derry girls and Ballymena boys, should unite in making sure Karen Bradley and her kind do not get the chance to wreck our future once again.
Tories have abandoned pretense of impartiality on North
Bradley’s stupid blunder demonstrates lengths May will go to keep DUP support Northern Ireland secretary of state Karen Bradley: has already won herself a reputation as the stupidest and most inept secretary of state anyone can remember. Susan McKay. Irish Times.Dublin. Saturday, March 9, 2019
The British prime minister, Theresa May, puts on a special voice when she’s reassuring the DUP about “our precious, precious union”. We all know she only does it to hold on to their precious, precious votes. However, it is now clear she is dangerously willing to pay any price for the highly equivocal loyalty of that party.
She has already alienated the majority of Northern voters, those who voted to remain in the EU, over Brexit. Now she has shown that her government will trample on the independence of the legal system, jeopardize trials and inquests, and grievously insult the families of children, women and men bereaved at the hands of her security forces.
It was the DUP’s Emma Little-Pengelly who asked the question in parliament on Wednesday. With so much focus on the 10 per cent of people killed by the security forces during the Troubles, she demanded, what was the government going to do for the other 90 per cent, those she called the “innocent victims of terrorism”.
As it happens, Little-Pengelly’s father was convicted, in France, of involvement in a loyalist gun-running plot. Alongside the late Ian Paisley, Peter Robinson and Sammy Wilson, he donned the red beret of the Ulster Resistance Movement.
He denies he actually imported arms. The DUP distanced itself from the group after it came out that it had imported weapons. But when it gets exercised about terrorists, the DUP is referring, by and large, to the IRA. It is left to others to point out that mounting evidence of collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries skews all the figures.
The context of Little-Pengelly’s question is the impending announcement by the Public Prosecution Service about whether or not paratroopers will face prosecution over the role of the regiment on Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972 when 13 unarmed civilians were murdered. Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Karen Bradley thanked her for asking. Killings during the conflict by soldiers and police were “not crimes”, she said. These people were “acting under orders and under instruction and fulfilling their duties in a dignified and appropriate way”. Harrowing evidence While she was speaking, an inquest in Belfast was hearing from a man who said he had spent the last 48 years trying to forget what he had seen on the day he was shot as a nine-year-old child by a British soldier during what has become known as the Ballymurphy Massacre.
The Butler brothers were shot at as they tried to run away across a field. They saw soldiers flinging injured people and bodies into the back of a Saracen. One teenager was crying.
“One of the soldiers pulled out a gun and said F**k up, you c**t and shot him once or twice towards the chest. There was no sound from him after that,” Edward Butler said in evidence.
Relatives of Joan Connolly who had come out of her house to search for her daughters, sobbed as they heard harrowing evidence of her final moments after she was shot in the face. Those soldiers were from the Parachute Regiment. Had the regiment been disciplined in any way for its actions that day, its soldiers might not have felt free to go on a similar rampage in Derry six months later – on what will henceforth be known not as Bloody but as Dignified and Appropriate Sunday.
Bradley has already won herself a reputation as the stupidest and most inept secretary of state anyone can remember – she laughingly boasted that when she was given the role she had not known that nationalists did not vote for unionists, and vice versa.
Now she has blundered into undoing the tentative healing which began with former prime minister David Cameron stating in 2010 that the killings were “unjustified and unjustifiable”. She has also inadvertently lent her support to those who argue that it is various decorated gents including Gen Sir Mike Jackson who should be in the dock since they were the givers of orders and instructions. Outrageous comments More shocking even than her outrageous comments was the fact that while the SOS[Secretary of State] (oh the aptness of that acronym!) was speaking, her Tory colleagues on the benches behind her continued to chat among themselves, as oblivious to what Bradley was saying as they were to the television cameras.
At one level, it is just another demonstration of how little the parties at Westminster care about The North. For years now, MPs have been racing each other to the exit doors whenever it comes up. Bradley rushed through Northern Ireland’s budget last week to benches that were almost empty.
Report after report shows that The North is likely to be disproportionately badly impacted by Brexit, particularly if there is no deal. That hasn’t stopped the Conservatives, particularly the extreme Brexiteers who are favourites among the DUP, from flirting with that outcome.
But it is worse than that. When the British government signed up to the Belfast Agreement in 1998, it committed itself to “rigorous impartiality”. In her desperate bid to hold on to power at any cost, the prime minister has abandoned all pretence of this. As for the profundity of Bradley’s belated apology – we already have irrefutable evidence that this secretary of state is deeply, deeply shallow. Is it reassuring when a senior politician says, “I want to be very clear – I do not believe what I said. That is not my view”? It is not.
Far from being neutral peacekeepers, a new documentary exposes the involvement of British security members in civilian murders during the Troubles.
Bereaved family members sat in the front row. On screen, Alan Brecknell spoke of his father being sprayed with bullets. Margaret Campbell described watching her husband’s execution. Priests raised the alarm about a “murder triangle,” where attacks were mounting but investigations were superficial.
Desiring to confront the past, director Seán Murray travelled to South Africa to speak with John Weir, a former Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) Special Patrol Group officer and member of the gang. Murray came away with the impression not of a monster but of a man shaped by the conditions of a conflict. Haunting closeups of Weir’s face punctuate the feature-length documentary as he answers Murray’s questions.
In 1999, a sworn affidavit was made public in which Weir admitted his role in loyalist murders and identified the farm, owned by RUC Officer James Mitchell, as the base for planning the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings that killed 33 people. The bombings happened two days after the loyalist Ulster Workers Council strike to collapse the Sunningdale Agreement, which strove to establish a power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive and cross-border Council of Ireland.
Weir linked British special branch agent Robin Jackson, known as “the Jackal,” to the 1975 Miami Showband Massacre by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), an attack in County Down involving two gunmen who were active soldiers in the British Army and one former solider, which killed three members of a popular cabaret band. Weir says superior officers were aware of the gang’s operations. The farm was eventually raided in 1978; weapons found included two submachine guns. The same year, Weir was arrested for the murder of a Catholic man after fellow officer William McCaughy confessed to their crime.
British forces are often portrayed as neutral peacekeepers in the conflict. This week, Northern Ireland Secretary Karen Bradley claimed that killings by security forces during the Troubles “were not crimes,” and that the military were “acting under orders and under instruction and fulfilling their duty in a dignified and appropriate way”. But evidence shows that security force members were involved in loyalist murders and the bombings of civilians.
Alan Brecknell was just seven when his father was killed in a loyalist attack on Donnelly’s Bar in 1975. Unquiet Graves follows his search for answers about his father’s murder, supported by the Pat Finucane Centre, which together with another human rights group Justice For the Forgotten, met with Weir in Paris in 2001 and brought Brecknell closer to the truth. Weir told the groups he believed that intelligence officers had wanted the Troubles to spiral into a full civil war, forcing moderates to take sides so the British military could crush the nationalist movement.
Members of the security forces involved in loyalist attacks were named in the book Lethal Allies, written by Anne Cadwallader, a veteran journalist and caseworker for the Pat Finucance center. The book was a touchstone for Murray’s film. She analyses how British colonial rule attempted to divide in order to conquer; British officer Frank Kitson, who was stationed in Northern Ireland from 1970-72, developed a strategy using “gangs” to fight independence movements, and described the law as “little more than a propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public.”
This exploitation of sectarian violence is disturbingly present in Unquiet Graves. Weir repeats the claim that British military intelligence tried to manipulate loyalists into shooting up a Catholic primary school outside the small village of Belleeks. Was the aim to kill primary school children? Weir is adamant: “Children, teachers, yes, yes.”
I asked Murray if he faced criticism over the making of Unquiet Graves. “Of course you have people saying you shouldn’t be making these films, it’s only dragging up the past, but I don’t look at it that way,” Murray explains. “We need to listen to each other’s stories, we need to realise there were many truths and many untruths, we need to unpick that for the future.” For Murray, who was raised in a republican family in West Belfast, security forces were a paramilitary threat – the “enemy of the people”. He believes trust needs to be restored.
“If we don’t [restore] confidence in the police it’s going to lead to radicalising young people,” he added. “We don’t want that.”
The film ended with a live reading of Seamus Heaney’s poem The Strand at Lough Beg, delivered by the film’s narrator Stephen Rea, whose cousin was killed in an attack linked to the Glenanne Gang. The audience drew breath. As the lights came on and the room emptied out, three women stayed to finish drinks among the seats.
The youngest said that when she visited England people knew about IRA attacks but nothing about British collusion. Helen Murphy, a woman in her fifties taking drags from a vape, told me that her brother was in the Hillcrest bar when it was bombed on St Patrick’s Day in 1976, another attack linked to the Glenanne Gang. “He held two kids together,” she said, their bodies horribly injured in the blast. It haunted him still.
