He didn’t crack a smile
But it’s no laughing party
When you’ve been on the murder mile
Only takes one itchy trigger
One more widow, one less white nigger
Oliver’s army is here to stay
Oliver’s army are on their way
And I would rather be anywhere else
But here today
Elvis Costello 1979
As Britain and the European Union agonise and argue over the terms of the Brexit divorce and “the Irish backstop”, we recall the fiftieth anniversary of “the battle of the Bogside”.
Historical memory is like a sieve. Give it a good shake and only the big chunks are left, and as Patrick Cockburn and other British commentators note with anguish, for many on mainland Britain, mired in the Brexit morass, Ireland is not one of these. These commentators, who often possess Irish roots or connections and are veteran correspondents with decades of experience in the volatile Middle East, lament how many people in mainland Britain are ignorant of, or worse, indifferent to Northern Ireland and to the centuries-old conflict that burst into fierce flames half a century ago.
The conflict was never primarily about the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, but about the civil and economic rights of the Roman Catholic minority in the north in relation to the Protestant majority. Had the Ulster Protestants shared power and privilege equitably with the Catholics, things might have turned out much differently.
Though nationalism and religion had been irrevocably and often violently intertwined for hundreds of years, Britain and Ireland’s entry into the EU arguably provided a catalyst for peaceful political change which led in time to the Good Friday Peace Agreement of April 1998.
It might seem unthinkable that anyone should willfully reignite a conflict never that was never really extinguished but merely reduced to a simmer. And yet, recent events in Derry – failed bombings and the New IRA’s murder of Lyra McKee, a working-class Catholic journalist and LGBT activist (during a riot that was apparently staged for a TV crew,), and political paralysis in Westminster over Brexit, including the controversial “backstop” to prevent the re-imposition of a “hard border”, have sparked fears that the centuries only Irish Question was not dead but only sleeping.
The problem of Ireland had never gone away – or was it, rather, the problem of England?
In 1921, Winston Churchill asked Parliament: “How is it that (Ireland) sways our councils, shakes our parties, and infects us with her bitterness, convulses our passions, and deranges our action? How is it she has forced generation after generation to stop the whole traffic of the British Empire, in order to debate her domestic affairs? … Whence does this mysterious power of Ireland come?”
He forgot – or never realized – that the reason for all of this Irish “bitterness” and “passion” was his country’s brutal legacy of colonialism beginning several hundred years prior, stretching at least as far back as the mid-1500s conquest of Ireland by King Henry VIII and the 1606 plantation colonization) of Ulster by King James I (whence the ancient town of Derry got its ‘London’ prefix – history can be reckless with place names), and all the way through Oliver Cromwell’s pogroms, the the ‘98, An Gorta Mór, and Padraic Pearse’s doomed intifada at Eastertide in 1916 and the Crown’s execution of the rebel leaders.
Just like the recent flare-ups in Kashmir over India’s unilateral rescission of its autonomy, and citizens in Hong Kong resisting tighter controls from China, the messy legacy of Britain’s colonial past continues to play out around the world.
Fifty years ago last October, a civil rights march in the historic city of Derry, the second largest city on Northern Ireland, was brutally attacked by police in front of the television cameras. It was the crucial moment in the rise of peaceful opposition to the one-party unionist state. When this failed to achieve its ends, the door was opened to violence and the rise of the Provisional IRA. It sparked widespread disorder and rioting across Northern Ireland.
For many, this is the moment thirty years of violent conflict euphemistically known as The Troubles began.
By the end of the year, various ‘no-go’ areas had been established and walls built dividing major cities. Large population movement began that saw once mixed areas become exclusively one faith or another, polarizing not only people, but also opinions and attitudes. On both sides, paramilitary groups began to re-emerge, gaining in strength and status as widespread civil disorder quickly escalated into a bloody conflict that would last for nearly thirty years. With the police unable to cope with the scope and scale of the disturbances, the government decided to send in the British Army to restore order – the only ever peacetime deployment of British troops on British soil in modern times.
Increasing degrees of violence culminated in January 1969 when, in the aftermath of a march from Belfast to Derry, the Royal Ulster Constabulary rioted in the Bogside, assaulting Catholics in the streets and in their homes. Residents put up barricades and declared themselves citizens of Free Derry and outside the authority of the police.
In August, a much larger riot – the “Battle of the Bogside” – saw the police expelled from Free Derry by locals throwing petrol bombs, and nationalists and loyalists fighting hand-to-hand in the streets of the city they shared.
Just like flare-ups in Kashmir this week over autonomy and citizens in Hong Kong resisting tighter controls from China, the messy legacy of Britain’s colonial past continues to play out around the world.o, as nationalism and sectarianism dealt a coup de grace to Tito’s Yugoslavia; and in Baghdad as the ancient city sundered into confessional cantons.
Derry’s trials culminated in Bloody Sunday on January 30, 1972 when soldiers of the Parachute Regiment shot twenty eight unarmed civilians during a protest march against internment. Fourteen Catholics died: thirteen were killed outright, while the death of another man four months later was attributed to his injuries. Many were shot while fleeing from the soldiers, and some, while trying to help the wounded.
These were but a few of nearly four thousand people killed during the conflict, including some five hundred British soldiers, and some fifty thousand injured in ulster and on the British mainland in protests and firefights, executions and assassinations, beatings and bombings.
I republish below poignant and gripping feature by Australian journalist and author Mark Dapin about that day. It is a timely reminder that Northern Ireland is a knot that refuses to be untangled, and that for the families of the victims of the conflict, the wounds have never closed let alone healed.
Author’s Note
Whilst I do not have skin in the Ulster game, I do have a connection. My father was a protestant from the town of Castlederg, County Tyrone, just south of Derry and east of the Irish border. He married a catholic from Enniscorthy, County Wexford, and I was born and baptized catholic in Birmingham, England – neutral territory. I used to sing the Clancys’ The Orange and the Green back in my old folkie days, and loved The Old Orange Flute. Serendipitously, a good friend and tradesman of choice in in our small Australian country town is from Castlederg, from a large catholic family. He learnt his trade on the building sites of Belfast and experienced the latter years of The Troubles first hand, including the dangers of working on protestant-only worksites. Another acquaintance on our coast is a protestant from Belfast. He too has many stories of those dangerous time, including how he would visit an actively paramilitary friend who had been banged up in the notorious Maze prison (where catholic and protestant prisoners would be segregated into separate wings.
Derry 2019
Read also in In That Howling Infinite: Mo Ghile Mear – Irish myth and melody; and The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir
The Battle of the Bogside was 50 years ago – so why are the same mistakes being made right now?
Patrick Cockburn, The Independent 9th August 2019.
Fifty years ago, the Battle of the Bogside in Derry between Catholics and police, combined with the attacks on Catholic areas of Belfast by Protestants, led to two crucial developments that were to define the political landscape for decades: the arrival of the British army and the creation of the Provisional IRA.
An eruption in Northern Ireland was always likely after half a century of undiluted Protestant and unionist party hegemony over the Catholics. But its extreme militarisation and length was largely determined by what happened in August 1969.
An exact rerun of this violent past is improbable, but the next few months could be equally decisive in determining the political direction of Northern Ireland. The Brexit crisis is reopening all the old questions about the balance of power between Catholics and Protestants and relations with Britain and the Irish Republic that the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) of 1998 had provided answers with which everybody could live.
The occasion which led to the battle of the Bogside came on 12 August when the Apprentice Boys, a fraternity memorialising the successful Protestant defence of Derry against Catholic besiegers in the 17th century, held their annual march. Tensions were already high in Derry and Belfast because the unionist government and its overwhelmingly Protestant police force was trying to reassert its authority, battered and under threat since the first civil rights marches in 1968.
What followed was closer to an unarmed uprising than a riot as the people of the Bogside barricaded their streets and threw stones and petrol bombs to drive back attacks by hundreds of policemen using batons and CS gas. In 48 hours of fighting, a thousand rioters were treated for injuries and the police suffered unsustainable casualties, but they had failed to gain control of the Bogside.
Its defenders called for protests in other parts of the North to show solidarity with their struggle and to overstretch the depleted Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). In Belfast, Protestants stormed into the main Catholic enclave in the west of the city, burning houses and forcing Catholics to flee. The RUC stood by or actively aided the attacks. The local MP Paddy Devlin estimated that 650 families were burned out in a single night, many taking refuge in the Irish Republic
I was in Bombay Street, where all the houses were burned on the night of 14-15 August, earlier this year. The street was long ago rebuilt but still has a feeling of abnormality and menace because it is only a few feet from the “peace line” with its high wall and higher wire mesh to stop missiles being thrown over the top from the Protestant district next door.
The most striking feature of Bombay Street is the large memorial garden, though it is more like a religious shrine, to martyrs both military and civilian from the district who have been killed by political violence since 1916. A high proportion of these were members of the Provisional IRA who died in the fighting during the 30 years of warfare after Bombay Street was burned.
The memorial is a reminder of the connection between what many local people see as an anti-Catholic pogrom in 1969 and the rise of the Provisional IRA. It split away from what became known as the official IRA because the latter had failed to defend Catholic districts.
Pictures of the ruins of Bombay Street on the morning of 15 August show local people giving British soldiers cups of tea. But this brief amity was never going to last because the unionist government in Stormont had asked the prime minister of day, Harold Wilson, to send in the troops not to defend Catholics but to reinforce its authority.
It was the role the British army were to play in one way or another for the next 30 years. It was one which was bound not only to fail but to be counterproductive. So long as the soldiers were there in support of a Protestant and unionist political and military establishment, the IRA were always going to have enough popular support to stay in business.
British governments at the time never got a grip on the political realities of the North. Soon after the troops were first sent there, the cabinet minister Richard Crossman blithely recorded in his diary that “we have now got ourselves into something which we can hardly mismanage”. But mismanage it they did and on a grotesque scale. The Provisionals were initially thin on the ground, but army raids and arrests acted as their constant recruiting sergeant. Internment without trial introduced on 9 August 1971, the anniversary of which falls today, was another boost as were the hunger strikes of 1981 which turned Sinn Fein into a significant political force.
What are the similarities between the situation today and 50 years ago? In many respects, it is transformed because there is no Protestant unionist state backed by the British army. The Provisional IRA no longer exists. The GFA has worked astonishingly well in allowing Protestants and Catholics to have their separate identities and, on occasion though less effectively, to share power.
Brexit and the Conservative Party dependence on the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) for its parliamentary majority since 2017 has thrown all these gains into the air. DUP activists admit privately that they want a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic because they have never liked the GFA and would like to gut it. Sinn Fein, which gets about 70 per cent of the Catholic/nationalist vote these days, is pleased that the partition of Ireland is once again at the top of the political agenda.
“I am grappling with the idea of a hard border which I would call a Second Partition of Ireland,” Tom Hartley, a Sinn Fein veteran and former lord mayor of Belfast, told me. He is baffled by British actions that appear so much against their interests, saying that “they had parked the Irish problem, but now Ireland has moved once again into the centre of British politics”.
Would Boris Johnson’s enthusiasm to get rid of “the backstop” evaporate if he wins or loses a general election and the Conservatives are no longer dependent on the DUP for their majority? Possibly, but his right-wing government has plenty of members who never liked the GFA and their speeches show them to be even more ignorant about Northern Ireland politics than their predecessors in Harold Wilson’s cabinet half a century ago.
Ireland is not to blame for the disaster of Brexit
An example of this is their oft-declared belief that some magical gadget will be found to monitor the border by remote means. But any such device will be rapidly torn down and smashed where the border runs through nationalist majority parts of the border.
Northern Ireland may be at peace, but in a border area like strongly Republican South Armagh, the police only move in convoys of three vehicles and carry rifles, even if they are only delivering a parking ticket.
Catholics are no longer the victims of economic discrimination, though Derry still has the highest unemployment of any city in the UK. There has been levelling down as well as levelling up: Harland and Wolff, the great shipyard that once employed much of the population of Protestant east Belfast, went into administration this week.
Irish unity is being discussed as a practical, though highly polarising, proposition once again. Political and economic turmoil is back in a deeply divided and fragile society in which the binds holding it together are easily unstitched
The Troubles revisited: ‘I have a hatred for what the Paras did on Bloody Sunday‘
Mark Dapin, Sydney Morning Herald, 3rd August 2019
Every week of every month of every year, Paul Doherty takes tourists on a journey around the death of his father, who was killed by the British Parachute Regiment (“the Paras”) on Bloody Sunday in Derry, the second-largest city in Northern Ireland, on January 30, 1972.
But this year, things are different. This month, Doherty hopes, a murderer will at last be held to account. He has already looked into the eyes of his father’s killer, and he hates him.
“I have a hatred for what the Paras did on Bloody Sunday,” says Doherty, 55, “and also a hatred for the individual soldier.”
He knows he’s not supposed to say that (and he also hates the British Army officers and British government of the day) but Derry is built on the banks of the River Foyle, one of the fastest flowing rivers in Europe, and the torrent of Doherty’s conversation far outpaces the waterway. He speaks like two people, one interrupting to annotate the other – “They do a good pint of Guinness in there, aye” – and push him to clarify his opinion in the rare moments he might seem guarded or vague. Doherty says his tour is “political” but not “politically correct”.
Derry is officially called Londonderry, although the “London” has been spray-painted out of many road signs (just as the “no” has disappeared from no-smoking signs). London has rarely been popular in a place where three-quarters of the population are Catholic, most of them republicans who would rather see their home part of the Republic of Ireland than the United Kingdom. After the Bloody Sunday massacre, Derry saw 26 years of concentrated shootings and bombings, until the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998 began to draw the euphemistically named “Troubles” to a close with its newly codified recognition of both British and Irish interests in Northern Ireland. The Provisional IRA and the Ulster Volunteer Force, among other militia, eventually decommissioned their weapons – but in Derry there were always a handful of hardmen who wanted to keep killing for a united Ireland.
Some of these “dissident republicans” had already helped to form the so-called New IRA, which has admitted responsibility for the death in April this year of the young journalist Lyra McKee, who was shot by a sniper during an apparently staged-for-TV riot in Derry. Doherty has a bit to say about that, too.
Paul Doherty is a cheery man. He’s thickset and stocky and likes to make jokes – can’t help himself, really – and runs perhaps the least romantically named travel business in the world, Bogside History Tours. It takes a surprisingly large number of visitors (between two and 40 per tour) on twice-daily guided walks through Derry to the Bogside, a neighbourhood in the city’s west, where the ghosts of Bloody Sunday’s dead still march alongside his father, on murals the size of houses.
Paul’s younger brother, Gleann Doherty, is leading the walk on the morning I arrive, and Paul offers me a more exclusive “taxi tour”. It begins with an eccentric industrial history of Derry, whose docks were established before the famous shipyards of Belfast, where the passenger liner RMS Titanic was constructed by a largely Protestant workforce.
“The most celebrated ship in the world, the Titanic, never completed a journey,” says Doherty. “People say, ‘Why did it never complete a journey?’
Doherty talks about the 17th-century Plantation of Ulster, in which Protestants from England and Scotland, who were loyal to the British Crown (“loyalists”) were settled in the north of Catholic Ireland, usurping Irish landowners and ultimately exercising political power through gerrymandered voting and a system which, until 1968, allowed (largely Protestant) business owners an extra vote in local elections while (often Catholic) renters had no local vote at all.
We drive over Craigavon Bridge, named for James Craig, the first PM of Northern Ireland and founder in 1912 of the Ulster Volunteer Force – “A modern-day terrorist and drug-racketeering operation; beside that, they’re okay,” says Doherty – to a lookout over a walled city of cathedral spires, council houses and dozens of boxy, repurposed shirt factories. We motor down from the hills and back into town, where Doherty’s taxi cruises the close, stony streets, stopping at corners that paid witness to the events that led to the death of his father: the rise of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) whose demands included an end to anti-Catholic discrimination; one man, one vote; and the reform of the heavily Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the country’s then police force.
Peaceful civil rights demonstrations were attacked by loyalists and the RUC with increasing degrees of violence until January 1969 when, in the aftermath of a march from Belfast to Derry, the RUC rioted in the Bogside, assaulting Catholics in the streets and in their homes. Residents put up barricades and declared themselves citizens of Free Derry and outside the authority of the police. In August, a much larger riot – the “Battle of the Bogside” – saw the police expelled from Free Derry by locals throwing petrol bombs, and nationalists and loyalists fighting hand-to-hand in the streets of the city they shared.
An end-terrace house, which had become famous internationally when its side wall was painted with the slogan “You are now entering Free Derry”, still stands as Free Derry Corner in the Bogside, although the other homes in the terrace have been demolished. “They were gonna redevelop the Bogside and build a roadway,” says Doherty. “They were gonna move the [Free Derry] wall and take the wall away, but the negotiations were very skilful: ‘Touch the wall and you’re gonna be disappeared yourself.’ So that was the end of that.”
I grew up in England in the 1970s, near the base of the Parachute Regiment. When I arrived in Northern Ireland recently, I was puzzled to see what looked like the regiment’s flag flying in parts of Belfast. I thought the outspread wings must stand for something else on this side of the Irish Sea. They don’t. Doherty says the flag was also raised a few weeks ago in The Fountain estate, a loyalist enclave near the heart of Derry, “in support of Soldier F”. (Soldier F is the man who shot Doherty’s father.)
“The people who want to do it must have sick minds,” he says. “In 2019, 400 yards [370 metres] from where the massacre of Bloody Sunday happened, these people feel the need to fly the flag of the Parachute Regiment, celebrating the murder of 14 innocent people in the Bogside in 1972.” To Doherty, it’s as if his neighbours are celebrating the killing. “There’s negotiations at the minute to bring [the flag] down,” he says. “The negotiations were begun by ourselves – the [Bloody Sunday] families – through our member of parliament and the loyalist terror and paramilitary groups here. They don’t seem to be working. So if you hear it was taken down in the middle of the night, by some guy on a ladder, it’ll be me that did it. And I mean that sincerely.”
It’s a very short drive to The Fountain, where every lamppost is painted red, white and blue, and the Paras’ flag hangs limp on a windless morning. Doherty scowls. “That’s hurtful,” he says. “It’s wrong. It degrades this community. So I’m just going to see what type of ladder we’ll need.” Mentally, he measures the distance between the banner and the ground. “We’ll need a 16- or 18-foot ladder,” he decides, eventually. “We’ll go up and get that down.”
Doherty does not believe anyone could truly support Soldier F, if they knew the facts. “I’ll tell you what Soldier F did in the Bogside …”
On Sunday January 30, 1972, the NICRA held a march through Derry, even though all marches and parades had been banned. In the month before, two RUC had been killed in Derry, and the British Army believed the planned demonstration would provide cover for the IRA. The 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment was brought in to Derry to police the demonstration and arrest rioters. They ended up shooting 28 Catholic civilians, of whom 14 were killed, 13 on the day and one later. A British tribunal set up in the immediate aftermath of the killings found that the Paras had been fired upon first, and largely accepted claims that the dead marchers were gunmen and nail bombers. The families of the dead refused to accept the findings and for decades argued that peaceful protesters had been massacred.
In 1998, in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement, the British government established the Saville Inquiry, which culminated 12 years later with a 10-volume, 5000-page report. Saville found that the Paras had shot first and without warning; their victims had been all but unarmed and helpless, and posed no significant threat; that the IRA had maintained only a small, shadowy presence and loosed off a few ineffective shots; and that the Paras had lied.
It is this story, more or less, that Doherty tells at the Creggan estate among the heavily muralised roads around Free Derry Corner. While the area remains a working-class Catholic republican stronghold, the streetscape has changed: buildings have been demolished, whole blocks torn down. Doherty reaches into the past, to point to where things used to be, as he describes the last moments in the life of his father, Patrick Doherty, a 31-year-old plumber’s mate and member of NICRA, who joined the march from the Creggan.
The protesters set off mid-afternoon and were diverted from their chosen route by army barricades. Angry youths threw stones at the soldiers, who replied with tear gas and water cannons. The march organisers redirected the rally towards Free Derry Corner, and a group of soldiers fired live rounds in the direction of the rioters. Wounded men began to fall. Two civilians were knocked down by armoured cars. Soldiers broke through their own barriers to arrest the stone-throwers.
As the firing continued, the marchers ran for cover. There were already seven dead when Patrick Doherty sought safety around a small square named Glenfada Park, where today stand his son, Paul, and I. As the death toll mounted, the Paras’ brigade headquarters ordered the soldiers to cease fire. A radio operator – now dubbed Soldier 027 – passed on the order to men known at the Saville Inquiry as Soldiers E, F, G and H, but they ignored the command and set about hunting down and killing Catholics. “In here,” says Doherty, “in Glenfada Park they murdered four.”
He knows the ground where each man fell. “William McKinney was in a crowd running from here, across here,” says Doherty. “He was trying to escape right over here. And Soldier F, disobeying orders, went up that street, and he murdered William McKinney about here. Willy was shot in the back. The bullet raced through his body and went into the body of a teenager called Joseph Mahon. Joseph Mahon played dead when Soldier F touched him with a rifle to his head. Soldier F walked away thinking he’d killed him, and he shot Jim Wray in the back. Jim Wray hit the ground with such force that he didn’t get his hands in front of him.
“Soldier G walks towards him,” he continues. “Jim Wray was shouting, ‘Somebody help me! I can’t move my legs! Somebody help me!’ and G shoots him in the back again, executes him, then turns to his friend and says, ‘There, I got another one.’
“And F came out,” says Doherty, “knelt down at that lamppost right there and murdered my dad.”
Patrick Doherty was shot from behind as he tried to crawl away. A bullet drove into his buttock and ripped out of his chest. On its way through his body, it lacerated his aorta, diaphragm and left lung, tore his colon and bowel attachments, and fractured two of his ribs. “Soldier F knelt down there,” says Doherty, “observed by hundreds of people, killing my dad, and then very clearly watching a man walking towards him with a white handkerchief in his hand. Barney [Bernard] McGuigan said to him, ‘Don’t shoot’ and Soldier F shot him.”
There were six children in the Doherty family. Paul was eight years old. “We were home,” he says. “With my brother and my friends, we were all outside playing marbles. Our home suddenly filled up with people, and then a young guy came up and joined in with the marbles for about 10 minutes and said, ‘Oh, by the way, your dad’s dead. I seen him get taken into an ambulance over here.’ And my mum then came and told us he was killed.”
I have to ask Doherty how their lives changed, although I know it’s a stupid question. “It is,” he agrees, as is his way. “The death of a parent’s one thing, the murder of a parent’s another thing. I wouldn’t like to relive that in the heart of a child. We sort of individualised ourselves as a family. My mum was on medication. My sister had to really look after the two [youngest] children. And we all had to adapt to a different type of life. My dad was very regimentist [sic]. We had to do certain chores every morning: somebody had to do the dishes and somebody had to shine the shoes. It was a good way of being brought up. The discipline – that all went out the window. Education went out the window as well.”
Their loss affected them each in different ways. Doherty’s older brother, Tony, joined the IRA and spent four years in prison. Today, Tony’s the author of two well-received, lyrical memoirs. There was turmoil for all the children but, “We’re all very successful in what we’re doing now,” says Doherty.
Most of the Saville Inquiry’s hearings were held in Derry but certain witnesses, including Soldier F, were permitted to testify in London. Doherty travelled to London with his family and watched Soldier F on the stand. What was it like, ask I – the master of the dullard’s query – to be in the same room as his father’s killer? “Aye, it was strange,” says Doherty. “I can’t describe it. It just put a face to an armed thug who had no care for himself or his community he came from, and he came into this community and just shot it to bits.”
Soldier F confessed to nothing but a poor memory. Five hundred and seventy times, according to Doherty, he answered questions with “I can’t recall”. But Soldier 027 – speaking from behind a screen to protect him from being identified – said the soldiers had killed innocent people for no operational reason, and called their actions “unspeakable”. Soldier 027 had been trying to confess for years. “We were getting telephone calls in the late 1980s from a soldier who was crying down the phone,” says Doherty. “He left the Army, hit the drink, and then he told the truth.” As for Soldier F, “If there was any kind of remorse, you would have to deal with that, but there was no remorse at all. And, again, forgiveness – you can’t forgive anybody who doesn’t ask for it. They shouldn’t get it.”
Did Soldier F know who Doherty was? “He would’ve been made aware of who we were,” says Doherty. “I’m not sure if he would’ve individualised us. We gave him a wee stare every time he went past us, so he probably would have. He was 53, he’s got a tan, athletic, small, stocky. He looked like he looked after himself. He has a very light-spoken voice. But obviously he had killing in his DNA.”
Saville found Soldier F had shot dead Patrick Doherty and Bernard McGuigan – but, under the terms of the inquiry, any evidence heard was inadmissible in any subsequent prosecution. A separate police investigation led to Soldier F being charged in May only with the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of four others.
The families are bitter that only one man, Soldier F – a lance corporal – will be charged over Bloody Sunday. In the years since the massacre, Soldiers E and G have died, and the Northern Ireland Public Prosecution Service has said there is insufficient admissible evidence to provide a reasonable prospect of convicting other soldiers: dead bodies are not enough.
“We’ve heard since that the Public Prosecution Service were split on whether they should charge anybody,” says Doherty. “So we think they gave us a token. We wanted the remaining soldiers charged in a joint enterprise. We wanted the officers – some of whom are still alive – but you don’t get that.”
The case is scheduled to begin this month in the imposing, neoclassical Bishop Street courthouse, which Doherty identifies as the most bombed building in Derry. In January, Doherty pointed this out to four young Dutch women on a taxi tour. “And the next thing, it was blown up by the New IRA,” says Doherty. “I met them down the street, and I said, ‘Aye, it was blown up last night.’ ”
The most recent bomb caused little damage, and the New IRA are seen by many republicans as bumbling clowns who cannot even blow up a courthouse. But the joke turned acrid, as Irish jokes are wont to do, when a New IRA sniper shot dead the highly regarded Lyra McKee, a working-class Catholic journalist and LGBT activist, during a riot that Doherty says was staged for a TV crew. Apparently, McKee was not targeted as a journalist. She was simply standing too close to a police van. The New IRA admitted responsibility and apologised.
“The statement that they came out with then, trying to defend this, was adding insult to injury: that the girl was ‘standing behind enemy lines’ and ‘ground forces’ and this. That’s a relic from the past. They will say, ‘Well, the IRA did this type of thing as well.’ Well, we can’t argue that for ever and ever. Sometimes you’ve got to say, ‘There was a time for war and a time for peace.’ But the dissidents have no support, they’ve got no strategy, they won’t debate with anybody, they won’t talk to anyone, and they get young guys into the ranks of their organisation and tell them they could be heroes for Ireland.
“Well,” says Doherty, “the heroes for Ireland are all lined up in the cemetery.”
Police have arrested four suspects for the shooting of McKee, including a 15-year-old boy.
The demonstrators who died on Bloody Sunday were never forgotten. In some ways, their memory has grown larger over the years. Huge murals in the Creggan, painted between 1996 and 2008, bear their portraits and those of the men who braved bullets to rush to help them. “These people were heroes,” says Doherty, “because they could’ve jumped over them, ran away, but they didn’t. They stayed with them. They comforted them until they died. The guy who helped my dad until he died was called Paddy Walsh – he crawled out to my dad, the bullets were flying over his head as he stayed with him.”
On display in the nearby Museum of Free Derry is a famous photograph of Paddy Walsh crawling over to the corpse of Patrick Doherty. It looks as if Walsh has lent his own head to Doherty’s broken body. A simple monument and garden dedicated to the victims of Bloody Sunday stands close to the museum.
“The garden was paid for by lawyers and barristers for the families,” says Doherty. “We asked them for money – and they were making plenty of money – so they gave us the money to do this garden. It’s lovely. Mostly old neighbours used to look after it, but most of them are dead now, so now and then we come over ourselves and do a bit of weeding.”
This isn’t my story – far from it. I’m just a journalist who asks stupid questions, tramples on hearts, trespasses on grief. But I went to school in Aldershot, England, the home of the British Army and – in those days – the base of the Parachute Regiment. We moved to the town because it was cheap, because nobody wanted to live alongside the Army. It was in Aldershot that the IRA planned to extract revenge for Bloody Sunday with a bomb attack on the officers’ mess of 16 Parachute Brigade. The attack was supposed to kill and maim the men – or perhaps just the kind of men – who ordered their troops to open fire in the Bogside.
Instead, a time bomb in a stolen car exploded outside the building at 12.40pm on February 22, 1972 and tore apart the bodies of a Catholic British Army chaplain, a civilian gardener, and five local women variously described as kitchen workers, waitresses and cleaners. One of the women was the mother of a boy who was eight years old – the same age as Paul Doherty on Bloody Sunday. There was so little left of her that she could not immediately be recognised from her remains. Eventually, she was identified by a tattoo.
I moved to Aldershot three years after that attack. The disappeared woman’s son was in the year below me at school. I knew him very slightly. I never knowingly met any of the families of the other victims, but another boy whose mother was murdered that day – Karl Bosley – signed up with the Paras (“with anger and hatred in my heart,” he said later) – just as Tony Doherty joined the IRA. Apparently, Bosley was not permitted to serve with the regiment in Northern Ireland.
The Troubles in Northern Ireland continued throughout my schooling, and the Paras were a fierce and terrible presence in the town. They departed for tours of the province and returned with fury in their eyes, prowling the streets like the jungle cats tattooed on their hamhock forearms, at war with the world. And, of course, some of them never made it back. In an ambush near Warrenpoint in County Down in August 1979, the IRA killed 18 British soldiers, 16 of them Paras.
In Aldershot, the survivors policed their own pubs. Most of the town centre was a no-go area for civilians, and the Paras’ pubs around the high street were “airborne” only. Even other soldiers – “crap hats” – copped a kicking if they walked into the Pegasus, the Queen or the Trafalgar. You wouldn’t send the Paras overseas to police a demonstration. You’d dispatch them to destroy it. There are no pictures of the body of the eight-year-old’s mum, because there was nothing left to photograph. A small memorial at the site of the bombing is hardly visited by people outside the families, and when I went back to Aldershot a couple of years ago, I couldn’t even find it. Apparently, the area is going to be redeveloped, and the new houses will look down upon a memorial garden.
While the Irish may have long memories, it sometimes seems as if the English remember nothing at all. There are no tours to retrace the last journeys of the cleaners, as they came from the council estates to the garrison to work for a wage. And there is fierce feeling in England today that men like Soldier F should be left alone, that the post-Good Friday justice system let many imprisoned IRA “volunteers” off the hook and the same courtesy should be due to every British soldier – although the provisions of the agreement specifically excluded the perpetrators of crimes that had not yet been prosecuted.
In That Howling Infinite 
[…] deadlocked on the matter of the Irish border, we revisited the dark days of “The Troubles”: Free Derry and the battle of the Bogside. As Britain headed in slo-mo to its decisive December election, the Labour Party was mired in […]
[…] of the Boyne in 1690. you can read more about all that here, and its legacy in Northern Ireland here. How he and my mom got together is another story and quite unrelated to this one. But it had a lot […]