This week (Jan. 30) in 1972, in the Catholic section of Londonderry in Northern Ireland, British paratroopers killed 13 Irish Catholics during a protest march that had turned violent. Fifteen other protestors were wounded — one later died — and although the paratroopers claimed they had been fired on first, no evidence supported (or refuted) this. What was certain was that the dead were unarmed and many were shot in the back, indicating that they had been fleeing, not initiating, the violence. The incident became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
The British paratroopers were in Londonderry to support the city’s ruling Protestants, who feared Catholic unrest. Although Catholics vastly outnumbered Protestants in “Derry,” city elections always returned the latter to power, thanks to suffrage laws that made “one-man, one-vote” a mockery. Catholics also were denied equal access to jobs, housing and municipal services. Fed up, they organized a series of marches, of which the one on January 30 was only the latest.
In the wake of “Bloody Sunday” a British judicial inquiry found the paratroopers not guilty of murder — an inquiry that was considered an affront to justice by Catholics in Northern Ireland. The coroner in charge of the inquest, a British army officer, said of the incident, “It was quite unnecessary. It strikes me that the army ran amok that day and shot without thinking what they were doing … I would say without hesitation that it was sheer, unadulterated murder.”
It would not be the last such murder. Soon, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was bombing British and Protestant targets in Northern Ireland, militant Protestant groups responded in kind, and the British government suspended Protestant rule in Northern Ireland and assumed control.
That was in 1972, and for the next 25 years the British continued to occupy Northern Ireland, while Catholics and Protestants continued to fight over whether Northern Ireland, with its Protestant majority, would remain part of Great Britain, or whether it would unite with the Catholic-dominated South and be ruled by a national Irish government. And then in 1998, the Belfast Agreement, known as the “Good Friday” agreement, established a Northern Ireland Assembly — later endorsed by the voters of Northern Ireland in a referendum — that established a power-sharing arrangement that somewhat reduced, if not completely eliminated, the violence.
Fast forward to June of 2010. The 5,000-page Saville Report, the longest investigation in British legal history, concluded that the British paratroopers in Londonderry had unjustly fired on unarmed protestors who posed no threat to them. In response, British Prime Minister David Cameron offered a public apology, which was televised in Londonderry, where thousands of its citizens retraced the steps of the Bloody Sunday protest marchers — and cheered wildly.
