The Time For Truth

The Doherty family has known beyond doubt from the 30th January 1972 that Patrick Doherty was murdered. That that was equally well-known to the military and political establishment is evidenced by the indecent haste with which the Widgery Inquiry was set up, allowing it almost immediately to be said that the matter was sub judice.

In any society in which the rule of law prevailed, a murder investigation would have been started on the Sunday afternoon, the Bogside would have been taped off, the soldiers weapons would have been removed from them and the soldiers arrested. Instead a campaign of lies was mounted against the dead and the wounded.
When the lies in relation to Patrick Doherty did not even stand up in the Widgery Inquiry and he was cleared of the lying allegation that he had a pistol, a lie plain for all to see from Giles Peres' photographs, there was still no prosecution for murder. The coroner who conducted the inquest describing the killings as "sheer unadulterated murder" brought no reaction from the prosecuting authorities. By 1992 it had come to be accepted by Government, and the view was expressed by John Major, the then Prime Minister, that the victims were innocent, but still no prosecution for murder was forthcoming.
That no one will ever be prosecuted for the murder of Patrick Doherty is now set in stone. His rights as a citizen of this jurisdiction and his family's rights will never be vindicated by prosecution in the way that every citizen is entitled to expect. In those circumstances, while how Patrick Doherty was killed is obviously of consuming interest to his family, the paramount question and the question which they look to this Tribunal to answer is: why did he die; what was the plan, plot, the strategy; why did this happen; who ordered it, condoned it, permitted it? The only thing they demand for themselves and in his memory is that there be no more lies.
What guarantee, then, do they have that there will be no more lies; what guarantee do they have that the Ministry of Defence has disclosed every document? In January this year it emerged, as the Tribunal knows, that the Ministry of Defence had ordered the destruction of 13 rifles used on Bloody Sunday, that they had done so, not only after this Tribunal was set up, but apparently after giving an undertaking to the Tribunal to preserve all relevant evidence. What is the hope of full disclosure of documents in the face of that? In our submission it is in the highest degree incredible that the Ministry of Defence is not represented before this Tribunal. Could anyone imagine, for example, the recent Stephen Lawrence Inquiry in England being conducted without the Metropolitan Police being represented or an inquiry such as that into the Marchioness disaster without the owners and managers of the boat. There are Counsel here representing individual soldiers, one set of Counsel representing over 400, but on Bloody Sunday these were not individuals; they were an army acting under orders and Patrick Doherty was murdered by them.
On the one hand the Government has said that this is a tribunal set up to establish the truth; on the other hand the government department which knows the truth and which is responsible for the operation is not even here, is still refusing almost 30 years later to come out into the light of day and tell the truth. In our submission that is nothing short of a public disgrace and it gives little hope to the Doherty family that there will be no more lies.
They need to know, and we will be pursuing the question, what documents and which witnesses are missing from the vast amount of material which has been amassed. Apart from the Ministry of Defence documents, where are the memos or reports which must have passed between senior military figures and the Cabinet in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday; where is the statement, for example, from John Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Security Committee in Northern Ireland at the relevant time; what documents were destroyed; why were they destroyed; by whom; what guarantee do the Doherty family have there are not documents as yet undisclosed under the 30-year rule or indeed will such documents ever be disclosed?
Attached to our skeleton opening, I think that the Tribunal will find a cutting from the Sunday Telegraph, published on 2nd July of this year. The headline of the article is "'clobber Catholics', civil Servant told minister", and the subheading "memo released under 30-year rule is hurriedly withdrawn from public". If I might read a few extracts from the article. It details how: "A memorandum dealing government plans to 'clobber Catholics' in Northern Ireland during the 1969 riots has been hurriedly withdrawn after being released by the Public Record Office last month. The Ministry of Defence last week surreptitiously recalled the file containing miscellaneous papers on Ulster which have been released in June under the 30-year rule. It contained a memorandum from Oliver Wright, the Labour Government's representative to the Northern Ireland Administration. Mr Wright had by then already been private secretary to two Prime Ministers, Sir Alec Douglas Home and Harold Wilson, and went on to become ambassador to West Germany and America, receiving a knighthood. Sir Oliver was seconded to Belfast for six months in August 1969 after a summer of violence between Catholics and Protestants. He reported back to James Callaghan, the Home Secretary. His memorandum states that a return to the rule of law was essential and that meant dismantling the Catholic barricades. He wrote: 'this may entail the use of force against the Catholics to ensure grievances are redressed. HMG, Her Majesty's Government, might have to be cruel to be kind. In the last resort it must suit the Catholics to get clobbered by us, if that is the only way we can get justice for them'".
Further down the column, Sir Oliver explained what he had meant in his memorandum about 'clobbering the Catholics': 'We could not let law and order which we had sent the army in to restore be interrupted by local ghettoes which were not open to us. This was of course in the very early days and things developed subsequently rather differently. We could not allow the barricades to remain because our overriding obligation to both communities was to restore law and order.' His memo was found by researchers in a Ministry of Defence file of Northern Ireland papers released as part of the open Government initiative. Last Monday at 9.15 am, before the Public Record Office opened to the public, the Ministry of Defence ordered that it be withdrawn and returned to Whitehall."
That, in our submission, speaks for itself and very much fuels the fear which the Doherty family presently have that the Ministry of Defence is simply not co-operating with the Tribunal and, indeed, is attempting actively to obstruct it.
It is our further contention that Bloody Sunday cannot be considered in isolation. As other counsel have said, and as what I have just read out from the Sunday Telegraph makes clear, the no-go areas and perhaps Free Derry in particular were an anathema to the British Government. There was clearly a military policy formulated for dealing with them which can be seen to stretch from July 1970, the time of the Lower Falls curfew, to Operation Motorman in July 1972.
The policy's chief architect was Brigadier General Kitson who, as the Tribunal will know, wrote extensively about low intensity operations and who had considerable experience of the same in many British colonies and former colonies. It was he who released the first Parachute Regiment from Belfast to Derry for Bloody Sunday and in our submission it is vital that this policy be investigated and not just the events of the day. There are ten further issues which we consider central to the task of the Tribunal in its search for the truth. They are as follows:
1. The training of the 1st Parachute Regiment in general and any particular training it received for the discharge of its duties in aid of the civil power in Northern Ireland
2. The role of General Kitson in its training
3. The history of the particular Regiment in the discharge of its duties in Belfast prior to and after Bloody Sunday and the killings carried out by it in Belfast
4. The relationship between General Ford and Brigadier Kitson and between Brigadier Kitson and Colonel Wilford
5. The factors which influenced the choice of this Regiment given the reputation it had already achieved in Belfast prior to Bloody Sunday
6. The education, if any, which the soldiers in the Regiment had prior to deployment in a complex civil conflict in Northern Ireland
7. Whether there existed a culture of cover-up by deliberate obfuscation and who was responsible for this
8. The relationships between the United Kingdom Cabinet, the Northern Ireland Cabinet, Lord Grey, the Governor of Northern Ireland, and the senior army commanders and, in particular, the way the army commanders assumed control over all security matters after June 1970
9. The factors coalescing to influence General Ford, such as the influence of Northern Ireland Government ministers, loyalist groups, Protestant businessmen in Derry, army strategic interests and so on
10. The reasons why General Ford decided to be present on Bloody Sunday and how much control he exercised on the ground during the operation.
Some of the Doherty family have actively campaigned over the years for the establishment of a tribunal such as this, waiting for it to begin its deliberations, attending the hearings and reliving the day, seeing the photographs of Patrick Doherty as he was murdered, hearing how he had shouted that he did not want to die alone, how Barney McGuigan had heroically gone to his aid only to be murdered with him. All this, it goes without saying, is distressing and traumatic in the extreme. The only thing that makes them endure it is that there be no more lies; only total and utter transparency and accountability will suffice. The Ministry of Defence will have to come out from its hiding place.
We say that the truth about Bloody Sunday was and is undoubtedly known to senior army officers and senior politicians of the day. It could be written on a sheet of paper if the political will to do so existed. The Doherty family have sufficient faith in the powers of this Tribunal to believe that by the time it is over, at long last the truth will be clear.