The Troubles: Bloody Sunday (Part 4)

**Tom Holland** (0:11)
Mr. Speaker, I am deeply patriotic. I never want to believe anything bad about our country. I never want to call into question the behavior of our soldiers and our army, who I believe to be the finest in the world. And I have seen for myself the very difficult and dangerous circumstances in which we ask our soldiers to serve. But the conclusions of this report are absolutely clear.
There is no doubt, there is nothing equivocal, there are no ambiguities. What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong.
What happened should never, ever have happened. The families of those who died should not have had to live with the pain and the hurt of that day and with a lifetime of loss.
Some members of our armed forces acted wrongly. The government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the armed forces and for that, on behalf of the government, indeed, on behalf of our country, I am deeply sorry. So that was former Prime Minister David Cameron speaking to the House of Commons on the 15th of June, 2010 And it was his response to the report of the Savile Enquiry, which had been set up 12 years earlier by Tony Blair, to investigate the single most controversial moment of the entire Troubles. And that moment was the shooting and killing of 13 unarmed Catholic civilians by British paratroopers during a protest march in Derry on the 30th of January 1972, a day that has gone down in infamy as Bloody Sunday. And the Savile Enquiry was actually the second official British investigation. The first under Lord Chief Justice Widgery, a splendid name, was conducted just weeks after the event. And that one largely exonerated the paratroopers. But most people didn't agree with that conclusion. Certainly the families of the victims never accepted it. And of course, you too never accepted it. And their song helped to make Bloody Sunday a cause celebra wherever popular music is listened to by earnest teenagers in bedrooms.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (2:54)
So Tony Blair set up the Savile Enquiry as part of the peace process in 1998 And it was incredibly expensive, cost almost 200 million pounds.
And the Savile Enquiry, unlike the Widgery report, it blamed the paratroopers for losing control and for lying about it afterwards. Hence Cameron's statement afterwards. So it's obviously a notorious date in modern British and indeed Irish history. And today we'll explore the context for Bloody Sunday. We'll talk about what happened that day in January 1972, why it mattered and how Northern Ireland spiralled into hell, basically, in the worst year of The Troubles. But first, by way of recap, let's pick up in the autumn of 1971 So in the last episode, we talked about the disaster of interment, which was that August, the new stories about the torture of the people who were interned, and then the sectarian bomb attacks that autumn. So the Four Steps, the Red Lion pubs, the McGurks bar attack, and then the Balmoral furniture showroom. Now, amid all this, in October of that year, 1971, relatively new Stormont Prime Minister Brian Faulkner flies to London. And he has come to brief Ted Heath on the desperate security situation. And Faulkner says to him, look, this is dreadful. If these bombings continue, a breakdown in government might occur in a matter of weeks. And Heath says to him, I mean, this is very bad news. I agree it's awful. And this cannot go on. The British people, the British public is losing patience.
Now, if you think about their options at this point, if we step back and think about their options, what can the British government plausibly do? So one option, which would be the sort of the John Lennon option, and of course the option that the provisional IRA would like, the troops out movement, lots of people on the left who think this is Britain's Vietnam, but also lots of ordinary people in Britain who don't, you know, they don't give a damn about Northern Ireland. They don't understand why the British army is there and why people are dying.
This option would be to get out, to just say, fine, forget it, we're going home, we're going to leave you to your own devices. So the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, we talked about him last time, very clever, very corrupt, lazy, off his face on gin all the time. He's slightly of this mind. So there's a story about a group of community relations experts coming to meet him at his office, and they found him slumped in an armchair, and he was completely sort of exhausted and demoralised. He said, so what do we do? Arm the Protestants and get out? And obviously, this is an option.