Bloody Sunday- 1972

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FOR THE first time the Government has banned socialists and Irish nationalists from marching through British cities in memory of the 13 unarmed Irish men shot down in cold blood by British paratroopers on Bloody Sunday, 1972.

Bloody Sunday protest marches have been held every year since 1972, when news and photographs of the carnage in Derry shocked tens of thousands of people into the decision to go out and do something about the British terror in Northern Ireland.

A few small protest strikes occurred in London. On February 5 1972 a vast throng of many thousands converged on Whitehall and widespread clashes with the police broke out. Many of those on that march were non-political Irish working class men and women, stirred into political protest - for the one and only time so far - by Bloody Sunday.

In the Irish Republic a similar march stormed and burned the British Embassy. That too was a unique occurrence. Not even the emotioncharged hunger-strikes of 1981 triggered such a reaction in the South.

What happened on Bloody Sunday?

On January 30 1972 a march was called in Derry to protest at internment without charge or trial. Internment had been introduced six months earlier, in August 1971, exclusively for Catholics.

The Northern Ireland Unionist government at Stormont banned the demonstration. But the organisers decided to defy the ban.

Ian Paisley threatened that civilian Orangemen would themselves stop the banned march. The authorities then promised that they would stop it. They did.

On Sunday January 30 the protesters assembled and the march moved off. Then the paratroopers opened fire, picking people off at random. -One wounded man was killed with a second shot as he tried to crawl to safety. Another died going to the aid of a friend who had been hit.

13 men died and 30 were wounded by the hail of bullets that the British Army loosed at the crowd of peaceful demonstrators. One of the wounded died soon after.

Only the official British inquiry believed the British army's story that the paratroopers were returning IRA fire. No-one else did.

Precisely what happened is still not known, but the outline is perfectly clear.

Placating the Orangemen required that Britain stop the demonstration, and the paratroopers went at it with a will. But paratroopers make crude and brutal policemen. Somewhere along the line the death sentence on a lottery basis was imposed on those who decided to defy the ban on the demonstration.

British and world reaction blew the Tory government's Northern Ireland policy apart. In March 1972 they suspended the Northern Ireland government at Stormont and imposed direct rule. For the following two years they tried to placate the Six County Catholics, and co-opt them into support of the Six County state by setting up new powersharing structures. Those in turn were shattered by the Orange general strike of May 1974.

For the past ten years Britain has 'held on', balancing between the communities and, usually, beating down the Catholics to keep the 'balance'.

What the British government has inflicted on the Catholic community over this decade has not been less savage than what the paratroopers did to placate Paisley on January 30 1972. It has only been less spectacularly savage, and therefore less of a liability to the British government, than Bloody Sunday was.

Burned-out British Embassy in Dublin

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