Bloody Sunday Inquiry

Lord Davies of Stamford Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd. I have the greatest regard for him as an eminent jurist and I am sorry that he will not agree with at least one of the things that I am about to say.

I have read that part of the report that is available in print. It seems to me to be a clearly argued, thorough and convincing report and I hope, trust and pray that it brings closure to the families of the victims and to the two communities in Londonderry—or Derry—and in Northern Ireland. It is undoubtedly a remarkable achievement by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, and his colleagues.

However, it would be quite wrong not to say on the occasion of this debate in this place that there is a big problem, which has been referred to several times: this inquiry took so long and cost so much that the Government have, apparently, decided that we can never do such a thing again. I totally agree with my noble friend Lady Royall that that is a regrettable decision. It deprives the country of an enormously important check and balance in our system of governance. Of course, we hope that nothing so horrific will ever happen in our history again, but we all know that that is unlikely to be the case. I am extremely worried about the abandonment of the whole concept of an inquiry of this kind.

Before we take such a definitive decision—this is where I think that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, will not like what I have to say—I hope that we will look again at the way in which this inquiry was conducted. I am certain that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, acted with the greatest integrity and professionalism. I do not for one second suggest—to anticipate what might be in some colleagues’ minds—that there was any financial motivation on the part of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, in this matter. I do not doubt that he could make vastly more money doing other things. Whether that is the case for all the lawyers involved, I really do not know. However, I attended the inquiry on one or two occasions and, rather more frequently, I followed it on the internet and, at the time, I was frankly appalled at the leisurely pace at which it was conducted. Sometimes a witness would not turn up and, so far as I could judge, there was no sanction at all for that. The inquiry would simply be postponed for two days, there apparently being no alternative work programme in place. I was quite shocked by that. Also, as we heard this afternoon, it took five days to cross-question Ted Heath, the Prime Minister at the time of those events.

Rather than just abandoning the idea of having such inquiries, however, we owe it to ourselves and the country to find a way in which, in future, such inquiries can be viable and can be conducted with a greater degree of discipline and a rather more focused, businesslike management of the whole process, which I am sure is possible. It may be that different financial incentives have a role in that. I just mention in passing, without in any way suggesting that this would be appropriate in such a judicial activity, that in the City it is now normal, before lawyers are hired for any transaction, including the most complicated and the largest, where the complexity and the time involved can least easily be predicted at the outset, for the lawyers to be asked to quote a fixed price before they are appointed. There may be alternative structures that should be considered. We should not just abandon the whole mechanism without thinking about how it might be made more viable and realistic in future.

That said, I should like to make just four points about the general context in which this horrific event took place. As the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, has just reminded us, this is a moment to try to seek historical truth. One has to start with the fact that these events took place against the background of a march organised by the Civil Rights Association. Most people taking part in that march were clearly entirely peaceable in their intentions. One has to ask: why was there a march in this country organised by the Civil Rights Association? The reason is that, at that time, and during the whole of the 50 years for which the Stormont Government existed, there had been serious abuses of civil rights. Indeed, the civil rights of the Catholic minority had been systematically suppressed for all that time. There were problems in housing and education. There was deliberate gerrymandering of constituencies. There was a terrible problem with job discrimination in the employment market. It was not just that the Government of Northern Ireland acquiesced in job discrimination; from time to time, they promoted it. Lord Brookeborough, who became the third Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, urged unionists to employ only Protestants—to use his phrase, to employ Protestant lads and lasses—and vaunted his employment of 100 per cent Protestants. That was the background. In those days, there was a culture in Northern Ireland that it was a Protestant state and that if the Catholics did not like it they could go down to the Free State or, after 1948, to the Republic.

Only two people, or groups of people, did anything about that. One was a very brave man, Terence O’Neill, who was bitterly attacked from within the unionist party—many of the attacks were co-ordinated by the Reverend Ian Paisley—and politically destroyed. Some people will recall the extraordinary furore that was created in Northern Ireland when Terence O’Neill visited a Catholic school—it was the first time in the 40 years since Stormont had started that a Prime Minister, or any Minister, had been in a Catholic school. That indicates the psychology at the time.

The only organisation to do anything about that was the Civil Rights Association. It organised a number of peaceful demonstrations, which were turned violent by extreme unionists—many of them also organised by people extremely close to the Reverend Ian Paisley. There was disgraceful violence in Armagh and at Burntollet Bridge, just outside Londonderry, in 1968-69. Against that background, it is of course not justifiable or forgivable but it is perhaps humanly understandable that a climate—a fertile field—was created in which extremists and terrorists from the IRA could present themselves as being the defenders of the Catholic community, which was under such attack and systematic discrimination. That is not a happy story.

My second point is that, although I have deliberately been harsh on them, this was not entirely the responsibility of the Northern Ireland Government of those days. The buck really stops here in Westminster because the Northern Ireland Parliament was not a sovereign Parliament like the Irish Parliament in the years before 1800; it was a subsidiary Parliament created by the Government of Ireland Act 1920. We had ultimate responsibility for the way in which it was conducting the governance of Northern Ireland and we did nothing whatever about it.

It would be easy to make a party-political point and say that on the whole that period was dominated by Tory Governments, that a ruthless alliance was formed before the First World War by Carson and Bonar Law in their attacks on the third home rule Bill and that it was all the fault of the Tories. I do not say that, however, because I am ashamed to say that Labour Governments of the time—the minority Labour Government of 1924 and the Labour Governments of 1929 and 1945—were equally negligent about this scandal taking place in Northern Ireland. I am happy to be corrected, but as far as I can recall no Liberal voice was raised in all those years against what was going on in Northern Ireland. That was a disgraceful situation.

It was the fault of Westminster, this Parliament that created Stormont. It simply acquiesced in that completely intolerable situation, which ended up in the appalling situation that we have become familiar with over the past 30 years. There are lessons in that for everybody. I cannot conceive of another devolved Parliament in the United Kingdom behaving in the fashion that the Stormont Government and the majority in the Stormont Parliament did, but if that were ever to happen I hope that in Westminster we would not fail in our responsibilities as we did last time.

My third point is that the background to this appalling event—the tragic disaster on Bloody Sunday—is internment. It is extraordinary that the mistake of internment was made at all. British Governments—Whig, Tory and Liberal—throughout the 19th century voted through these two Houses in Westminster coercion Acts that had the same effect and allowed arrests without any judicial process, the holding of people without trial and the suspension of habeas corpus. They were a complete disaster and did not work at all. Many Irish leaders of the time were arrested in this way, including Parnell, who was arrested in 1881. When the coercion Act had been passed and before Parnell was arrested, as he expected to be, somebody said to him: “Mr Parnell, who is going to take over the Irish parliamentary party if you are arrested?”. He responded, “Captain Moonlight will take over the Irish party”, and Captain Moonlight did. The equivalent of Captain Moonlight took over in the 1970s after internment. That was a terrible mistake and we should learn from it, because we could make similar mistakes in other parts of world, overthrowing our constitutional liberties, supposedly in the interests of security, but in fact finding that that sacrifice is entirely counterproductive.

My final point is that, after this ghastly tragedy of Bloody Sunday, we had to face conflict with the IRA for the next 25 years or so. Why did we have to do it? It was to uphold the principle of democracy, the fundamental principle of a free society. Constitutional and political decisions can be made and constitutional arrangements can be changed only by the democratically expressed will of the people, not at the point of a gun. We had to resist the IRA and we did so. I say “we did so”, but the British Army and the RUC actually did so. I accept the appalling criticisms in the report before us, but 99 per cent of time the British Army behaved with incredible courage and great professional restraint. It was because of that, above all things, that we came through and successfully defended that essential principle of a free society.

I also want to say a word about the RUC, which was equally incredibly brave. Many of those men must have felt tempted to drop that profession and get away because it was so dangerous. I am not easily moved to tears, but I have with great difficulty, because grown men do not weep in public, restrained them when going into the police station in Londonderry on more than one occasion and seen the incredible number of names of RUC officers killed during the Troubles in that city. It is absolutely horrific. I make a particular point about the Catholic officers who, of course, were even more vulnerable to revenge attacks and to their families being intimidated and who stayed with the RUC throughout those terrible years. We owe an enormous debt to our security forces—to the British Army and the RUC—in those very difficult times. It is a debt that we must never forget.