Bloody Sunday Inquiry (Report)

Ben Wallace Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Ben Wallace (Wyre and Preston North) (Con)]

Thank you for calling me to speak so early in the debate, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is a privilege to follow not only my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State but his predecessor in Northern Ireland, the right hon. Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Mr Woodward), who worked tirelessly to try to resolve the issues there. I want to contribute to the debate not because I was an adult or serving in the armed forces at the time of Bloody Sunday; I was not even one-year old at the time. In a sense, it is just a memory. However, I confronted its legacy on the streets of Northern Ireland as a platoon commander and as an intelligence officer in the 1990s. I witnessed the pressures as a platoon commander on the streets of west Belfast, and I also witnessed the embryonic stages of the peace process in 1994, under the Conservative Government of the time. That does not seem to be mentioned much these days, but it was an important turning point for Northern Ireland, because of the steps taken not only by the Government but by the Provisional IRA, which did not come easy to that organisation at the time.

I want to put the Bloody Sunday inquiry into context, because it is important to remember that there were deaths before Bloody Sunday. The troubles in Northern Ireland did not begin and end on 30 January 1972. There were 215 deaths during the troubles leading up to Bloody Sunday, and we cannot forget that there were violent deaths in the Irish civil war and the border campaigns of the 1950s. Violent deaths were characteristic of Ireland, not just in the north, for perhaps hundreds of years. We should not forget that they did not start and stop with Bloody Sunday.

I also want to remember the victims of Northern Ireland. There were 1,855 civilian deaths and 1,123 security forces deaths, of which 2,057 were caused by republican paramilitary groups, and 363 by British security forces, as well as 1,000 by loyalist terror groups. All had a part to play in the troubles in Northern Ireland, and all had a part to play in the tragedies that have been left behind after those events.

I listened to the shadow Secretary of State’s call for perhaps never-ending inquiries. We should not forget that the death of each of those victims is as important to their family members as those of the Bloody Sunday victims. Their loss and suffering count as much to them as Bloody Sunday counts to the media and to the wider strategic goals of the political parties in Northern Ireland. Many of those people might want an inquiry, although perhaps not a sophisticated, expensive one. They might not yet have all the answers. They might not know why their loved one was singled out to be murdered. They want to know why their innocent brother or sister went out shopping one day and did not come back. They want to know who perpetrated those atrocities, and why they have never been held to account.

There are plenty of famous atrocities—dare I link the two words?—in Northern Ireland that probably mean nothing to most people. Bloody Sunday is one of the most memorable ones to people outside the Northern Irish and Irish struggle bubble, but there was also Claudy, Bloody Friday and Warrenpoint. They are famous incidents that all Northern Ireland Members will never forget. It is a characteristic of the Irish troubles that we have these great tragic events throughout history, and it has gone on for many years.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

The hon. Gentleman rightly refers to many of the landmark atrocities in Northern Ireland. Does he agree that four of them have a particular link: Bloody Sunday, Ballymurphy, Springhill and Shankill? The link is that they were all perpetrated by the Parachute Regiment. Should not somebody be looking at that?

[Mr Wallace]

I recognise the hon. Gentleman’s points. Regiments are always living things: they come and go; different leaders take over and different soldiers join. The Scots Guards, of which I was a member, is a very different regiment from the Scots Guards when it was founded in 1642—ironically, to go to Northern Ireland. Regiments come and go, and it is too easy to put a beret on the problem and say that it is all due to the Parachute Regiment. I know my own prejudices, but they are not factual prejudices. It is too easy to link the problem to one regiment or another. I say that it was mainly a problem of ethos—ethos in our politicians, who sometimes sent the wrong messages; ethos in paramilitary units, or even in political parties that often chose to manipulate the people they were supposed to represent.

As I said earlier, I was not serving in the armed forces on Bloody Sunday, as I was just one-year old, but I have met people on the streets of Northern Ireland who were inspired by it—inspired to defend their communities, inspired to take up arms or, indeed, inspired to enter into terrorist organisations. I have met people who were manipulated by what happened and manipulated by some political parties that used every atrocity to feed another atrocity. Murder begets murder; injustice begets injustice.

This inquiry is about one atrocity, but if it is about drawing a line in the sand, it is about saying that an injustice took place. People in the armed forces, particularly its members on that day, are sorry for what they did. We as a Government are sorry about how we dealt with the troubles in the past. However, we must also remember that there were attacks after attacks after attacks. That is why we should put Bloody Sunday in context. The report says that paramilitary activities were taking place on that day. The official IRA fired the second shot and the Provisional IRA was active with weapons in the city on that day. That does not excuse at all or in any way the behaviour of the soldiers on that day, but we should not forget that, in the end, this was an environment into which many people came untrained, ill aware of what they were being asked to do and perhaps led by the wrong leaders. That might be a criticism that we can strongly lay at the door of the Parachute Regiment on that day.

It is not for me, nearly 40 years later, to judge individual soldiers. What we should not forget—this is why the activity of paramilitaries on that day does not detract from what is right or wrong—is that every soldier is responsible for what he or she does down the end of a barrel of a gun. It is their responsibility—the individual’s responsibility and that of the junior ranks of local leaders—to realise that, in the end, their actions have consequences.

Having been a platoon commander in Iraq, I have been frightened. I know what it is like to sit behind barbed wire and concrete bunkers. It very quickly becomes “them and us”. It is easy to dehumanise the community outside the front gate. It is very easy if you are spat at, shouted at and abused, to go back with your men, your soldiers and your team and describe the situation as them and us. That is not an excuse for a platoon commander, a company commander or a commanding officer to say, “All bets are off; all rules can be ignored”. That is simply not right. We are there as officers and leaders of men to protect the weak, to uphold discipline and ensure decency on the street—irrespective of whether the communities are Catholic or Protestant. That is our job.

I could not go to Northern Ireland and undo history. That was not my job at 20 years of age. I was not going to allow myself to be blamed for history—something about which we need to be careful when it comes to the Saville inquiry. We cannot blame other generations and undo it as if it were an easy thing to do on “The X Factor”, for example. I knew, however, that if I stood by decency on the streets and did what was right by the people I was there to protect, we would go some way to ensuring peace.

What is very important from my point of view is that we carried the yellow card, which set out the rules of engagement on the streets of Northern Ireland. It is a good document; it has been finessed over the years, but remains a good document. It is interesting that the Saville report clearly says that no soldier involved in the shootings on that day would have had the authority to open fire if they had followed the yellow card issued to them for dealing with the troubles even at that time. These are good rules of engagement: they are clear and fair and require every soldier to take aimed shots. We should not ignore or excuse the facts by claiming that the environment or the context detracts from the responsibility of our soldiers. It is also the case that the same does not detract from the responsibility of paramilitaries. Every terrorist in Northern Ireland must take responsibility for what they did with a bomb, what they did with a rifle and what they did when they intimidated their communities.

I would like to pay tribute to the Social Democratic and Labour party in Northern Ireland, which throughout the troubles recognised the consequence of violence. Throughout it all, its members spoke up in communities where they themselves were intimidated by other republican parties that felt that they could use peace on the one hand, but could use violence on the other. We should not neglect to pay tribute to the parties that pursued peace on both sides throughout the peace agreement.

The real issue is the future. The former Secretary of State came to the Dispatch Box today to speak about the past. That is interesting, as when he was Secretary of State he rarely mentioned the Finucane or other inquiries and rarely raised issues about the past, which now seems to have come to the forefront. The real challenge is for the future and it revolves around whether we are going to move forward and accept devolution. Will Northern Ireland one day be prepared for a Sinn Fein First Minister? Other real questions are how to deal with dissidents and when we will say goodbye to the past.

We can argue about whether we should have one more inquiry, or two more, or four more, or five more or 10 more, but at the end of the day it will come down to three or four main points: paramilitaries killed innocent people; soldiers sometimes got involved in unlawful killings; and the innocent people of Northern Ireland suffered. How many more inquiries are just going to repeat the same points? The future is what counts—and that means peace, which is the only thing that will wash away the blood.