Bloody Sunday Inquiry

Lord Bew Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew]

My Lords, in his recent memoirs, the former Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, addresses the issue of the inquiry which he asked the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, to establish into the events of Bloody Sunday. In his memoires, Mr Blair said that as time passed and as more and more money was spent, he became more and more jaded and asked himself whether he had done the right thing and thought perhaps it was not a justifiable move. However, in the end, when the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, reported and there was that remarkable response by the people of Derry, Mr Blair came to the conclusion that he had done the right thing and that the expenditure was justified. I regard Mr Blair’s attitude in this respect as being entirely understandable and I think that it would find many echoes in your Lordships' House. I have more respect for Mr Blair’s work as Prime Minister than is probably now fashionable in your Lordships' House, but I am unwilling to leave the matter quite there.

I must first declare an interest as one of the two historical advisers to the tribunal, appointed in the late 1990s. The other was my friend, Professor Paul Arthur of the University of Ulster. I should describe briefly, so that there can be no misunderstanding of my subsequent remarks, the role of the historical adviser. It was, first, to provide historical background papers about the situation in Derry and Northern Ireland for the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville; at a later date, to advise about a document search—where documents were likely to be found in government archives based on my own experience as a historian—and suggest places to look; and, finally, to do an analysis of those documents. All this work was completed in the last century and all of it is a matter of public knowledge. The work is posted on the inquiry’s website. In fact, I had never spoken to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, until this afternoon, just before he gave evidence on his inquiry to the House of Commons Select Committee.

That was the nature of our involvement. We were extraordinarily fortunate in terms of documents and personnel. Very few documents that seemed to be relevant had disappeared. Let us contrast that with the more recent inquiry into the death of Mr Billy Wright, which cost £42 million and was considered to be much less satisfactory. That was not because of any absence of professionalism on the part of those who worked on that inquiry; it was simply because, although the events connected with Mr Wright’s death were only 10 years ago, a surprisingly large number of the dramatis personae were dead whereas a surprisingly large number of the dramatis personae of Bloody Sunday, 38 years ago, were still alive. It was also because many documents in the Billy Wright case had taken a walk whereas the same documents in respect of Bloody Sunday had not. So we were extremely fortunate, particularly in the matter of the survival of documents.

Even for £200 million, no inquiry can give the absolute truth. In the 1880s in London we had the special commission of inquiry into Parnellism and crime. Relevant documents with regard to the conclusions of that special commission have become available only in the past 10 or 20 years. I am absolutely certain that, over time, documents will become available and memoirs written which will change parts at least of the story as given by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville. That is not a reflection on the professionalism and lucidity which he has brought to his report; it is simply a reflection on the difficulty of establishing the absolute truth of these events. I fully support the conclusions that he has reached, but since the report has been published I have heard from a nationalist, Derry and Bogside point of view criticisms of certain points which seem to be at least serious, and I have heard people with connections with the Army criticise other points in a way which seems also to have a degree of seriousness. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, has done a remarkable job, in particular in the handling of sensitive intelligence matters which I did not think could be handled so well, but even at that price, you do not get a guarantee of absolute truth. What you get is a very good job and a remarkable piece of work by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville.

I remind noble Lords of the real context of why we got the Saville inquiry in the first place. It was not because Lord Widgery said that those who died were guilty—because he did not; it was because Mr Gerry Adams and the leadership of Sinn Fein said that there was a conspiracy on the part of the British state to bring about these events. The Saville inquiry was set up because a calculation was made by the then Prime Minister, as part of the peace process that led to the successful negotiation of the Good Friday agreement some months later, that it was necessary to bring Sinn Fein along. It was an entirely defensible and correct political calculation on the part of the Prime Minister of the day. But the actual circumstances are often misrepresented.

Let me explain. What did Lord Widgery say in April 1972 about those who died? In the conclusion of his report he stated:

“Each soldier was his own judge of whether he had identified a gunman. Their training made them aggressive and quick in decision and some showed more restraint in opening fire than others. At one end of the scale some soldiers showed a high degree of responsibility; at the other … firing bordered on the reckless”.

He concluded:

“None of the deceased or wounded is proved to have been shot whilst handling a firearm or bomb”.

Lord Widgery's report is inadequate in many ways. It does not reach out to the people of the Bogside who suffered so much pain on that day, but he did not say that those who fell were guilty of any crime. If there is any doubt about that, John Major, the Prime Minister before Tony Blair, said in the House of Commons that those who died on that day should be considered innocent. There was therefore no need as such to address that question. There were other important questions that rightly had to be addressed and I hope I showed by the fact that I was happy to work for the inquiry that I believed it was important to get to the truth of these matters. But it is not the case that Lord Widgery actually said that those who fell on the day were guilty.

On the other hand, Mr Adams's views, taken two months before the establishment of the inquiry on 7 December 1997 to the Independent, are very clear. He said that one question that is very much on people's minds is Bloody Sunday. He said:

“Everybody knows it was a premeditated attack as part of the military-political strategy at that time. You'd think it would be relatively easy to set up an independent inquiry to sort everything out, but to do that the Prime Minister has to challenge all that stuff. That’s the test”.

It was as a response to that challenge that Tony Blair took the correct decision to establish the Saville inquiry. But it is quite important to realise the real context of the political decision.

The immediate casus belli is a claim of conspiracy. In my view, the release of documents before the turn of the century made it clear that there was no conspiracy at the level of the British Cabinet, no conspiracy at the level of the Northern Ireland Cabinet and no conspiracy at the level of the higher reaches of the Army or the Ministry of Defence. That was for the price of £20,000 or £30,000. A large part of the tribunal's conclusions state that there was no conspiracy. I do not say that the many other tens of millions of pounds subsequently racked up in this century were irrelevant or wrong. This afternoon, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, before the Select Committee in another place, made a very serious point that the Ministry of Defence had lost contact with many of the soldiers and it was necessary to pay private inquiry firms to establish contact with many of the soldiers involved. I regard that and many other things that he gave instance of this afternoon as entirely legitimate expenses that the inquiry subsequently entered into.

There is a point here about the peculiarity of the English in these difficult situations to lawyer-up with this model of inquiry. The Belgians, confronted with the difficult question in their own past of the possible involvement of the Belgian state authorities in the murder of Patrice Lumumba, had a commission of historians. The Swedes, confronted with issues about how their security forces had operated during the Cold War, had a commission of historians. The Dutch, confronted with issues of how their army performed in the Balkans—sensitive, difficult and painful issues for the Dutch people—had a commission of historians. In England, we lawyer-up. There is a certain model of inquiry and certain expenses inevitably follow from that inquiry, which is part of the reason already given by the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Clifton, in this respect.

I shall give noble Lords another example. The eight days of the former Prime Minister, Mr Edward Heath, in the witness box, contributed absolutely nothing to the final conclusions of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, while contributing a significant amount to the earnings of the barristers involved in the questioning. All we needed to know about the former Prime Minister’s views about Bloody Sunday were in the Cabinet conclusions of two weeks before, when it was perfectly clear that his opinions and attitudes about what to do about Derry were, if anything, benign and conciliatory, and certainly did not edge or lead towards the murderous events that took place. Then there is the case of Mr David Shayler, the intelligence officer. His evidence on a key intelligence question took one hour, but there were several days of lawyers asking questions to establish his credibility before he could go into the witness box.

So there is a problem with how we do this type of work, and its cost. We regard Saville as having been successful and benign, in certain important respects, regarding the impact of his report on Northern Ireland. We must also face up to the fact that we have new inquiries coming in, one of which is rumoured to cost £52 million and another £40 million. We are very fortunate indeed that the Saville inquiry, partly through luck, turned out to be so authoritative in some many crucial respects. Already, in the case of the Billy Wright inquiry, we have an example of a very expensive inquiry, costing £32 million, which is widely regarded as somewhat unsatisfactory in its impact in Northern Ireland, although through no fault of those carrying it out. That is an awful lot of hip replacements and other operations in the National Health Service. Hundreds of millions of pounds are racked up on this, again and again.

I conclude by making an observation about Mr Blair’s opening case for setting up the inquiry in the House of Commons. He said about the Armed Forces, I think entirely correctly, that,

“it would be a disservice to them to believe that they should have anything to fear from an inquiry that establishes the truth, where people accept that people were killed in circumstances in which they should not have been killed. Far from undermining support for our armed services, I believe that … we underline the fact that, unlike the terrorists, we do not have anything to fear from inquiries into the truth”.—[Official Report, Commons, 29/1/1998; col. 512.]

I believe that Mr Blair spoke the truth that day and that it is a truth that is much to be respected.

The truth now is that a Martian who came down to earth and listened to the post-Troubles debate about Northern Ireland would conclude, after listening to the BBC news on a regular basis, that the following people died during the Troubles—those who died on Bloody Sunday and those who died in the other celebrated cases in which we have inquiries, which we have mentioned this afternoon. The Martian would also conclude that we have a very serious problem with collusion. In certain cases there appears to be evidence that there has been an element of collusion between state forces and loyalist paramilitaries, but the number of republicans killed by loyalist paramilitaries is just over 30. So even if all these were cases of collusion in which state forces had helped the loyalist paramilitaries, that would be less than 1 per cent of the total of those who died during the Troubles. It is also worth bearing in mind—and it has already been referred to—that for every one member of the IRA who fell during the Troubles, eight members of the security forces fell. Those are very important facts that have to be kept in mind.

We need now an attitude towards the past that does not privilege certain deaths. It is quite correct that we have led the way in those cases in which the state has behaved badly, but in a modern democracy we need to have more than that. Why? Because it demoralises the centre ground in Northern Ireland and those people with conventional morality who cannot figure out this way of dealing with matters. Most importantly, we rely on our Army and security services to help us in another and probably greater threat of terrorism. We need those in our Army and security services to know that while we will of course be vigilant with respect to wrong-doing, we also respect the work that they are doing and that the way in which we approach these matters, including the story of the Troubles, reflects that respect.