THE BLOODY SUNDAY INQUIRY - DAY 215: The former Stormont prime minister, Brian Faulkner, publicly blamed the IRA for the Bloody Sunday deaths, but privately questioned the British army's assertion that most of the victims had been terrorists, it emerged yesterday.
Dr Robert Ramsay, who was principal private secretary to the late Mr Faulkner in 1972, said in evidence that when he told Mr Faulkner by phone that first reports were that the army had returned fire against terrorists, he replied that he could not believe that all, or even most, of those killed had been terrorists.
However, the inquiry was also shown the text of the statement issued publicly by Mr Faulkner on the evening of January 30th, 1972, in the aftermath of the shootings. In it he said: "Those who organised this march must bear a terrible responsibility for having urged people to lawlessness and for having provided the IRA with the opportunity of again bringing death to our streets".
The inquiry also heard that evidence by several senior Stormont civil servants concurs that key strategic decisions were often taken by Mr Faulkner or his home affairs minister in private meetings with security chiefs rather than the formal setting of cabinet or committee meetings.
Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, deputy secretary to the Stormont cabinet in 1972 (and later head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service), in a statement to the inquiry, recalls that important matters were decided in private before meetings of the joint security committee (JSC), which included British advisers and army chiefs.
Dr Ramsay was asked yesterday if decisions were taken outside the JSC and outside the cabinet. He replied that they were "certainly prepared outside", but the JSC was the recognised forum in which they were formalised and recorded "so that the various people could refer back to them and say that that was a decision."
(Another witness, Mr David Gilliland, a former Stormont press officer, also agreed that he had the impression that the JSC was asked to rubber-stamp decisions which had been made elsewhere.)
Dr Ramsay was asked by Mr Michael Mansfield QC, for a number of victims' families, if Mr Faulkner, as prime minister, had given the army the impression that they could "get on and do the job, even if it included shooting civilians in a riot situation".
He replied: "Certainly not".
Mr Mansfield quoted from the Hansard record of a Stormont debate in May 1971, in which Mr Faulkner gave "a very strong warning" that the army "is not prepared to take half-measures with terrorists" and any soldier seeing any person with a weapon or acting suspiciously "may fire either to warn or may fire with effect, depending on the circumstances and without waiting for orders from anyone".
Counsel added that Mr Faulkner also said in that debate: "People who go on the streets in a riot situation deserve what is coming to them". Dr Ramsay said he did not recollect being at any meetings where such matters were discussed before these statements were made.
The witness said his own perception at the time was that there could not be progress on constitutional and social reforms in Northern Ireland until the security situation had been improved.
If there had been a marked improvement, the changes proposed by Mr Faulkner would have led to efficient new institutions "instead of the convoluted and fragmentary Mickey Mouse arrangements which eventually were foisted on the people of Northern Ireland by London, Dublin and, God help us, the Americans."
The witness also asserted that, after internment was introduced in 1971, "the Irish Republic took a cynically opportunist view of the situation, both providing a safe haven for men on the run and adding a loud condemnatory voice against the measure in the forum of world opinion."
Mr Faulkner, he said, at that time "was already aware, from our intelligence sources, of the involvement of senior political figures in Dublin in the financing and equipping of the Provisional IRA".
The inquiry continues today.