The Bloody Sunday Inquiry/ Day 433: The closing phase of the inquiry into the killings of 13 civilians and the wounding of 14 others by British paratroopers during a march in Derry on January 30th, 1972, was told yesterday that Bloody Sunday has remained controversial in almost every aspect.
In his closing statement, the inquiry's counsel, Mr Christopher Clarke QC, said one of the main issues to consider was whether the "tragedy of Bloody Sunday" was caused by a "risky" plan for the day, known as Operation Forecast, which was drawn up by the army, by someone who had no clear idea of what the soldiers planned to do when they were deployed in the Bogside.
Mr Clarke also said the tribunal might conclude that the reason why the paratroopers who opened fire had not given a justifiable explanation was because no such explanation existed.
However, he also said that the inquiry, chaired by Lord Saville of Newdigate, might "take the view that uncomfortable facts have been airbrushed out of history and that the situation the soldiers faced was radically different to that of which the civilian evidence speaks".
Mr Clarke said that following 432 days of evidence from 931 witnesses, among them civilians, politicians, soldiers, police officers and intelligence officers, there was still no indication from the soldiers as to who shot who.
He said the inquiry should stand back from the morass of material and the myriad issues to focus on the central question.
"Why and how did 13 people come to be killed and 14 to be wounded within something like 10 minutes on January 30th, 1972, in this city?" he asked.
Mr Clarke said he was assuming all 27 people shot had been shot by soldiers. "If that assumption is correct, it has to be said that even after many days of evidence, the answer to even the first question, who shot them, is not, on the soldiers' evidence, in any way clear," he said.
Mr Clarke said another consideration was that the paratroopers retaliated swiftly after they had come under fire when they were deployed into the Bogside.
"In such a situation it may not be possible to link a particular soldier with an individual victim. Another view is that a party's belief that the soldiers appear on one view to have hit not one of the gunmen or nail-bombers at whom they fired or, if they did, to have shot 27 others in addition."
Mr Clarke said that in the autumn before Bloody Sunday, the Northern Ireland intelligence committee, known as GEN 47, met the then prime minister, Mr Edward Heath, who said the first priority "should be the defeat of the gunman using military means".
Mr Clarke said that following that meeting, a number of themes ran through subsequent government documents. "One is that the defeat of the gunman is the first priority, another is that a purely military situation was unlikely to succeed.
"A third is that if there was progress in the security front on the defeat of the gunman, there could, would or might be a window of opportunity and the Protestant community satisfied the security was being brought under control, but before the success of that exercise brought intransigence towards reform," he told the inquiry.
There was no evidence that a memorandum drawn up by the army general officer commanding, Gen Robert Ford, prior to Bloody Sunday, which suggested that selected ringleaders should be shot had been shown to Ministry of Defence officials.
"Nor is there any evidence that the memorandum reached any of the relevant politicians or other Whitehall departments, nor is there any evidence that the ideas inside it played any part in the planning of Operation Forecast," the army's plan for Bloody Sunday.
Mr Clarke said the inquiry would wish to "consider whether there was inadequate planning as a result of which the operation as carried out was likely to be unsuccessful and indeed risky.
"If it were so to conclude, it would mean the tragedy of Bloody Sunday arose from an operation that was unlikely to achieve its ends and carried out on the orders of someone who had no clear idea of what the arrest force planned to do at the time when he (Brigadier Pat MacLellan, the then army commander in Derry), launched it."