It can now be proclaimed to the world that the dead and the wounded of Bloody Sunday were innocent one and all, gunned down in their own streets by soldiers who had been given to believe they could kill with perfect impunity.

The Parachute Regiment is the front-line assassin for Britain’s political and military elite. The report of the Saville Tribunal confirms this. It was the paras mission in Derry to massacre people they thought of as enemies of the state. They will have known that murder is what was expected of them when they erupted onto our streets.

Bloody Sunday wounded Derry. We may hope that from today we can begin to bind up those wounds. But we recognise, too, that the issues arising from the Report go wider and deeper than Derry’s concerns.

When the state kills its citizens it is the interests of all that those responsible be held to account. It is not just Derry, or one section of the people of Derry, it is democracy itself that needs to know what happened here on January 30 1972. The British people need to know. The world needs to know.

Our campaign in the first instance was for justice for our loved ones. But we didn’t fight only for ourselves. We have tried to stand in the place of others who have suffered the same grief and grievous wrong at the hands of unaccountable power and who may never win any official inquiry, who may never have their truth told. We are mindful of the victims of the Ballymurphy massacre by men of the Parachute Regiment in August 1971, of the families of the two men murdered by the paras on the Shankill Road in September 1972. And of all families bereaved by the paratroopers and other state forces over the course of the conflict. And of all who have died here, from whatever background, at whomever’s hand.

Bloody Sunday was the price the Bogside paid for Free Derry. So it is, always and everywhere. Just as the civil rights movement of 40 years ago was part of something huge happening all over the world, so the repression that came upon us was the same as is suffered by ordinary people everywhere who dare stand up against injustice. Sharpville. Grozny. Tiananmen Square. Dafur. Fallujah. Gaza. Let our truth stand as their truth too.

Bloody Sunday was a great injustice. But the fight for truth and justice has been an inspiration, too. It has deepened our sense of who we are. And made us more aware, that we are also citizens of the world. Nobody who struggles for justice will be a stranger here. Nobody who dies in the struggle for justice will be forgotten here.

The Provisional IRA was almost finished before Bloody Sunday. Its numbers were down to around 30 and its popularity within the community was on the wane. But Bloody Sunday reinvigorated the Provisionals and they never again lost support.

The extraordinary misjudgement of the Army and the Government has never been fully detailed before now. In our film, Secret History: Bloody Sunday, which was shown almost 20 years ago, we revealed the extent of the cover-up and the serious questions that still hung over the whole episode. During almost two years of research, we spoke to almost everyone involved, including a number of the soldiers and many of the officers as well as the victims and their families and hundreds of witnesses. Saville has backed up our findings and brought some further clarity to the events of the day.

I have no doubt that some of the soldiers – especially those around the front of the Rossville Flats – believed that they had come under fire. The sound of the first shots, fired by the Lieutenant over the heads of the crowd, reverberated from the front of the Flats and those coming up the central spine felt that they were under fire. The soldiers on the other side of the infiltration area – around Glenfada Park – almost certainly knew that they were not under attack and fired recklessly and with utter abandon.

Those soldiers had been wound up by the officers to a high pitch. They had not been fed for two days and then were given raw steak in the hour before the mission. As they unloaded from their armoured personnel carriers they were urged to ‘Go, Paras, Go – Go Get ‘Em’ by the senior officers. Any attempt to lay the blame firmly at the door of the squaddies would be misplaced. There is no doubt that some of the personnel acted viciously and with no provocation but they had been stretched to such a pitch by those in charge that it really is no wonder. If any charges are to be brought then they should be brought against the senior officers involved and possibly all the way up to higher echelons of Whitehall and Heath Government.

However, I know from my extensive dealings with the families that this is not the wish of the vast majority. They now have what they wanted – an admission that the whole exercise was misguided, unlawful and reckless. To bring individual charges against individual soldiers would open a whole new can of worms that extends throughout the time of the Troubles. While there has been no full ‘Truth and Reconciliation Committee’ in the Six Counties there is a widespread understanding among the community today that the Troubles are behind them and that to reopen old wounds would only cause a renewal of bad feeling and possible hostility – no one wants a return to violence.

Our film and the subsequent documentary by Peter Taylor of the BBC helped to trigger the renewal of calls for a full and open inquiry into Bloody Sunday and thus opened a door for the Good Friday agreement. Those films were the catalyst that began the process and I am delighted today that our findings have been vindicated. That it took 18 years after the films were shown for the results to be published is a damning indictment of our judicial system. £200 million is far too high a price for elementary justice and will act as a deterrent for others who wish to re-examine serious crimes of the past.

We now need to urgently examine the processes of our judicial establishment to determine a better way of running inquiries of this kind, for they are fundamental planks in the protection of our human rights. An inquiry into the inquiry may seem like a costly and needless expense on top of the huge sums of money already spent but it is absolutely necessary to re-establish a methodology for such situations.

In the meantime we should share the relief and joy of the families that justice has finally been seen to be done and look forward to a better and more peaceful future for an area that has suffered so much division and violence over such a long period of its history.

Tony Cook was the Chief Researcher on Praxis Films award-winning documentary ‘Secret History: Bloody Sunday’ shown in 1992 on Channel 4

But the report is not flawless. When it comes to the allocation of blame to the soldiers, it follows a pattern of convicting the lower orders while exculpating the higher command, and dismissing the possibility of political leaders had been even passively complicit in the events.

The individual paras who fired the shots that killed or wounded civil rights marchers are damned for the roles that they played. Additionally, Lieutenant Colonel Derek Wilford, commander of the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, is singled out for obloquy.  It was his disobedience of orders, says Saville, which put the paras into position to carry out the killing. Had he followed orders, the massacre would never have happened. Thus, an undisciplined battalion commander and a small squad of kill-crazy foot soldiers did it all.

The effect is to insulate the rest of the British army from blame. The report was brilliant for the Bloody Sunday families, but it wasn’t a bad result for the British army either.

David Cameron might have found it more difficult to disown those involved in the atrocity so forthrightly had Saville included in his list of culprits, say, Major General Robert Ford, Commander of Land Forces, Northern Ireland, at the time, or General Sir Michael Jackson, second-in-command to Wilford on the day, later army Chief of Staff and NATO commander in Kosovo.

Ford, second in seniority in the North only to the general officer commanding, commissioned the Bloody Sunday battle plan, ‘Operation Forecast’, and ordered the paras to Derry to carry it out. In the weeks before Bloody Sunday, he had made plain his frustration at the failure of Derry-based regiments to bring the Bogside no-go area to heel.

In a document published by the Inquiry dated 7 January 1972, Ford declared himself ‘disturbed’ by the attitude of army and police chiefs in Derry, and added: ‘I am coming to the conclusion that the minimum force necessary to achieve a restoration of law and order is to shoot selected ringleaders amongst the DYH (Derry Young Hooligans).’

Insulates political and military leaders

Ford took the decision to deploy the paras six days before Bloody Sunday, overruling a message the same day from Derry commander Brigadier Pat MacLellan indicating that he and local police chief Frank Lagan believed that any direct confrontation with the civil rights marchers should be avoided. Ford also held to the plan in face of strongly expressed opposition from senior Derry-based officers. On the day, although with no operational role, he travelled to Derry and took up position at the edge of the Bogside, shouting ‘Go on the paras’, as they ran past him through a barbed-wire barricade towards the Rossville Street killing ground.

Saville suggests that Wilford allowed his soldiers in the Bogside to exceed MacLellan’s orders ‘not to fight a running battle’. But nowhere in the report is it considered whether Wilford and the paras might have believed or suspected that MacLellan’s orders need not be regarded in all the circumstances as binding.

The possibility that Ford’s decisions in advance and comportment on the day played a part in the way matters developed is brusquely dismissed: Ford ‘neither knew nor had reason to know at any stage that his decision would or was likely to result in soldiers firing unjustifiably on that day,’ Saville declares in chapter four of his report’s first volume.

In the same chapter, Saville insulates political and military leaders generally from blame: ‘It was also submitted that in dealing with the security situation in Northern Ireland generally, the authorities (the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland Governments and the Army) tolerated if not encouraged the use of unjustified lethal force; and that this was the cause or a contributory cause of what happened on Bloody Sunday. We found no evidence of such toleration or encouragement.’

This is remarkable. Numerous incidents over the previous year might have suggested toleration if not encouragement of unjustified force. The most egregious had happened six months before Bloody Sunday, when the First Paras were involved in killing 11 unarmed civilians over three days in Ballymurphy in west Belfast. Newspapers of the period, particularly Nationalist newspapers, were carrying regular complaints, many of them plausible, of unjustified and sometimes lethal violence by soldiers against civilians. Toleration of this behaviour might have been inferred from, for example, the fact that no inquiry had been held into the Ballymurphy – neither massacre nor any soldier disciplined or statement issued expressing regret.

Saville dismissal of the suggestion of a ‘culture of tolerance’ would be unremarkable, if by ‘evidence’ he meant testimony to the Inquiry. He had at an early stage declined to examine prior events in the North on the reasonable ground that to subject the Ballymurphy incident, for example, to the same level of scrutiny as Bloody Sunday would have made the Tribunal’s task impossible. But this makes the statement that, ‘We found no evidence …’ puzzling: the Tribunal had decided not to gather such evidence.
 
Many who read through the body of the report will be puzzled, too, by Saville’s acceptance of the explanation eventually offered by Jackson of his role in compiling the ‘shot-list’, which formed the basis of the initial cover-up of the killings.

Questions over ‘shot list’

Jackson had provided the Tribunal with a detailed account of his movements and involvement in the Bloody Sunday events and took the witness stand in London in April 2003. Nowhere in his statement or his April evidence did he refer to compiling the shot list or other documents giving a version of what had happened. His role emerged the following month during evidence from Major Ted Loden, who described how, late in the afternoon of Bloody Sunday, he had taken statements from the shooters and plotted map references showing the trajectory of their shots.

However, when a number of documents including the original of the shot list were then produced, the list was not in Loden’s handwriting but in the handwriting of the now Chief of Staff of the British Army. How could this have come about, Loden was asked, ‘Well, I cannot answer that question’, came the reply.

In the weeks leading up to the vote, Green Party leader John Gormley announced that the new programme would be transformational – a statement that succeeded in focusing media attention on the new agreement negotiations and away from the controversial NAMA. The NAMA solution had created widespread unease among party members, but what many had failed to realise was that the two Green cabinet ministers had already signed off on NAMA at cabinet meetings.

Despite John Gormley’s stage-managed and dramatic ‘transformational’ announcement, only a political dilettante would ever believe that there could be a transformation of the political policy landscape under a Fianna Fáil-led government. Yet Green parliamentary party members and ministers continued to nod through budget cuts in social welfare entitlements, along with cuts to the disabled, the blind and carers.

And as if to add insult to injury, the Greens even walked through the yes lobby in support of a blasphemy bill, championed by the hard-line Fianna Fáil minister for justice, equality and law reform. The same minister has decimated the Equality Authority and the Combat Poverty Agency. The overall budget for 2010, agreed by cabinet and supported by the two Green Party ministers, identified savings of EUR4 billion by targeting child benefit, the young unemployed, the blind and community support schemes. Public sector pay has also been reduced, with all workers, including the lowest paid, getting sharp wage cuts.

While all political parties represented in the Dáil have accepted the need to balance the national finances and agreed the need for cuts, there has been widespread condemnation of the options chosen, with accusations that the budget was callous and uncreative in its approach. For example, recent research has shown that if tax breaks on personal income and corporation tax were reduced to average EU levels, their cost to the exchequer would fall from EUR7.2 to EUR2.2 billion. This EUR5 billion saving would be more than EUR1 billion more than the cuts targeted at the less well-off.

A key problem for the Green leaders is that, despite much public handwringing, they are firmly embedded in a government that is lurching from crisis to crisis. Ireland’s economic collapse has exposed grossly inept if not corrupt practices at the highest levels in both the political and financial spheres, and in the senior public and civil service. But not a single person has been sacked or jailed as a result.

So where does this leave the Greens? Many now believe that the decision to enter government in 2007 was a major tactical and strategic error. The Irish Greens had two choices – to go into government in a minority position and prop up a socially-conservative, centre-right administration, or to remain on the opposition benches, giving the organisation time to broaden and deepen the party’s electoral strength and influence.

By staying out of government, the Greens could have greatly increased their membership and local authority base and expanded the Green parliamentary party with a view to government in a subsequent election. Instead, the Greens got a drubbing at last year’s local and European elections.

The Greens’ strategy has been to define the party’s policy on narrow environmental lines, appearing to ditch its equality and social justice platforms and moving the party to a more centrist, ‘Green-lite’ position. Its minor environmental gains, while admirable, have been dwarfed by its support for massive bail-outs of financial institutions, coupled with draconian cuts to the most vulnerable. In essence, the Greens are perceived as upholding policies that support the most culpable to the detriment of the most vulnerable.

To be fair, any government in power in Ireland in the current economic situation would face a backlash from the public, and being in government will always involve compromise. The lesson to be learned from the Irish Greens’ experience is that, before entering into any coalition agreement, you must adopt clear and unambiguous bottom-line policies – and stick to them.

A former Dublin city councillor and deputy lord mayor, Bronwen Maher was a senior member of the Irish Green Party for 20 years before she resigned early last year in opposition to the policy direction taken by the Fianna Fáil/Green coalition government. Maher is now co-chair of the Irish Labour Party’s environment and sustainability policy committee

Our game was based on speculation, but European leaders seem to have come to a similar conclusion. While ten national referendums were originally planned on the EU constitution in 2005, the repackaged treaty saw no votes scheduled anywhere – except Ireland, whose constitution forced it to hold one.

In the wake of the Irish result, these committed democrats have now begun to describe referendums in general as a ‘tool for dictators’, as France’s former Europe minister and current centre-right MEP, Alain Lamassoure, did three days after the Irish vote.

Other EU leaders have called for Ireland, whose people committed the cardinal sin of rejecting the current political path that the EU is taking, to be kicked out of the bloc altogether. Among them were Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister who is touted as the country’s next chancellor (although he was quickly reined in) and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the celebrated 1968 student leader who is now a Green MEP.

In suggesting that Ireland leave Europe, Cohn-Bendit even compared the country’s No voters to Italians who cast their ballots for the anti-immigrant Northern League. It is an old rhetorical trick: to oppose the current EU is to be ‘anti-Europe’, and to be anti-Europe is to be xenophobic – never mind the fact that the EU itself has just proposed measures to detain migrants for up to 18 months.

Political leaders in a pickle

None of this can disguise the fact that the EU’s leaders are in a bit of a pickle. There is no appetite for a substantive root-and-branch renegotiation of the treaty. But even if there were, the neoliberal and militarist limits of mainstream European political discourse would not enable them to address the real reasons why the Irish voted No. Any new proposal would be no different in substance from the existing document – just as the Lisbon Treaty is no different from the constitution that preceded it.

There will be no Constitution Mark III. Brussels will instead allow for only three possible responses, none of which any progressive should support. The first is a two-speed Europe, in which the rest of the EU pushes ahead without Ireland – although the leaders of other small states would raise their voices against this should it begin to be seriously considered. They have already noted how different the current response has been to when France voted No and the constitution was shelved. Would Europe move ahead without them as well should they have objections to anything in the future?

The second possibility is just stumbling forward with the union as it is, working on the basis of the previous Nice Treaty. The genesis of the current treaty and the constitution was the idea that with 27 members, the existing arrangement was too unwieldy. However, since the adhesion of the new member states in 2004, the EU has chugged along with little of the institutional paralysis that had been predicted.

The trouble with this option is that in a multi-polar world facing escalating resource scarcity and concomitant instability, the politicians and technocrats in Brussels know that to maintain their vision of Europe’s global position, deeper European economic, political and military integration is vital – a vision that is even shared by Tory MEPs.

The third, and most likely, scenario is the cobbling together of a package of opt-outs that apply to Ireland, and then force the Irish to vote a second time. The shock of this option, which was mooted just minutes after the referendum result was announced, is that Lisbon was allegedly intended to make Europe more transparent and democratic.

Yet telling people to keep on voting until they come up with the ‘right’ answer hardly amounts to respecting the democratic wishes of the people of Europe.

Why Ireland voted No

In Ireland, as in the Netherlands and France at the time of the 2005 referendums, almost the entire political, economic and cultural establishment strongly backed the treaty. This included all the mainstream political parties (including the previously Euro-critical Greens, who are now safely ensconced in government), along with the church, all the major newspapers, the farmers’ association, employers and some unions.

In contrast, a majority of women, young people, middle-aged people, blue-collar workers, white-collar workers, urban voters, rural voters, housewives and students opposed the treaty. The only demographic where a majority voted Yes was among rich old men, as the Economist noted.

There are numerous reasons why the Irish voted No – based on concerns ranging from growing EU militarism to the bloc’s democratic deficit and attacks on social services and workers’ rights.

While some of this opposition to the treaty did come from the right, the No campaign was markedly the territory of the left, whether socialist, Irish republican, alter-globalist or pacifist. There were various No campaigns, but even the neoliberal No group Libertas – despite arguing that people should vote No due to worries that Ireland would lose its low-tax status (if only!) – focused its campaign more on democratic concerns than tax issues.

Indeed, only six per cent of voters said they plumped for the No side to ‘protect our tax system’, according to a Eurobarometer flash poll commissioned hours after the result by the EU Commission to find out why the vote was lost.

Likewise, for all the reports in the continental press that Catholic Ireland was afraid that the Charter of Fundamental Rights – given additional legal weight by Lisbon – would allow Brussels to fly in armies of gay proselytisers to convert the young, install abort-o-matic machines in every kitchen, and euthanise all senior citizens at the first sign of incontinence, such ‘moral issues’ figured as a concern among only two per cent of No voters, according to the same survey.

For as long as the arguments behind the No are willfully misunderstood, any opt-outs will not address the key concerns of Irish voters.

Matching the masses

Sinn Fein, which was the only significant party to support a No, is now considering switching to supporting the Yes side in a second referendum should there be sufficient opt-outs on protecting Irish workers’ rights and the country’s tradition of neutrality.

As People’s Movement spokesperson and former Green MEP Patricia McKenna told me, ‘Any opt-outs for Ireland miss the point – however they may or may not protect Ireland, what about the rest of Europe? How do we protect the rest of Europe from the militarisation of Europe and the lack of democracy?’

‘Those on the No side are more pro-European than those supporting the Yes,’ she continued. ‘Yes supporters are not doing the EU any favours. What is contained in the treaty only encourages greater anti-EU sentiment. People won’t put up with this forever, and that’s the real threat to Europe.’

What is most striking here is how, for a third time since Ireland rejected the Nice Treaty in 2001, the left of the left has matched the politics of the mass of the people in an EU vote, with almost the entire establishment lined up against it. Yet during general elections the voters return, albeit in diminishing numbers, to the mainline parties.

If this political space is to be maximised for the left, we have to go on the offensive. This is easy to say, but it is sometimes harder for the ostensibly internationalist left to overcome national parochialisms than EU leaders. Yet a genuinely pan-European extra-parliamentary left should be born in the confidence that, on every issue bar immigration, our beliefs closely match those of the mass of Europeans.

September’s European Social Forum should resolve that any attempt to force the Irish to vote again be met with Europe-wide demonstrations. More importantly, it could call for an Estates-General of the people of Europe in which every popular sector – environmental groups, human rights and development NGOs, rank-and-file workers, students, pensioners, women, minorities and immigrants – is represented, in order to forge a counter-proposal for the social Europe we want to see.