was introduced in Northern Ireland on 9 August 1971, and oversaw the ‘lifting’ of Catholics by the security forces and their imprisonment in internment camps (such as Magilligan) where they were unaccountably held and, in many cases, tortured. Catholic victims of these practices were interned on the slightest pretence – membership of an Irish language club or of the Gaelic Athletic Association, for instance.
Internment without trial discredited Stormont’s already diminished reputation in the eyes of the Catholic population still further: while the British army was directly responsible for interning, it was the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Brian Faulkner, who had introduced the measure. The fact that he and his cabinet could preside over such outrages made Stormont’s claims to be a government of law and order risible. For all the evidence of brutality within the walls of the internment camps, the nadir of the army’s misconduct was still to come in its reaction to the protest marches first at Magilligan on 23 January 1972 and then in Derry on 30 January 1972.
On 23 January 1972 (one Sunday before Bloody Sunday), Hume led a protest on Magilligan beach to demonstrate the anger in the Catholic community about internment. In response to the peaceful demonstration, the British Army’s Parachute Regiment fired plastic bullets at point-blank range at men, women and children, all of which was recorded by film cameras. The following exchange between Hume and the British army official responsible for the firing, likened by James Sharkey to the ‘encounter between Hugh O’Neill and the Earl of Essex four centuries earlier’,21 does indeed suggest a face-off not only between protesters and security forces, but a collision of civilisations:
Hume:Could you tell me on what authority that you’re holding us back from walking in there?
Soldier:This is a prohibited area. You are not allowed into a prohibited area.
Hume:Under what law – would you ask those men to stop firing rubber bullets at men and women please?
Soldier:They will not. They will stop it provided you keep away from the wire and don’t try to enter this prohibited area.
Hume:Under what law is it prohibited, or under what authority is it prohibited? Can you tell me?
Soldier:It has been prohibited by the police and by the government.
Hume:The police tell me that it is you who is in charge here, not them … Are you proud of the way your men have treated this crowd today?
Soldier:This crowd has tried to come into a prohibited area. You as a Member of Parliament could try to stop them.
Hume:You shot them with rubber bullets and gas. The crowd was marching over there. The leaders were going to speak to you. Before we even got here you opened fire … I wouldn’t be very proud of the conduct of your men today. They opened fire on a crowd of people and they were totally unarmed people …
Soldier:You are not allowed to march in there.
Hume:Why not? It does not belong to you.
Soldier:It is prohibited.
Hume:It does not belong to you. You cannot prohibit it ...
Soldier:It has been prohibited by your government.
Hume:[shouts] Who’s government?
Soldier:The government of Northern Ireland.
Hume:Not our government. And that’s why you’re here – because it is not our government.22
In his final response, John Hume MP had come to the point of repudiating the Northern Irish government. After years of commercial initiatives, of civil rights demonstrations or raising awareness through teaching, campaigns and journalistic articles and three years as an elected representative, Hume’s conclusion was simply that a government which would sanction such actions was not his. Now, Hume intimated, there was a palpable risk that people could be shot dead for simply expressing themselves through marches, and Magilligan was the moment when Hume ultimately rejected the tactic of civil disobedience. Hume later explained that he realised something new was happening, that the power of decision-making now lay with the military and there was no negotiating with the Parachute Regiment. Hume realised at Magilligan beach that something terrible could happen. Robert Fisk, who at that time covered Northern Ireland for the Times in London, remembers:
I realised there was something wrong with the Parachute Regiment. I do not know if it was a Parachute Regiment decision or whether the politicians and military people in Lisburn knew what the Parachute Regiment would do. But John was right. He spotted right at the start something had changed. I mean, when you looked at the soldiers of the Parachute Regiment – they were trained to fight and kill and beat.
The Parachute Regminent solider who Hume was remonstrating with in the iconic footage maintains that the British government had legitimised their presence, and that they could open fire with plastic bullets if people insisted on marching beyond the barbed wire boundary. Hume disputed his authority entirely and demanded to know the law that permitted his Regiment to act as it did. So wherein did authority lie for what happened at Magilligan? In Robert Fisk’s opinion:
For a long period in Northern Ireland, there was clearly among most Brits, however well educated [and] whatever their roles, politicians (not Whitelaw but beneath him) and certainly army officers, there was a very colonial mentality. Remember most of the senior officers in the British Army at that time had taken part in the retreat from Empire. They had been in Aden or they had been in Cyprus or they had been in some cases in Kenya. So they had seen the withdrawal of the Brits, the weakening power of Britain. As the years moved on, the army officers became slightly less colonial in their minds but the politicians became more so (Roy Mason is a classic example).
Hume’s view was that if the Parachute Regiment was willing to open fire with plastic bullets on the beach, they would do that and worse on the streets of Derry. Three days later, he spoke at a meeting at the Ardowen Hotel in Derry and made it clear that he would not participate in the march scheduled in Derry on 30 January. Not unlike Martin Luther King’s decision on ‘Turn Back Tuesday’, Hume urged people to regroup in the new political context engendered by the Magilligan attacks. Was Hume vindicated in urging people not to proceed with a march on the streets of Derry the following Sunday? Eamonn McCann, who was not present at the Magilligan Beach march on 23 January 1972, but did participate in the Bloody Sunday march the following Sunday in Derry, remembers:
There was a number of possible reactions to what had happened at Magilligan. One was John’s reaction to say well if that’s the way it is going to be, we want to draw back from it, that these people are going to kill us. The other reaction was we are not going to be intimidated, we are not going to be driven off the streets by these people. I thought myself at the time that the bigger the crowd we had, the less likely it was that there was going to be violence from the State. Nobody could foresee the future. Nobody knew how things were going to unfold. After half a century of stasis, events were moving very quickly in the North. We were hurtling into the future, and I think that people did not have time to stand back and try to work out what exactly was happening. John did not seem to grasp that what had happened at Magilligan made a big march in Derry the following week absolutely inevitable.
Like the march at Magilligan beach the weekend before, the march scheduled for 30 January 1972 in Derry City was an anti-internment march. However, the brutality exhibited by the Parachute Regiment at Magilligan had to a considerable degree reconfigured the march as a contest; it was the people’s defiance of the Parachute Regiment, which had been called in to ‘police’ the Derry demonstration. The presence of a multitude of television cameras and journalists was also certain to make the Derry march an even higher-profile event.
Of all the acts of terror and aggression that were to follow over the course of over twenty years of war, the Parachute Regiment’s firing of live rounds against innocent demonstrators in Derry on 30 January 1972 remains the most transformative act of the Troubles because it was perpetuated by a ‘professional’ army which instantly lost any integrity it had left in the eyes of the Catholic minority. In the aftermath of 30 January 1972, as Eamonn McCann put it: ‘to suggest to people after that that they should seek redress for their problems through constitutional means was just laughable …