Brendan Duddy was born on 10 June 1936 and raised in the city of Derry, on the very edge of the United Kingdom, on the border with County Donegal in the Irish Republic. In the late 1960s it was an impoverished and neglected place, as if its distance from Westminster relegated it to an inferior status. The majority of its inhabitants were Catholic, and considered themselves to be Irish, not British. Discrimination against Catholics was institutionalised in the political, economic and social fabric of the city, and the electoral boundaries were rigged in a way that guaranteed a Protestant majority on the council. Fourteen thousand Catholic voters elected eight councillors, while 9,000 Protestant voters elected twelve.2 This reflected the gerry-mandering of Northern Ireland itself.c The province is made up of roughly a million Protestant Unionists, who wish to remain part of the United Kingdom, and half a million Catholics, most of them Nationalists and Republicans who wish to be part of a united Ireland. Nationalists favour bringing this about by peaceful means, while Republicans believe that violence is justified to achieve the goal.
In Derry, broadly speaking, Protestants got the best jobs and the best houses. These glaring inequalities, largely ignored by Westminster, and about which the majority of citizens in the rest of the United Kingdom remained unaware and indifferent, were the dry tinder that led to the explosion of the civil rights movement in 1968 and the subsequent re-emergence of the IRA. Brendan was simply one of the thousands of Catholic victims of the system. ‘I had no work in Derry. There was no work,’ he told me.3 To fill the emptiness of the days he used to go running in the beautiful countryside outside the city with a friend, Bobby Daly, who was a bin man. ‘I was hoping that some day I might get a job as his assistant.’ That was Brendan’s dream.
London called him, as it had so many young Irish men and women in the past. ‘It was the feeling of being boxed in in Derry. No work. No home. No house. England was a different world.’ It was an alien environment for Brendan, but at least there were jobs there. He finally found work at the Bush factory in Ealing, ‘putting the little knobs on brown Bakelite television sets’. He’d been expecting a replication of the discrimination he’d left Derry to escape, and that the English would look down on him because he was Irish. When it came to overtime, he assumed there wouldn’t be any for him. But he was wrong. The way he was treated in England conditioned forever the way he thought of his fellow citizens on the other side of the Irish Sea. ‘I met a group of people who were honest, easy to get on with and fair to me.’ This, combined with the experience of learning the Irish language at the feet of the IRA veteran Sean Keenan, equipped Brendan to understand and interpret both sides of the conflict, and made him a valuable intermediary in the secret dialogue between the British government – via its spooks and diplomats based at the Northern Ireland Office residence at Laneside outside Belfast – and the IRA’s ruling Army Council.d
Like many Derry men and women who leave the city, the urge to come home proved irresistible to Brendan. He returned, and opened a fish-and-chip shop in William Street, on the edge of the Bogside area where the majority of Catholics live. ‘I loved every second of it. I was the best, and still am. I understand potatoes. I understand fish.’ In London he had been earning £11 a week, and now he was making £10 or £12 a night. But the shop was more than just a chippie. It was a salon for the emerging leaders of the civil rights movement, who would discuss politics way into the night. Brendan never put the chairs on the tables. The teenaged Martin McGuinness was a regular visitor, not to take part in the greasy political salon but to deliver the sustenance for it through the back door, in the form of beefburgers from James Doherty’s butcher’s shop down the street. ‘He was an innocent, handsome young boy,’ Brendan remembers. ‘He’d come in with the box of burgers, put them on the counter and chat up the girls, and I’d say, “Come on, Martin, there’s work to do here.”’ Did he have any interest in politics? ‘Absolutely none.’
The chip shop endured turbulent times in the late sixties and early seventies, with regular riots on its doorstep as the increasingly radicalised Nationalist youth of the Bogside fought pitched battles with their hated enemies the police (the RUC) and the British Army. It was ironic that the army was seen as the enemy only a few months after British soldiers had intervened in August 1969 to defend Catholics from Loyalist mobs in Derry, Belfast and elsewhere. British soldiers were initially welcomed as saviours, but the honeymoon was soon over. The army referred to the opposition as the ‘Derry Young Hooligans’ (DYH). Margo and Bernadette both served in the chip shop, and regarded the street battles as entertainment. ‘We used to sit upstairs and watch,’ Margo remembers. ‘The riots were fierce, but you didn’t feel in any danger. It was good fun.’
But on 30 January 1972, the fun ended. The day became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’.e Everyone knew there was trouble coming. The army had made its own controversial assessment. Three weeks previously, Major General Robert Ford, the Commander Land Forces (CLF), who had visited Derry on 7 January, wrote a secret memorandum to his boss, Lieutenant General Sir Harry Tuzo, the General Officer Commanding Northern Ireland (GOC). He didn’t mince his words: ‘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 after clear warnings have been issued.’4
The ‘enemy’ was ready too. By this time, both wings of the IRA – the Officials and the Provisionalsf – had grown in strength, their ranks swelled by anger at the British policy of internment (the arrest and detention without trial of hundreds of Catholic Nationalists, and far fewer Loyalists) and allegations of torture being used by the army to extract information from detainees. Martin McGuinness had now risen to become second-in-command of the Provisionals’ Derry Brigade. His former lack of interest in politics had been transformed by internment and what he saw on the streets of his city, where British soldiers were now seen by Catholics as the aggressors and no longer their saviours. Brendan had grown increasingly concerned at the potential consequences of a showdown between the army and the IRA. And so had his old friend, the police officer in charge of Derry, Chief Superintendent Frank Lagan, who was one of the few Catholics in the almost exclusively Protestant RUC at the time.
As tension in the city mounted in advance of a huge anti-internment march that was being planned for Sunday, 30 January, Lagan came to see Brendan to seek his help. ‘He said, “I’m terrified. The IRA must not be there. There must be not a gun in that area.” I said that was a tall order.’ Lagan waved his hand, smiled and said, ‘You can do it.’ Brendan did his best. He talked to both wings of the IRA, and got assurances that guns would not be in the Bogside that Sunday. He reported back to Lagan that, as requested, there would be no guns. But there were guns – in the hands of soldiers of the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment. And they used them. The army said the para-troopers came under fire from the IRA as they deployed into the Bogside to arrest rioters, the ‘Derry Young Hooligans’, who had been stoning soldiers stationed at the entrance to the area. The paras returned fire at what they claimed were gunmen and bombers. As a result thirteen civil rights marchers were shot dead. In his epic report into the shootings almost forty years later, Lord Saville concluded that all the dead were unarmed and innocent.g His definitive findings ran to 5,000 pages, took twelve years to produce and cost £195 million. I was relieved when I first read his summary, which confirmed much of what I had concluded in 1992 in my own investigation into the events of Bloody Sunday on its twentieth anniversary, and about which I had given evidence to Lord Saville’s tribunal sitting in the Guildhall in Derry. A senior member of the Official IRA in the city told me that some weapons had been left in the Bogside for ‘defensive’ purposes.5 I had concluded that there was at least one