The day after Bloody Sunday, Frank Lagan came to Brendan’s house again. Brendan was furious, having arranged, as he thought, the removal of all IRA weapons from the Bogside. Lagan was shattered, and had no explanation of what had happened or why. ‘This is an absolute disaster,’ Brendan told him. ‘We are going to have a war on our hands.’ That is precisely what happened.
Bloody Sunday was my introduction to the conflict in Ireland. I was then a twenty-nine-year-old journalist, most of whose previous TV experience was limited to reporting for Thames Television’s Today programme, presented by the legendary Eamonn Andrews. I covered local government, social issues and lighter subjects too – from the ‘pumpkin nobblers’ sabotaging a village’s ‘biggest pumpkin’ competition to a man building a flying saucer in the Berkshire woods, with his coalshed acting as Mission Control. I hardly felt equipped to cover what I found when I arrived in Derry late that Sunday evening after the shooting was over. By then I was working for Thames’s This Week programme – ITV’s Panorama. We’d been planning to cover the march that day with three film crews – one with the army, one with the marchers and one just floating, since it was clear that there was going to be trouble. But our plans were stymied by the militant television technicians’ union, the ACTT, which demanded danger money on such a scale that the company refused to pay. The plan therefore was called off.
I remember shivering in my London flat that cold Sunday afternoon, sitting on the night-storage heater to keep warm, when I heard the news that there had been shootings and deaths in Derry. My programme editor, John Edwards, and I spoke on the phone, and along with a phalanx of other journalists I caught the next plane to Belfast. I confess I had to look at a map to find out where Derry was, such was my ignorance of Ireland. Like most of my fellow citizens, and many journalists too, I was equally ignorant of the roots and history of the conflict. I arrived in Derry just before midnight and checked into a B&B. As I undressed to go to bed I glanced at the window, wondering if an IRA sniper had me in his sights. I smile when I think of it now.
The following morning I went down into the Bogside. I found a scene I will never forget. There was not a soul around. I could almost touch the silence. Fresh blood was still on the ground. Nervously, I started knocking on doors to try to talk to people. Being a journalist from a country whose soldiers had just killed thirteen of their neighbours, I expected a hostile reception, but I was surprised to find the opposite. People asked me in, and gave me tea, biscuits and buns. They were eager to talk, wanting the world to know what had happened. I met some members of the IRA’s Derry Brigade. They were not what I’d expected. They weren’t hooded or threatening. Many of them were the sons or fathers of the families I had been speaking to. They were part of the community, and now after Bloody Sunday they were seen more than ever as its defenders. I also interviewed the Provisionals’ Commanding Officer, who was adamant that they had removed all their guns from the Bogside. He was a nervous man with no great natural authority, and first had to make a phone call to the IRA high command in Dublin to check that he could do the interview. It was the first time I had talked to an active ‘terrorist’. I remember being acutely embarrassed before filming began when my producer insisted on combing my hair.
I watched a torchlit procession wind its way through the Bogside and up to the church on the Creggan estate on the hill above, where thirteen bodies were lying in their coffins. I was standing next to the Nationalist politician John Hume, who in 1998 would jointly win the Nobel Peace Prize with his Unionist counterpart David Trimble. John pointed out one of the mourners, and said he was someone I should talk to. It was Martin McGuinness. Shortly afterwards I met McGuinness in the disused gasworks in the Bogside which was a sort of IRA gang hut. It was a bizarre experience to meet a senior member of the IRA in such unlikely surroundings, within sight and range of British Army rifles stationed high on the city walls above the Bogside. The army had made a decision not to go into the areas dominated by both wings of the IRA. The twenty-two-year-old McGuinness was charming, articulate and impressive, and seemed terribly young. Even then his eyes, into which I was to look on and off over the next thirty years, had the capacity to harden at a moment’s notice, and seemed capable of taking you out at ten paces. He talked passionately about the ‘armed struggle’ and why he was engaged in it. To my surprise, at the end of our conversation he said he’d much rather be washing the car and mowing the lawn on Sundays than doing what he was doing. I believed him, although I thought that I shouldn’t. I never imagined that one day one of Britain’s most wanted ‘terrorists’ would become Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister.h
* * *
The events of 30 January 1972 made Brendan Duddy determined to do all he could to help bring peace to his city and the province. ‘That feeling was as strong as it could be. It was not that I could fail. It was that I was going to do it. I think it came from years of running over the hills. You had to get there.’ After Bloody Sunday, the violence escalated as young men and women queued up to join the IRA. Retribution for the killings that day was swift and savage. The IRA, in which the Provisionals now made the military running, thinking they were close to achieving their goal of driving the British out of the North, declared that they were ready to call a ceasefire and talk peace. The British decided they had nothing to lose, and secretly took up the Provisionals’ offer, arranging to meet the IRA leadership – which included Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams (belying Adams’ insistence that he was never a member of the IRA) – in the unlikely setting of fashionable Cheyne Walk in London’s Chelsea. The meeting, held on 7 July 1972, got nowhere. The IRA said they wanted the British out of the North on or before 1 January 1975. The Northern Ireland Secretary, William Whitelaw, later said that meeting and talking to the IRA was the greatest mistake of his political career. Brendan wasn’t surprised at the failure of the talks, as he felt the IRA leadership were living in cloud cuckoo land. ‘It was a disaster. “Brits out” politically couldn’t happen. I just said, “They’re crazy!” Nobody had taken the time to think what would happen to a million Protestant Unionists if the Brits left. It was their lack of understanding of politics.’ He was to spend the next twenty years trying to educate the IRA in political realities.
Two days after the fiasco of Cheyne Walk the ceasefire was over, and it was back to the ‘war’ with an even greater savage intensity. On Friday, 21 July, the IRA exploded twenty-two bombs across Belfast, killing eleven people and injuring 130. The disturbing scenes of the carnage, with charred body parts being shovelled into black plastic bags, could not be shown in their entirety on television. The IRA claimed that warnings had been given but not properly heeded. There were warnings, but they were hopelessly inadequate. I had been looking for an IRA contact the previous evening and was told he was at a meeting in a school in the Nationalist Andersonstown area of predominantly Catholic West Belfast. I went along, and stumbled upon what seemed to be a high-level gathering of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade sitting around a table and, I subsequently imagined, possibly finalising the plans for what became known as ‘Bloody Friday’. What happened shocked me, and shattered Brendan. ‘It wouldn’t add one centimetre to Irish freedom,’ he said. ‘When I was looking at that black bag, that was somebody’s mother, father or brother.’
By the summer of 1972, the British had decided that the army would have to enter the ‘no go’ areas not just in Derry but in Belfast and other places in the province that the IRA had made its fiefdom, and from which its units could operate with impunity. The government feared that moving into uncharted territory dominated by the IRA was potentially a recipe for disaster on a scale that would dwarf Bloody Sunday. Once again, Chief Superintendent Frank Lagan pressed Brendan into service. He told him the army was coming in with tanks and 5,000 men. ‘All the heavy stuff,’ he said. ‘We need the IRA’s guns removed.’ Brendan was understandably sceptical, given what had happened on Bloody Sunday, but Lagan convinced him that this was different. He went to Dublin to see Seamus Twomey, the IRA’s Belfast commander and member of the Army Council, and convinced him that his men would face overwhelming force, and the loss of life would potentially be great. He explained that the British had no objection to the IRA removing its weapons – presumably across the nearby border into the Irish Republic, where they would hang on to them. Twomey