Londonderry Air

Peter Hitchens writes:

I have said for years that the British government should apologise for Bloody Sunday. This is for firmly Unionist reasons. Londonderry, as I still call it, is in my view a British city, and certainly felt like one to me when I at last managed to go there a few years back. I've nothing against those who wish to call it 'Derry' (or 'Doire'), provided they don't mind me calling it Londonderry. But I think the BBC, being a British institution, should stick with 'Londonderry' - as should ministers in the British government. I'll relax my view of this if ever I hear an Irish politician , or RTE, the Republic's equivalent of the BBC, refer to the city as 'Londonderry' in a gesture to its Protestant inhabitants.

But the main point of this is simple. If such a thing had happened to Her Majesty's peaceful subjects in Portsmouth, Cardiff, Hull, Liverpool or Aberdeen, the government would - and should - have fallen the next day.

And it remains shameful that Edward Heath and his Cabinet did not resign the morning after this dreadful blunder, which was of course perpetrated by soldiers - but by soldiers whose orders and deployment originated in London, and in the not-very-bright policies of the day towards Ireland.

So I am glad of the apology, far too long delayed. I think David Cameron delivered it with proper gravity and without any attempt to qualify it. This was right.

But I am annoyed by the report, which seems to me to have an entirely political purpose and may not be a wholly accurate account of events. How can we know, in such detail, so long afterwards? It is interesting to examine one's memory, when events which took place in one's own lifetime gradually solidify into historical events. I can remember hearing the news of the shootings on the Sunday evening on the radio (as I generally heard news in those days of scarce TVs and infrequent bulletins) that freezing cold weekend in York, and the angry demonstration we students mounted the following day, its indignation for once entirely justified. But if you asked me for details of either day, instead of brief and probably misleading scraps of memory, I would be unable to help you.

In fact a couple of years ago, on an assignment in Moscow, I travelled by metro to the district where I had lived for a year in 1992. When I arrived at the familiar station, I made for the steps by which I was sure I had always exited, and walked as if to go to my block of flats. I was completely wrong. The exit was wrong. My direction was wrong. I walked the wrong way, in increasing bafflement, for half a mile because I was so sure I was right. Reluctantly, I had to accept that my memory, for all its insistent clarity, was misleading, to put it mildly. And that was a distance in time of about 16 years, less than half the period which separates us all from Bloody Sunday.

I'll have more to say about this later, but if we are to go on a voyage of rediscovery through the Northern Ireland Morass, I think we need to be a good deal more even-handed about what we study.

And by the way, the closed-minded people who always write in and say that I am some kind of patsy for the 'Loyalist' scum are completely wrong. I loathe the violent racketeers of the 'Loyalist' side just as much as I loathe the IRA. My case is and remains that the compromise which kept Northern Ireland British could have been reformed peacefully, and under British rule - and that Direct Rule was actually rather a good thing, which could and should have been made permanent. It was those who insisted on the 'Irish Dimension' who turned this from a reasonable campaign for reform into a struggle over sovereignty which is not yet over. And it was those people who also marginalised the decent and the lawful, and brought into power the bloodstained and the lawless.

If we ever conducted a proper inquiry into the whole Northern Ireland shambles, from 1969 to now, the Irish Republican Army and its front men and women would be the principal culprits, making trouble where there was none, pretending to be what they were not, always preferring hate and violence to peaceful compromise.

And:

Very few Irish people, either side of the border, wanted a war in 1969. A very small number of bilious hate-mongers did want a war, and succeeded in getting one by use of the classic methods of terror. The shame was that the lawfully-constituted authorities reacted with text-book incompetence, as if they had read the terrorist manual and had decided to do exactly what the terrorists wanted on every occasion - internment, Bloody Sunday, torture of suspects.

May I here recommend Dominic Sandbrook's extraordinarily good summary of the affair, with a good appreciation of the difficulties involved, in his book White Heat.

The origin of the problem lies in the creation of the Stormont Parliament at partition, and the disastrous creation of the 'Protestant State' when there should have been direct rule from London from the start. Plenty of British politicians had long wanted to get rid of Northern Ireland, and didn't have their hearts in keeping it British.

In fact, Direct Rule, once begun, rapidly got rid of most of the anti-Catholic discrimination in the Six Counties of Northern Ireland. Enormous progress was made in this matter, especially in housing and employment - and could and would have been made in policing had it not been for the efforts of the terrorists to frighten Roman Catholics out of joining the RUC. There had always been plenty of peaceful, constitutional Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland who were happily reconciled to living under the British flag, and they have been betrayed by recent events just as much as have the Protestants who desire passionately to remain British.

Also, until quite late in the story, the Dublin government had no interest at all in encouraging the anti-British movement. They didn't want to acquire a resentful Protestant minority, thanks very much. In fact, the behaviour of recent Dublin governments, in promoting the 'Irish Dimension' is one of those odd cases of a political elite in the grip of impractical utopianism. It was encouraged by a strange combination. First, there was the effect of US politics (read Conor O'Clery's superb book The Greening of the White House about Bill Clinton's cynical embrace of Irishry to win back Catholic working-class votes lost by his party because of abortion).

Then there was EU pressure. The EU has long believed in a reunited Ireland under the Euro, the kilometre and the EU flag, and for years the 'European Parliament' published presumptuous maps of Ireland in which the old Irish borders of Leinster, Munster, Ulster (with all nine counties) and Connaught were superimposed on the actual frontier.

These things, plus the desire of the British 'deep state', well embodied by the Secret Intelligence Service, to get rid of a costly nuisance, lie behind the gradual surrender, starting with the Anglo-Irish agreement, moving on through the 'Peace Process', to the indefensible handover of the people of the Six Counties to the current shameful situation - rule by terrorist godfathers, some Green and some Orange.

No, the behaviour of the British state has not been perfect. But set beside the criminal murderers of the IRA, INLA and the UVF etc, I think much of it comes out pretty well, not least the Army.