Heath: Bloody Sunday set peace back 30 years

Former British Prime Minister Ted Heath today bluntly denied that the Bloody Sunday killings were planned and covered up by the British government.

Such allegations were “absurd“, Mr Heath, 86, told the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, sitting in central London.

The event, in which British paratroopers shot dead 13 Catholic men on a Derry civil rights march on January 30, 1972, was a “disaster“, he said.

It damaged the political process, boosted IRA support and helped underpin decades of sectarian violence that prevented a peace deal from being struck for 30 years.

Amid tight security and under the watchful eye of bereaved relatives, sitting a few yards away, Mr Heath remained unfazed by the barrage of questions and top secret documents he was asked to review.

He is only the second Prime Minister to appear before a British Government-appointed inquiry to account for Downing Street policy while they were in power. Margaret Thatcher appeared before the inquiry in the arms-for-Iraq affair in December 1993.

The questions were piped through a large pair of headphones that Mr Heath wore during more than two hours of questioning.

He spoke in a deep gravel voice, did not dodge any of the questions and did not use the hi-tech equipment installed to make the evidence-gathering at the multi-million pound inquiry easier.

The inquiry, which will have cost an estimated £155m (€235.6m) by the time it concludes next year, uses dozens of computer screens to bring thousands of documents and photographs from government archives into view at the touch of a button.

Mr Heath, whose 50 years in parliament had made him one of Britain’s longest-serving parliamentarians, did not use the screens. He insisted on paper copies of everything that was referred and they were handed to him by his assistant.

Mr Heath recalled that in an “outburst” at a ministerial meeting Lord Hailsham, then the Lord Chancellor, had said that anyone obstructing the army was liable to be shot as enemies of the Queen.

Referring to Lord Hailsham by his first name, Mr Heath told the inquiry: “He exploded in a very Quintin-like way...People just said well, that was Quintin and we got on with it.

“Certainly as a government, of which I was Prime Minister, we took no notice at all“.

There is a long-held belief that the Bloody Sunday shootings were sanctioned by authorities at the highest level.

Mr Heath began a staunch defence of the original public inquiry, the integrity of Lord Widgery who headed it and his government’s behaviour at the time.

Mr Heath said he was unaware of a confidential memo written by General Sir Robert Ford, then the Commander of Land Forces, three weeks before Bloody Sunday, which was declassified last year.

It said that Gen Ford’s view was that the best way to maintain law and order was to shoot a few selected hooligan ringleaders.

Internment, introduced in August 1971, made rioting and gunfire against soldiers commonplace. British soldiers and police stayed behind barbed-wire barricades which separated the Bogside’s Rossville Street from the city centre.

In his inquiry statement Mr Heath recalls: “The general view of Her Majesty’s Government was that the ’no-go’ areas would have, in due course, to be retrieved, but there was no plan as at the end of January 1972 for that to happen.

“The operation was seen as very much one of containment, with no intention of actively seeking to use this march as an opportunity to retrieve any part of the ’no-go’ areas.”

Mr Heath states he was “not aware” that 1 Para were to be deployed to arrest rioters that day – a direct denial of claims the operation had Downing Street approval.

Mr Heath is the 618th witness to appear before this inquiry. His testimony, which is only being heard in two-hour blocks in the afternoons due to his age, is set to last three weeks.

The hearing was adjourned until tomorrow.