Irish Government Report on Widgery and the New Evidence

Irish Government Report on Widgery and the New Evidence

Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern

On January 29, 1998 the Irish government published a 178-page report on Widgery and the new evidence. The report assembles overwhelming evidence to support its contention that Widgery was seriously flawed and "startlingly inaccurate and partisan" in its version of events.

The report contains evidence that:

British soldiers opened fire on unarmed civilians without warning, that they shot dead some of the wounded and planted nail bombs on victims to allow them attempt afterwards to justify the killings

The Widgery Tribunal staff concealed material evidence from relatives of the dead, fabricated evidence, ignored evidence which contradicted that of the soldiers and were biased in favour of the British army and against the deceased.

Lord Widgery's report is dismissed as a "startlingly inaccurate and partisan version of events, dramatically at odds with the experiences and observations of civilian eyewitnesses... it was inherently and apparently willfully flawed, selective and unbalanced in its handling of the evidence to hand at the time."

The Irish government report goes through the Widgery Report, paragraph by paragraph, contradicting and challenging most of them. The following are examples of this:

"There is no reason to suppose that the soldiers would have opened fire if they had not been fired upon first." Widgery report.	"The new material demonstrates that this is a fiction; the army did not come under fire and there was no engagement with assailants. Why the soldiers opened fire remains unknown." Irish Government report.
"The crowd ran not because they thought the soldiers would not fir unless fired upon, experienced citizens like Father Daly recognised that an arrest operation was in progress and wished to avoid the rubber bullets and rough handling which this might involve." Widgery Report.	"On the face of it, this paragraph was an astonishingly confident assertion of what motivated the crowd (which he had described as mixed) i.e. fear of arrest and rough handling combined with "complete confidence" that the soldiers would not fire unless fired upon. The new material, particularly the eyewitness statements and the Para AA document, undermines this assertion. They demonstrate forcefully the sense of fear and panic which seized most civilians present with the arrival of the Paras and the soldliers' immediately aggressive behavior, followed so rapidly by the use of live ammunition." Irish government report.
"Soldiers who identified armed gunmen fired upon them in accordance with the standing orders in the Yellow Card." Widgery Report.	"Soldiers never identified gunmen, much less engaged them." Irish government report.
"There is a strong suspicion that some others had been firing weapons or handling bombs in the course of the afternoon and yet others had been closely supporting them." Widgery Report.	"There were no grounds for any suspicions that some of the victims or as Lord Widgery put it 'some others' had been firing weapons or handling bombs and yet others were closely supporting IRA gunmen. Lord Widgery failed to demonstrate credibly that reasonable grounds existed for such a suspicion in even one case." Irish government report.
"For the most part the soldiers acted as they did because they thought their orders required it." Widgery Report.	"If, as Lord Widgery concluded, the soldiers followed their orders, the unresolved question of Bloody Sunday is what they thought those orders were." Irish government report.