IRA 'incapable of launching sustained Bloody Sunday attack'
A former member of the Official IRA has told the Saville Inquiry that the republican movement was effectively incapable of launching an attack on British soldiers in Derry on Bloody Sunday.
The witness, identified only as OIRA7, said IRA members often patrolled Derry with unloaded guns because they lacked ammunition.
"The army may have had this fearful image of us, but we were often in the position [where] we would have to beat them off with the rifle as it couldn’t be fired," he said.
The British army has always claimed that it came under sustained attack from the IRA before it opened fire on a Catholic civil rights march on January 30, 1972, killing 13 unarmed civilians and wounding 13 others.
In his evidence today, OIRA7 said he believed the IRA only opened fire on Bloody Sunday after the British army had begun shooting civilians.
He said he was participating in the civil rights march on the day and heard talk in the crowd that two people had been shot and wounded.
A few minutes later, he said, he heard a single shot that he believed was fired by an IRA gunman in the Bogside rather than from the British army’s positions.
He later came across two IRA colleagues, one of whom was carrying a rifle, and assumed he had fired the single shot.
This corroborates evidence given by another IRA witness, OIRA1, who told the Saville Inquiry last week that he fired a single shot at British soldiers on Bloody Sunday after hearing that two civilians had been wounded.
Both OIRA1 and OIRA7 told the inquiry that they believed the shot fired by the IRA had saved lives because it deterred the British soldiers from shooting more civilians.
