THE EARLY DAYS of February 1972 were marked by grief and fury in Ireland in the aftermath of the Bloody Sunday attack.
On 30 January the British Army’s 1st parachute regiment had shot and killed 13 people in Derry’s Bogside area during a demonstration about internment without trial. A 14th victim, John Johnston, would die several months later from injuries sustained when he was shot by a paratrooper.
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Dublin to voice their anger about the massacre.
The British Embassy on Merrion Square became the focus of demonstrations for several days following the Bloody Sunday killings. That reached boiling point when people started gathering outside the building.
The situation ratcheted up when a march organised by unions and republicans culminated at the building, leaving the street outside the embassy thronged with people and only approximately 200 Gardaí patrolling.
As RTÉ’s security correspondent at the time, Tom McCaughren attended the demonstration with a two-man crew. He recalls that by the time they arrived on the scene there was “already quite a bit of trouble between Gardaí and the hardliners who were spearheading the protest at the steps of the Embassy”.
“The streets around Merrion Square were absolutely chock-a-block with protestors. It was estimated that there were about eight to ten thousand people crammed into those streets,” he told The Journal.
The crowd were pushing forward, and the Gardaí couldn’t do much about it.
The demonstrators carried black flags, tricolours and placards excoriating the British government. A thin line of Gardaí stood between the angry crowd and the building, the facade of which had already been blackened by petrol bombs in the days before.
Black coffins painted with “13″ and “Bloody Sunday” were carried through the mass of people and placed at the embassy steps. British flags and effigies of UK prime minister Edward Heath were burnt. A tricolour was raised to half-mast on the flagpole.
McCaughren noted that on the day that the small number of Gardaí present were trying in vain to keep people away from the Embassy steps as the crowd chanted: “Burn the place, burn.”
The three-man RTÉ team moved from the packed streets to neighbouring Holles Street Hospital where they could see straight down to where the action was taking place.
Stones ricocheted off the embassy’s bulletproof glass windows, drawing cheers from the crowds. But the building’s reinforcements were no match for explosives, which destroyed the front door, hatchets and a hail of petrol bombs, which quickly ignited an inferno inside the offices.
“Gradually, more windows and doors were broken. Then the flames started to lick up through the inside of the building,” McCaughren said of the moment which has stayed with him 50 years on.
Former IRA member Christy Burke, who took part in the protest, told The Journal that the crowd was determined to show its revulsion at the 13 killings in Derry.
“Emotions were high. People, including Gardaí and emergency services, everybody was outraged with Bloody Sunday, what happened with the paratroopers slaughtering 13 people. The IRA were active in the area, I was an IRA volunteer, I make no bones about that.
The bloodshed in the Bogside “just triggered a feeling that hadn’t been expressed in that way before,” according to McCaughren.
The Antrim native said that prior to Bloody Sunday he felt the atrocities in the North seemed a distant issue to the people south of the border “and many people didn’t seem to be very much involved”.
“That was my feeling at the time. And then the shooting of the civilians seem to trigger something in their minds that hadn’t existed before. They suddenly realised how bloody it was, how awful it was, and the awful things that had happened. There was this great groundswell of anger and outrage about what happened.”
Burke, who has been a Dublin councillor since 1985, said the embassy was targeted because it was a symbol of the British monarchy, establishment and state.
The fire brigade was prevented from reaching the building and the blaze gutted the embassy over the course of the night.
The embassy was not the only building targeted: a British insurance company’s branch office in Dun Laoghaire was also destroyed. The Royal Air Force club was attacked and several other British owned shops around the country were vandalised.
In the aftermath of the blaze, McCaughren felt that the demonstration had been allowed to go ahead as an “expression of anger”.
“I think that the government decided to let people go and demonstrate, and burn it down. One, to ease the tensions which had built up enormously. And the second one, I think was to demonstrate to the British government, the depths of anger that had been aroused by the action of the paratroopers,” he said.
“The Embassy wasn’t staffed, there was nobody in danger. And I think it was accepted generally as a justified action in bringing home to the British government just how angrily people felt about the whole thing.
If you compare it with what happened a few years later when the people who supported the hunger strikers marched on the Embassy at Ballsbridge. Gardaí and the government had taken the decision that they would not be allowed near the Embassy.
It was cordoned off with steel barriers and hundreds of gardaí in riot gear who had a very, very violent confrontation with the protesters.
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