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Other witnesses insisted that that was precisely what the soldiers had done. They denied that any shots had been fired at the troops before the killing began. The militant Provisional wing of the I.R.A., which vowed revenge, inferentially admitted that it had been involved in the later stages of battle. But the I.R.A.'s Derry command issued a statement: "At no time did any of our units open fire on the British army prior to the army's opening fire." The statement added that the Derry command had specifically "ordered all weapons out of the total march area" that Sunday morning in order to avoid civilian casualties.
The First Shot. Another witness was Bernadette Devlin, the only Westminster M.P. present at Bloody Sunday. In her account of the incident to Commons, she insisted that "the first shot fired came from the British army wounding a civilian below the knee." Then she spoke of the panicked people, who were fleeing and falling. "It was a sight I never want to see again: thousands and thousands of people lying flat on their faces on the ground. I was lying on my mouth and nose." While prone, she tried "to tell the people to keep their heads down and on no account to rise any higher than their knees, but to crawl—crawl on the streets of their own city, on their hands and knees—out of the line of fire. That is what they did."
Bernadette's account of Bloody Sunday was delivered in low, almost theatrically whispered tones. The day before, though, she was the noisy protagonist of a highly unusual parliamentary drama. To a packed and impassioned Commons, Home Secretary Reginald Maudling, who is responsible for Ulster affairs, announced that the government was setting up an inquiry into the tragic events in Londonderry. However, Maudling echoed the army's argument that the troops "returned the fire directed at them with aimed shots and inflicted a number of casualties on those who were attacking them with firearms and with bombs." At this point Devlin leaped to her feet on a point of order. When her objection was curtly dismissed by the Speaker, she shrieked, "Is it in order for the Minister to lie to the House?" As pandemonium broke loose, Laborite Hugh Delargy bellowed that the paratroopers would go down in history "with the same odium" as the hated Black and Tans of the 1920s.
Glasses Askew. Maudling tried to continue, but Bernadette was up again, yelling, "Nobody shot at the paratroopers, but somebody will shortly." She also called Maudling "that murdering hypocrite." Suddenly, as the Speaker of the House struggled to maintain order, Bernadette stalked to the center of the chamber and threw herself bodily on the Home Secretary. Arms and legs flailing, she punched, scratched and spit at Maudling, knocking his glasses askew and tearing at his hair. For a few seconds, the stunned House sat and watched. Then Tory M.P.s pulled Bernadette away from the embattled Home Secretary. As she was escorted from the chamber, a group of women in the visitors' gallery shouted "Murder! Murder!" In less than five minutes, the civil-righteous little spitfire returned. Defending her attack on Maudling,* she shouted, "I did not shoot him in the back, which is what they did to our people!"