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One of the best known documentary makers to emerge from the Troubles has told how he “probably would have joined the IRA” if he had been a teenager in Derry during Bloody Sunday.

In a move likely to spark some controversy, Peter Taylor makes the admission in My Journey Through The Troubles - a personal reflection on 50 years covering the conflict here.

The veteran journalist says he began his reporting on the violence here when he arrived in Derry hours after it emerged that 13 people had been shot dead by Parachute Regiment soldiers.

Finding flowers laid next to pools of blood in the Bogside, he says he remembers “feeling guilty” that “my soldiers, me being a Brit, appeared to have shot dead” 13 people.

The documentary is a timeline of footage from the Troubles, with Paras commander Derek Wilford insisting in the aftermath of the massacre that his soldiers were fired upon as well as decades when he stood by his men.

And in a never seen before interview, a man said to be the IRA commander in Derry on Bloody Sunday, tells Taylor they had decided to “cancel all operations” to allow the civil rights march to be “peaceful”. The man, whose face is blurred, says the IRA “didn’t want any trouble”.

The IRA man says if they had had the “facility”, the IRA could have “recruited the majority of the Bogside” after Bloody Sunday.

In a personal reflection, Taylor adds: “If I’d been a teenager that day on Bloody Sunday, I probably would have joined the IRA. I would have considered taking that final step, which is what happened to hundreds of young Catholics, men and women. Because I think what Bloody Sunday did, was legitimise violence. If the state can use violence against us.”

In what the BBC are describing as “a uniquely personal film”, Taylor replays a number of interviews with key players which offer an insight into the dark underbelly of the Troubles.

Martin McGuinness came across as a “natural leader” and “charismatic” when he met him, but when he looked you “straight in the eye” it would be “friendly and warm” or “hard as iron”. Ian Paisley is shown denying he is stirring up hatred in Northern Ireland, while also buying the media ice creams on the campaign trail. The man who would become First Minister after years as a firebrand was “funny and charming” when you got to know him, Taylor says.

Insights into attempts to build peace are woven into the programme with “remarkable” MI6 officer Frank Steele describing a meeting with IRA members including Gerry Adams. Steele said he expected to meet an “arrogant street wise thug” but was “pleasantly surprised” to encounter a “very personable, lucid, persuasive” Adams.

The documentary references Gerry Adams’ well documented denials of IRA membership, however it also plays an interview with former IRA leader Seán Mac Stíofáin who insisted all those who met Government sources were IRA.

The reaction to the unrest of the UDA leads Taylor to a meeting with Ernie Elliot who pointed him in the direction of East Belfast where the paramilitary group was setting up ‘no-go’ areas like the IRA had created. Elliot was later found murdered.

Strabane plays a central role in the documentary, a “microcosm” of the conflict, with its streets the target of regular bomb attacks.

The treatment of suspects brought to Castlereagh RUC station was the centre of some investigative efforts by Taylor which, he says, lead to Secretary of State Roy Mason suggesting “another reporter” should replace him.

The experienced reporter talks of how he “felt sick” when Prison Officers’ Association leader Desmond Irvine was shot dead by the IRA just days after he had interviewed him in 1977.

The hunger strikes were obviously a key part of the documentary with Taylor offering the view that now he is “not convinced” that Gerry Adams was “running” the protest and that the “hunger strikers were running the hunger strike”.

The “remarkable young men and women” of the SAS and the ‘Det’ (the intelligence group who worked with special forces) opened Taylor’s eyes to the ‘secret war’ being waged against the IRA, the documentary adds. That counter-insurgency brought “the IRA to a standstill”, IRA member Brendan ‘The Dark’ Hughes tells the programme in an archive clip.

An anonymous member of the military tells the programme how a cake would be baked with the name of an IRA member killed on it to “celebrate” what was seen as successful operation.

One of those operations was Loughgall in which the SAS killed eight IRA members including, as Taylor has reported previously, the IRA member who tipped off their handler about the operation.

The ‘dirty war’ also sees his interview with UFF man Bobby Philpott repeated in which he says he was getting intelligence documents “day and daily” from the security forces.

The fate of informers makes for a grim element of the show with footage from the discovery of three men murdered after ‘confessing’ to helping security forces. Taylor was played recordings of these confessions which he describes as “chilling to say the least”.

Prisoners’ lives during and after the conflict range from the bizarre with loyalist prisoners staging a Twelfth style parade in one of the H-Blocks as well as a welly throwing competition to the reality of what many of them had done.

Billy Giles, who was doing life for a sectarian murder, tells Taylor he “lost something” the day he murdered a workmate. He later took his own life.

In the closing stages of the Troubles, the documentary maker says he wanted to discover who MI6 man Michael Oatley, known as ‘The Mountain-Climber’, was talking to in efforts to forge a peace breakthrough.

Later, over glasses of whiskey, Brendan Duddy told Taylor of the contacts that would lead, eventually, to the Good Friday Agreement and to a world in which Martin McGuinness would meet the Queen and Ian Paisley became a part of the establishment he spent his life railing against.

The “one major outstanding issue” of the Troubles, Taylor asserts, is how to deal with the past with the conflicting issues of forgiveness and justice. The border issue has been “resuscitated” due to Brexit, Taylor says.

The “certain inevitability” about the end of the road being a united Ireland “will only happen if unionists are party to it”, he adds.

He is not for putting down his notepad yet, he adds, because “the conflict is not yet over”.

Peter Taylor: My Journey Through The Troubles is broadcast on BBC2 NI at 9pm on Wednesday night.

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