The day after Bloody Sunday, British Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling announces a tribunal of inquiry ‘into the circumstances of the march and the incidents leading up to the casualties which resulted’. After being denied the right to provide an eye-witness account of what happened, an emotional Bernadette Devlin, the 24-year-old MP for Mid-Ulster who had been on the speaker’s platform in Derry the previous day, calls Maudling a ‘murdering hypocrite’.
‘On a point of order. I am the only person in this House who was present yesterday when, whatever the facts of the situation might be said –[Interruption.] Shut up! I have a right, as the only representative in this House who was an eye-witness, to ask a question of that murdering hypocrite— walks across the floor of the House of Commons and strikes him across the face. Devlin later says ‘I’m just sorry I didn’t get him by the throat’.
READ: House of Commons Debate on Bloody Sunday
