Delays and special treatment protected the state as well as Soldier F
Nadine Finch explores the background to the recent acquittal of a soldier involved in Northern Ireland’s Bloody Sunday.
The acquittal of Soldier F at Belfast Crown Court on 23rd October 2025 cannot be reduced to decision of one judge in relation to one individual. What was also on trial was the manner in which the British Army and establishment waged war on Republican dissent in Northern Ireland from 1966 to 1995 – and how they continue to obscure the policies they deployed, and continue to deploy today, in relation to the so-called Troubles. In a complex judgment, Patrick Lynch KC acquitted Soldier F but did not do the same for the British Army.
The actions of Soldier F, a member of the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, were the result of both the canteen culture of that particular time and regiment and the policies they were expected to implement. These policies had been developed in relation to conflicts resulting from Britain’s history of colonisation and, often, settler colonialism of the type practised in Northern Ireland.
In his 1971 book Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping, Frank Kitson used an analogy, borrowed from Mao, to describe the extent to which entire populations needed to be targeted in colonial conflicts. He noted that “in attempting to counter subversion it is necessary to take account of three separate elements. The first two constitute… the Party or Front… and the armed groups who are supporting them… They may be said to constitute the head and body of the fish. The third element is the population and this represents the water in which the fish swim.”
Kitson had assisted the colonial police against the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya and helped put down insurgencies in what were then Malaya and Oman. He arrived in Northern Ireland in 1970 and took command of the 39th Infantry Brigade of the British Army in Belfast. But his reach was much broader, as his ideas were widely used in training officers and troops. His central theme was that civil disturbances would lead to armed insurrection and that, therefore, counter-insurgency measures were necessary from the point at which there were marches and protests in support of civil and economic rights.
The use of these measures in Northern Ireland led to the very armed conflict they were said to prevent. They also led to deaths, collusion and human rights abuses that the Government is still trying to conceal.
It was while Kitson was a leading army strategist in Northern Ireland that ten civilians were shot and killed by members of the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment on the Ballymurphy Estate in August 1971. The soldiers were supposed to be arresting those suspected of belonging to the IRA in the past, but they acted on poor intelligence and arrested Catholics on the basis of their religion and the neighbourhoods where they lived, often at random. In Ballymurphy, they also shot civilians, including a priest and a mother of eight, for merely being in the vicinity of the operational base taken over by the battalion. Some were left to die.
No action was taken against these soldiers and this same battalion were then responsible for Bloody Sunday in Derry on 30th January 1972. On that day,13 people were killed and 14 wounded. They had been taking part in a peaceful civil rights protest organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. For decades the authorities refused to admit any wrongdoing, even though some protesters had been shot in the back and photos and television footage showed that they were unarmed. The actions by the British Army breached their own Yellow Card instructions and common law protections.
It was not until 2010, at the conclusion of the Saville Inquiry, that it was found that none of the protestors posed any threat to the soldiers of the 1st Battalion and that the civilians were shot without provocation. Saville found that these soldiers were responsible for the deaths and injuries and had lied to the Inquiry in an attempt to conceal their actions.
Soldier F was charged in April 2019 with the murder of James Wray (22) and William McKinney (24) and the attempted murder of five other civilians. At that time, the Director of Public Prosecutions in Northern Ireland found that there was sufficient available evidence to bring the case to court. Part of this evidence were statements made by Soldier G and Soldier H to the initial investigation in 1972, which asserted that Soldier F had shot relevant protestors. Committal proceedings were delayed by Covid 19 and, when they started again, the Public Prosecution Service reviewed its previous decision and discontinued the proceedings. But in March 2022 the High Court quashed this decision and preparations for a criminal trial started again.
Soldier F’s trial took place at Belfast Crown Court over a five-week period leading up to 23rd October 2025. The judge was not assisted by a jury in his fact-finding duties, as the Director of Public Prosecutions had used their powers under the Justice and Security (Northern Ireland) Act 2007 to order that the trial proceeded without a jury. This power extended Diplock-style criminal proceedings on the basis that juries in Northern Ireland are still not trusted to be impartial. Soldier F was granted anonymity and sat behind a curtain, practices that are not uncommon in Northern Ireland.
The judge acknowledged that the 53 years that had passed hampered the capacity of the defence to test the veracity and accuracy of the evidence. But the prosecution also faced serious evidentiary obstacles. There were two written statements from witnesses, Soldier G and Soldier H, made in 1972, indicating that Soldier F had fired at the protestors. But Lord Saville had previously found that the evidence given by soldiers at his Inquiry had been concocted and untruthful and designed to hide their own culpability.
There were also additional problems about the admissibility and reliability of initial statements made to the Royal Military Police. In this process, they would not have been cautioned about the effect of their testimony. In addition, by the time of the recent trial, Soldier G had died and Soldier H had refused to give further evidence on the basis that he might incriminate himself.
Soldier F himself did not give evidence and his defence team did not present any evidence. The defence are not obliged to put their case and it has been a common tactic in Troubles-related cases to merely wait and see whether the prosecution can prove its case. For example, three police officers from the Surrey Police Force were charged with offences connected to the forced confessions made by the Guildford Four. There was significant documentary evidence that the so-called confessions had been amended and re-amended to fit available evidence. The three officers simply said that they had no knowledge of this and they would not engage with the evidence. They were acquitted.
His Honour Judge Patrick Lynch K.C, had to consider whether on the evidence before him, the Public Prosecution Service had shown that Soldier F had knowingly and intentionally assisted in the shooting with intent to kill or was shooting himself with that intention. This had to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. This was a very high threshold in a case about an incident that took place more than 50 years ago and when key witnesses are unreliable and uncooperative.
It was not open to the judge to make a finding of collective guilt, which would have rendered Soldier F criminally liable. But the judge did make very clear findings that by no means exonerated Soldier F and the other soldiers in the same location on Bloody Sunday.
He found that members of the Parachute Regiment had entered Glenfada Park in Derry and started firing at unarmed civilians at a distance of fifty meters or less. He was in no doubt that the soldiers, who opened fire, did so with the intention to kill and did not act in lawful self-defence. In addition, he noted that the unarmed civilians had been shot in the back while fleeing from the soldiers and that this amounted to murder and unlawful wounding. He concluded that the soldiers had totally lost all sense of military discipline and that those responsible should hang their heads in shame.
Evidence was not led about the wider circumstances of the murders and attempted murders. But the findings also implicitly censure more senior members of the British Army and the establishment. Soldiers of the 1st Parachute Regiment were not disciplined for blatant breaches of the Yellow Card after either Ballymurphy or Bloody Sunday. Action was not taken when soldiers lied to the Saville Inquiry. No enquiry was established into underlying policies relating to the taking of statements by the miliary police or shoot to kill practices. The Government has continued its Neither Confirm Nor Deny policy whenever its actions are questioned.
It has also not explained why the Ministry of Defence spent £4.3 million on Soldier F’s legal fees when it is not offering families adequate legal aid funding in the proposed Legacy Commission.
The community dissatisfaction is also unlikely to increase confidence in the Legacy Commission being proposed in the current Northern Ireland Legacy Bill. Furthermore, only judges selected by the Home Secretary will sit in the Legacy Commission. It is doubtful that they will be able to make the robust criticisms made by His Honour Judge Patrick Lynch on 23rd October 2025.
Nadine Finch is an Honorary Senior Policy Fellow at the University of Bristol.
