'SOLDIER F' VERDICT: STATE COVER-UP ON BLOODY SUNDAY MASSACRE, DERRY 1972

Note the ages of the 14 shot dead, on this memorial

The acquittal of Soldier F in the Bloody Sunday Crown Court trial in Belfast is another outrageous chapter in the blood-soaked history of British state atrocities, dripping with the blood of innocents.

Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972, was one of the worst atrocities in the 30-year ‘Troubles’. A peaceful march in Derry, organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association against internment without trial - as introduced by the Ted Heath Tory government five months earlier - was gunned down by soldiers of the 1^st Battalion, Parachute regiment, slaughtering 14 unarmed civilians.

Carrying the first shot by the Paras, John Duddy

State lie-machine

State murder was followed immediately, within minutes that same January day, by ruthless, shameless state cover-up. The lie machine of army chiefs, Tory Cabinet ministers and their most reliable media mouthpieces went into overdrive, falsely claiming the Paras were obliged to open fire only after they came under attack by armed men, smearing the victims as terrorists.

Of course, these alleged gunmen could never be identified, because it was sheer state invention, to pave the road to a monumental cover-up for decades. A cover-up based on belief in state immunity from prosecution, whilst the same state terrorised whole communities with internment without trial, house raids, torture in police cells, H Block imprisonment, and shoot-to-kill policies.

Evidence destroyed

No evidence was gathered on the day by the RUC police. No forensics kept. No witnesses interviewed, no soldiers questioned as suspects, nor scenes of the crime quarantined to allow even the most basic investigation. Military police took statements from soldiers, without caution, as the army investigated itself. The guns used by the murderous Paras to kill 14 peaceful demonstrators were immediately destroyed!

Public outrage, protests, strikes and demonstrations across Ireland (including the British embassy in Dublin being burnt to the ground by an enraged crowd) and worldwide forced official inquiries to be held. The first, led by Lord Widgery in 1972, was an outright whitewash – although even it was obliged to concede the soldiers’ shootings “bordered on the reckless”.

The 'gentle attentions' of the Paras, on top of shoot to kill

‘Killings wholly unjustified and unjustifiable’

Then, after a quarter of a century, Blair’s Labour government set up the 1998 Saville Inquiry, which lasted until 2010 and cost £200m. It ruled that the victims were entirely innocent of the slanderous claims made against them and, to quote Lord Saville, “the killings were wholly unjustified and unjustifiable.”

Tory PM David Cameron was subsequently forced to make an official government apology – by the tenacity, in particular, of the working-class Derry families bereaved on Bloody Sunday.

Some of the truth was out, but still no justice for the victims or their families.

Soldier F trial

53 years after the event, after most of the potential forensic evidence had been consciously destroyed and ‘disappeared’, the Crown Court case against Soldier F for the murder of two of the innocent civilians reached the verdict that insufficient evidence was available, so this member of the Paras walked free of charge. In fact, as one of the accounts of the Bloody Sunday events stated:

“Then, while Doherty lay crying in agony, a 41-year-old man called Barney McGuigan stepped out from behind a block of flats to try to get help for the dying man. McGuigan was waving a white handkerchief. According to the testimony of numerous witnesses, including an officer from another regiment stationed on the city walls, soldier F – positioned on the other side of the road – got down on one knee and shot McGuigan through the head. No one who saw the mortuary photos of the exit wound in McGuigan’s face will forget what just that one bullet of Soldier F’s did.”

Army chiefs and government to blame

As Mickey McKinney - whose brother William was slaughtered that day – said after last week’s Crown Court judgement:

“Unlike his victims, there has been no declaration of Soldier F’s innocence. He created two young widows on Bloody Sunday, and he orphaned 12 children. And he deprived dozens of siblings of a loving brother.

“The Bloody Sunday families do not lay the blame for today’s decision with the trial judge. The blame lies firmly with the British state; with the RUC who failed to investigate the murders properly, or indeed at all; with the British army who shielded and enabled its soldiers to murder with impunity, and the office of the then Director of Public Prosecutions who, with a nod and a wink, complicitly signed off on decisions not to prosecute in 1972, without even raising an eyebrow.”

‘Authorised by men of far higher rank’

But this was about far more than Soldier F, murderous and indefensible as his actions were. He was intended as the ‘fall guy’ by a British military top brass and political establishment intent on a cover-up of their own responsibilities for the Bloody Sunday massacre.

As Kate Nash - sister of William, one of the two victims Soldier F was on trial for murdering - said in a statement:

“Soldier F and his kill-crazy comrades didn’t decide on their own to spray bullets into unarmed marchers demonstrating for civil rights. If justice were to be done there would be Cabinet Ministers, top civil servants and an array of generals standing shoulder-to-shoulder with F in court… The Bloody Sunday massacre was planned and authorised by men of far higher rank than the scruffs like Soldier F who pulled the triggers.”

Class not Creed, 1968 » Scottish Socialist Party

Background to Bloody Sunday

She’s spot on. During the previous few years, the British ruling class, their military top brass and governments had lost control of the rising revolt against their policies of discrimination, repression and enforced poverty for the working class of Northern Ireland. The potential for working-class unity and struggle for socialism shown in the civil rights movement of 1968/9 then turned into its sectarian opposite, for lack of a mass socialist party to channel the revolt against the system which meted out decades of poverty, discrimination and repression.

Increasingly repressive measures by the British army, after it was sent in by the Labour government in August 1969, led to further revolts – against the Falls Road curfew of 1970, internment without trial in 1971, and the ongoing failure of capitalist rulers to offer any kind of security, prosperity or peace to the working class – neither for the discriminated-against Catholic minority in particular, nor for the Protestant working class.

‘Shoot selected ringleaders’

Young rioters in Derry, who resisted invasion of the Bogside estate by sectarian mobs and state forces, were dubbed the ‘Derry Young Hooligans’.

In a particularly telling outburst, after his visit to Derry, the British Commander of Land Forces in Northern Ireland, General Robert Ford, said in a memo to the government:  “I am coming to the conclusion that the minimum force necessary to achieve a restoration of law and order is to shoot selected ringleaders among the Derry Young Hooligans.”

That was on 7 January 1972, three weeks before Bloody Sunday! It reveals that the upper echelons of the army and government were the ones who should have been in the dock, on trial for the Bloody Sunday massacre.

Bloody Sunday, 1972

Secret Cabinet Committee plotted cover-up

In fact, in the months prior to this state atrocity, a secret British Cabinet Committee named GEN 42 had been discussing what to do in the North. It was chaired by Prime Minister Ted Heath and involved senior army chiefs including British Army Chief of Staff Michael Carver, and Tory right-wing Lord Chancellor Quentin Hogg (Lord Hailsham).

Over 20 years later, Carver admitted Heath wanted soldiers to be able to shoot civilians, regardless of whether they were armed. At the GEN 42 meeting of 6 October 1971 – four months before the Paras shot 14 dead on Bloody Sunday – Heath said, “the first priority should be the defeat of the gunman by military means and that we would have to accept whatever political penalties were inevitable.”

The GEN 42 committee then debated at length how best to cover up any killings. Carver justified such plans by saying that in a colonial situation the army restores order, not law and order. Hailsham came up with the plan that as those rebelling against the government could be classified as guilty of treason, the state could legally do so.

In Derry on 30 January 1972, Brian Cashinelle, a senior reporter from the London Times, was standing beside the aforementioned General Ford. He reported how Ford, waving his swagger stick, was shouting, “Go on Paras, go and get them, go on, go and get them.”

Paras behind sandbagged barricades, Bloody Sunday

The bloody aftermath

The aftermath of that horrific execution of demonstrators fuelled 30 years of death, sectarian divisions, and cycles of state repression and recruitment of young, enraged Catholics into the dead-end methods of the Provos.

The ruling circles who issued the orders for the Bloody Sunday massacre have the blood of far more than the 14 innocent victims on their hands. They bear responsibility – along with their capitalist and landlord predecessors - for a system that relied on divide-and-rule, incitement of sectarian divisions within a super-exploited working class, state repression, brutal poverty and inequality, and which led to the deaths of 3,800 people during ‘the Troubles’.

Build workers’ unity and socialism

There should be outrage – but no surprise – at the continued cover-up by the capitalist state of its own actions, which the Soldier F court case epitomizes.

This latest chapter should motivate workers, trade unionists and socialists to aid those in Ireland fighting to build working-class unity and the struggle for socialist change, to abolish forever the oppression and injustices in the very DNA of capitalism.

Originally written (as a native of County Fermanagh) on 23 October 2025, for publication in the Online Scottish Socialist Voice. 

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