Colin Sheridan: The Soldier F verdict shows the Republic’s peace was built on someone else’s pain
The brothers of Bloody Sunday victim William McKinney, Mickey (left) John (centre) and Joe (right) arrive at Belfast Crown Court where the verdict in the trial of a former paratrooper, referred to as Soldier F for legal reasons, accused of two murders during the Bloody Sunday shootings in 1972 is expected to be delivered. The veteran is accused of the murders of James Wray and William McKinney during disorder after a civil rights parade in Londonderry on January 30 1972. Picture date: Thursday October 23, 2025. PA Photo. Some 13 people were shot dead by the Parachute Regiment on that day. Soldier F is also accused of attempting to murder Michael Quinn, Patrick O'Donnell, Joseph Friel, Joe Mahon and an unknown person. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire
One of the best pieces of sports writing I ever read was published around the time Armagh and Tyrone began winning All-Irelands in the early years of this century.
It captured a curiosity many of us outside Ulster — particularly the six counties — shared about why these sudden interlopers had such disdain for tradition and reverence. For blue blood. For “empire.”
Why, with no history, did they not buckle and wilt as Mayo and others did at the sight of Croke Park on the third Sunday in September? Their refusal to bend the knee and kiss the ring of the likes of Dublin and Kerry was both a mystery and a superpower the rest of us could not understand.
The gist of his thesis was this — they didn’t give a fuck for Kerry and the Dubs because, while those darlings were living out their golden years in the early days of technicolour, the dads, mums, uncles and aunts of those young lads from Strabane, Crossmaglen and Mullaghbawn were being interned and discriminated against. They were denied jobs and education. Their votes were gerrymandered.
Many of them were shot and killed. More were injured or disappeared. Their crime was to be Catholic, nationalist, “taigs.” Their names and addresses might as well have been tattooed on their foreheads when they were stopped at British Army checkpoints on their way to work or football training, their civil rights as imaginary as the tooth fairy.
We think we know, down south, but we do not know — and we never will. That truth was never as stark as yesterday, when Soldier F, a former member of the Parachute Regiment, was found not guilty of murder and attempted murder in Derry on Bloody Sunday, 1972.
We watched the verdict scroll along the bottom of our screens, half-listening as we unloaded the dishwasher — a passing headline from a faraway past. But to those in Derry, and to families who have carried the names of their dead for over fifty years like shingles, it was not a headline. It was the reopening of a wound that never closes. It was another reminder that their justice lives in another country — one that does not speak their language or hear their grief.
We do not know. We have never had soldiers patrolling our streets, peering through the letterbox as our mothers made tea. We have never been stopped on our way to training, told to stand against the bonnet and empty our pockets. We never knew the claustrophobia of living under suspicion, of having our accent identify us as enemy territory. Our peace — the Republic’s peace — was always a soft one, an inherited quiet. It was built on their noise, their fear, their funerals. We took the dividends; they took the damage.
Bloody Sunday has been processed by history, dissected by inquiry, apologised for by prime ministers and condemned by moralists, yet it still beats — painfully — in the national chest. The families of the dead have endured decades of legal detours, inquiries, delays and suspensions. They have waited longer than most of us have been alive. And yesterday, when the “not guilty” verdict came down, they were forced to bow again before the altar of British justice — a system that always seems to find sympathy for the soldier and never for the slain.
For those of us in the south, it is too easy to speak of reconciliation, of drawing a line, of moving on, because it is not our line to draw. We do not live with the murals or the memories of the barricades, or the knowledge that a neighbour’s father never came home from the betting shop or the bar. We visit Derry now and take pictures of the Bogside, of the “You Are Now Entering Free Derry” wall. We whisper reverently in the museum. We nod at the history and appropriate it when it suits us. But we cannot feel what they feel. Not really. Our empathy has limits. It stops where our comfort begins.
It’s worth remembering what those who died that day were marching for — not revolution, not insurrection, not even a united Ireland. They were marching for basic civil rights: fair housing, fair voting, fair work. They were marching to be treated as equals in the land of their birth. The bullets that tore through that January air were not just killing people; they were killing faith — in the state, in law, in the idea that dignity was negotiable.
The British government has apologised, yes. David Cameron called it “unjustified and unjustifiable.” But for the families, for the city, words are wind. The justice system they were told to trust has now turned its back on them once again. They are left with nothing but ghosts and dates.
For the rest of us, Bloody Sunday is a lesson we never properly learned. It should have been the national moment when we realised that the pain of the North is not theirs alone — it’s ours too. But we compartmentalised it.
We treated it as a tragedy that belonged to someone else’s history, someone else’s politics, someone else’s map. And in doing so, we allowed the wound to fester on one half of the island while the other half got on with business as usual. We called it peace, but it was only distance.
There is something profoundly unfair in how time works with tragedy. Fifty-three years have passed since that day, yet the trauma remains cellular, unageing. The soldiers grew old; the victims stayed young. And in courtrooms, the language of “burden of proof” and “reasonable doubt” becomes a shield for forgetting.
But there is no forgetting in Derry. You can’t walk ten minutes in that city without seeing the faces of the dead looking down from walls, immortalised in the way only injustice can preserve memory. The murals are not art; they are witness statements.
Down here, we often congratulate ourselves on our moral distance. We speak of the North as if it were a foreign country with strange customs and dangerous tempers. We forget that its blood is in our veins, its stories in our songs. When we say “we” — as in “we Irish” — we do not always mean them. And yet when something like this verdict happens, the line between us flickers, and we remember. We remember that we are the same people, separated only by circumstance and by the accidents of politics. But still, we do not know.
And what of the commanders? Those who directed Soldier F? Those who gave the orders, set the tone, briefed the men, and watched from a distance as civilians fell? What of those who are now dead, whose obituaries appeared in the and the with no reference to the war crimes they managed like head coaches on the sidelines?
What of them — with their state pensions, medals, and OBEs polished by grandchildren who will never read the Saville Report? We speak of one soldier, a single man, as if he operated in isolation, as if the violence was spontaneous combustion. But it was not. It was command. It was culture. And, worst of all, it was permission.
The truth is that justice for Bloody Sunday was never about one man. It was about a system — political, military and moral — that saw a crowd of Irish Catholics as lesser and acted accordingly. The state that sent them in has never stood in the dock.
The governments that covered for them have never been cross-examined. The senior officers died with clean reputations, Union Jacks neatly folded and handed to their widows. And so, the ledger remains open, the balance unsettled.
If there’s any decency left in our collective conscience, it lies in refusing to let this fade into background noise — in remembering that history doesn’t end when the news cycle does. In recognising that the North’s ghosts are not theirs alone — they belong to all of us, and they will haunt us until we have the courage to look them in the eye.
Because we think we know. But we do not know. And until we learn to carry that truth — humbly, honestly, without pretending otherwise — the wound will stay open.
And maybe it should.
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