The acquittal of former British paratrooper David James Cleary, known publicly as Soldier F, is not merely a legal incident isolated in time. It is the latest affirmation of a centuries-long relationship of domination in which the British state has exercised colonial violence over the people of Ireland. To understand why the British judiciary absolved a man involved in the shooting of unarmed civilians on Bloody Sunday, we must place the event squarely within the long arc of British imperialism and the national-class struggle in Ireland.
British Rule in the North of Ireland as Colonial Occupation
The British presence in the north of Ireland is not accidental, nor is it benign. It originates in the settler-colonial plantation of Ulster beginning in the early 17th century, when the British Crown seized Irish land and transplanted Protestant settlers loyal to imperial power. This formed the material basis for a colonial class structure: the new settlers were elevated, while the colonised Irish were dispossessed, criminalised, and economically marginalised.
Fast forward to the 20th century: the Partition of 1921 was not a compromise; it was a counter-revolutionary act designed to protect the interests of British imperialism and the unionist capitalist elite in the north. Northern Ireland was engineered as a state where the nationalist population would be a permanent second-class community, marginalised economically, socially, and politically. The result was a society where sectarianism was not an accident, but a tool of class rule.
Bloody Sunday and the British Army
When the oppressed Catholic/nationalist working class rose in the late 1960s demanding equal rights, housing, and democratic representation, the British state did not respond with reform, it responded with troops, curfews, and bullets. The British Army in the north was not a peacekeeping force. It was a colonial army enforcing occupation.
On 30th January 1972, a march organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association took place in Derry, and was intended as a peaceful protest against internment without trial, a policy that had seen hundreds of nationalist men imprisoned without evidence. As demonstrators made their way through the city, soldiers from the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment, suddenly began shooting into the crowd. Twenty-six civilians were shot and fourteen killed, many of them shot while fleeing or while aiding the wounded. This would come to be known and Bloody Sunday.
The British government’s initial inquiry, the Widgery Tribunal, was widely dismissed as a whitewash for exonerating the soldiers involved. It was not until the Saville Inquiry, published in 2010, that the killings were officially declared “unjustified and unjustifiable.”
Bloody Sunday wasn’t a “tragic mistake.” British soldiers opened fire deliberately, murdering unarmed civil-rights marchers in Derry. The purpose was terror: to break resistance, to force an oppressed population into submission, and to demonstrate that the imperial state would tolerate no rebellion from those it deems subordinate.
This is what Lenin meant when he said the state is “a machine for the suppression of one class by another.” The British state suppressed the Irish working class through the barrel of a gun.
The Trial of Soldier F as Imperial Theatre
The recent trial and acquittal of David James Cleary, over half a century after the killings, was never about justice. It was a performance meant to preserve the legitimacy of the British state, not challenge it.
All the familiar mechanisms of imperial impunity were on display:
- The passage of time used as a shield.
- Evidence rendered “unreliable.”
- Witnesses intimidated or deceased.
- Institutional loyalty maintained among soldiers.
- The judiciary acting not as neutral arbiter, but as a guardian of state continuity.
The court acknowledged that civilians were wrongfully killed. It expressed polite regret. But the function of the verdict was to protect the imperial army, not to deliver accountability.
The outcome was inevitable: the colonial state does not convict its own enforcers for carrying out colonial violence.
Class, National Liberation, and the Lesson of the Verdict
The national question in Ireland has always been fused with class struggle. The Irish working class, particularly in the nationalist community, has been oppressed both as Irish and as workers. British imperialism sustained a loyalist ruling bloc in the north specifically to fracture working-class unity and maintain British strategic and economic control.
The acquittal of Soldier F reinforces the truth long known among the oppressed: The British state will never dispense justice for crimes committed in the service of empire.
It is not the courtroom that will resolve the contradiction between coloniser and colonised, but political struggle.
Justice Will Not Come from the Imperial Courts
The verdict is not the end of history. It is a reminder. It tells us:
- Colonial violence will be protected by the colonial state.
- Legal neutrality is a myth masking class and national domination.
- The liberation of the Irish people will never come through British institutions.
The acquittal of Soldier F confirms what revolutionaries have always understood: the struggle for Irish freedom and socialism is inseparable from the struggle to dismantle British imperialism itself.
Justice will not be handed down. It must be won.
