Editorial: It is outrageous for low-ranking soldiers to face homicide trials but not IRA leaders who orchestrated decades of murder and mayhem

​The judge who acquitted Soldier F yesterday, said of some of the military on duty that day: ​”They totally lost all sense of military discipline.”

He was also scathing about the lies of some of the Bloody Sunday veterans.

Genuine supporters of the security forces will be dismayed to read such words. Any such friendly critic of a military that helped to prevent civil war in the Troubles will already be aware of such grievous failures on January 30 1972.

The killing of 13 civilians was the army’s darkest day during the violent years. The relatives of the dead that day did not get proper truth or accountability, which greatly aggravated the wound, and contributed to instability in the province. It is one thing to recognise such facts. It is another to say that an elderly soldier should have been put in the dock, 53 years later.

The Provisional IRA was wholly responsible for ramping up the violence, for example in its March 1971 murder of three Scottish soldiers, which sparked an upsurge. Or its murder of two young RUC officers, one Catholic, days before Bloody Sunday. Republicans accuse anyone who cites such context of whataboutery, which is contemptible from them, given their lies and hate acts back then and their vindictive pursuit of legacy now (put back on track recently by a spineless Labour government).

Bloody Sunday had no prospect of proper scrutiny in its aftermath because the IRA pushed NI to the brink of civil war in the rest of 1972 – for example its Bloody Friday massacre in Belfast that July, after Martin McGuinness and other IRA men had been flown to London but not given their demands.

While it is fair to acknowledge that a tiny number of soldiers who served in NI amid the chaos disgraced themselves, the overwhelming bulk served honourably. It is outrageous to put low ranking soldiers on trial when IRA godfathers have not and will not faced such.