The decision by the Public Prosecution Service for Northern Ireland to bring murder and attempted murder charges only against Soldier F for his alleged actions on Bloody Sunday astonished families as they gathered to hear the news. It has also drawn more poison from the military establishment, adding to its growing belief that its loyal foot-soldiers have in recent times become the scapegoats of colonial history.

Bloody Sunday was a very British atrocity – the top brass got away with it | Eamonn McCann Read more

The facts around the Bloody Sunday deaths, and around stories affecting many hundreds of families who lost loved ones – including my father who was killed that day – due to the actions of state forces in the years following 1969, are that very few were actually investigated as crimes. Evidence was not collected. Inquests were rushed and often held without family involvement or legal awareness of rights, limited as they were. Only four criminal trials were held for members of the security forces during almost 30 years of conflict. No investigating policeman ever darkened the door of our house in the Brandywell area of Derry to find out about Paddy Doherty (deceased). In the 1980s I served an IRA-related prison sentence for a much lesser offence.

Many families had only the most scant of details as to how their loved ones’ lives were ended. Put simply, they did not count. This is the reality that people grew up with in the dark days of the 1970s and 80s and it led to ordinary people such as me joining the IRA.

When the news swept across the ballroom of the City Hotel on Thursday, families gasped in disbelief that, after the wholesale excavation of evidence during the epic Saville inquiry, and now a police investigation, no charges were being brought in relation to young Hugh Gilmour, Michael Kelly, Michael McDaid and many others. And, while it was not exactly the news we had been expecting, all of us stood foursquare in support of the two families whose loved ones Soldier F will be charged with murdering: those of Willie McKinney and Jim Wray. This is what long-struggling families do – they support each other in solidarity.

The charges against Soldier F come in the midst of the mind-numbing inability of the British military establishment and the Tory elite to come to terms with the legacy of British colonialism and its impact upon Ireland and elsewhere. I listened one evening several weeks ago as Jacob Rees-Mogg explained to an astounded panellist on Question Time that Boer families had been kept in concentration camps for their own good – and that death rates there had been the same as in Glasgow at the time. And he did it with a straight face and not a blink or a stutter out of him!

The decision to prosecute only one soldier over Bloody Sunday is unbelievable | Michelle O’Neill Read more

The most recent British narrative of the legacy of the Northern Irish conflict would have us believe that it is quite unfair to be chasing elderly soldiers through the courts while the bad old IRA vets recline in comfort on their sofas from Camlough to Malin Head. This is nonsense, of course. The reason that they feel discommoded is that now, many years on, many of their lethal activities are being investigated for the first time ever. When I was in prison, the wings were full of people convicted of killing soldiers, RUC personnel, hijackings and bombings. The lists of “successful” prosecutions are almost endless. Yet the first two people I shared a cell with in 1981 were completely innocent.

Until Little England faces up to the absolute horrors of its colonial past, including its dirty deeds in my city, it will never become a progressive nation and will be doomed to choke on its own vomit for generations to come. We need a statute of limitations on colonial stupidity.

• Tony Doherty is an author who lives in Derry