David Davis MP writes for the Daily Mail about the Government’s Remedial Order to the Northern Ireland (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023

As published in the Daily Mail

This week is the beginning of a process which will expose British soldiers, particularly the SAS, to vindictive lawfare in Northern Ireland.

On Wednesday, the Government will use a technical instrument known as a remedial order to overturn, in part, legislation passed in 2023 by the Conservatives that stopped the lawfare carried out by IRA sympathisers against our veterans.

This is the first stage of Labour’s Northern Ireland Troubles Bill, which will reopen the door to criminal prosecutions against our veterans.

Let me give you an example.

In 1987, at Loughgall – the greatest single defeat of the IRA by the SAS – eight heavily armed IRA murderers were stopped on their way to kill again. They attempted to blow up Loughgall police station with a 400-pound bomb carried in a digger, which they detonated, also subjecting the building to withering fire with a hail of bullets from automatic weapons. The SAS shot the eight terrorists dead.

One of the IRA members killed was Patrick Kelly, the Officer in Command of the East Tyrone Brigade, a unit responsible for around 250 murders. Intelligence linked Kelly personally to at least five killings, including the murders of two UDR soldiers.

The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Hilary Benn, has now promised a sister of this same terrorist a new inquest into the events at Loughgall.

One of Patrick Kelly’s sisters said, ‘I have never denied that my brother went out to blow up a barracks [police station], but they were unmanned barracks. He went out to blow up, not to kill.’

This is absurd. Immediately after the bomb detonated, they fired battlefield-calibre weapons at the building, no doubt in the expectation of killing any policeman who emerged. What is more, the eight terrorists and their weapons were implicated in at least 40 previous murders.

We should not be placating the family members of terrorists at the expense of our veterans.

Uniquely in Northern Ireland these dead terrorists are described as ‘victims’. In 2006 the Blair government passed a law which said, in effect, that a serial murderer who was killed in the process of trying to carry out another murder would be described as a victim. Nowhere else in Britain, indeed nowhere else in the civilised world, is this ridiculous definition applied.

Even the courts are beginning to realise the absurdity of these inquests and trials. In a recent Judicial Review against a soldier who served during the troubles, a judge warned, ‘In this challenge, this Court is being asked to slow the passage of time down, to analyse events in freeze-frame and to address the issue of absolute necessity in slow-motion… It is ludicrous to suggest that this court should analyse the events of the day in question in that manner.’

What the judge said of this case will be true of all of them.

Some have said there will be no convictions even if it true, that is not the point.

The issue is this – the punishment is the process.

Veterans face decades of investigation, repeated questioning, and public suspicion, even when there is no realistic prospect of a charge.

In at least one case, a veteran has already died from a heart attack under the strain. His family say the stress of a 20-year legal ordeal killed him.

Any such trial will be unable to understand the realities our veterans faced. These were men operating under the rule of law, under sustained threat and live fire, forced to make split-second, life-or-death decisions.

No retrospective investigation, conducted decades later in a wholly different context, can ever hope to comprehend the circumstances under which those decisions were made.

The consequences are now being felt by the two million veterans across the country who rightfully feel betrayed.

In November, nine former four-star generals intervened publicly, calling the Bill morally incoherent and warning that it posed a ‘direct threat to national security’.

They delivered a clear warning: highly trained special forces soldiers are resigning.

It is regrettable that this warning has not been heeded – or acted upon – given the very real and increasing threats we face internationally.

These men are irreplaceable.

To compound the concern, over Christmas, seven former senior SAS officers wrote a letter warning that ‘in this Troubles Bill, the Government is complicit in this war on our Armed Forces’.

And now, most recently, the Northern Ireland Veterans Commissioner, appointed by this very Labour Government, spoke out. He said that the Bill treats veterans as ‘worse than terrorists’ and is ‘eating at the very fabric of the Armed Forces’.

Soldiers now ask a chilling question: Should I take my lawyer with me when I speak to my commanding officer?

That is no trivial concern – it fundamentally weakens the operational effectiveness of our Armed Forces by forcing them to second-guess themselves.

On the battlefield, doubt costs lives.

But this issue extends far beyond our domestic debate. It is now beginning to damage our military relationship with the United States. Even the Vice President, JD Vance, has raised serious concerns.

At its core, the problem lies in the unchecked power of coroners’ inquests in Northern Ireland, public inquiries, and criminal prosecutions. These are mechanisms increasingly used not to uncover the truth, but to rewrite it for political aims.

The Government now intends to push through a remedial order as the first step to revive this lawfare. This is not justice. The Government must stop.