Robert Jonathan Bradford was born on 8 June 1941 to a Belfast family who were resident in Limavady, County Londonderry, due to the wartime evacuation.

Nevertheless, Bradford claimed to always remain at heart a Methodist and also rejected suggestions that he was to join Ian Paisley's Free Presbyterian Church (which he never did).

[7] Bradford was opposed to power-sharing with the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) as set out in the Sunningdale Agreement, describing the proposal as "sheer madness".

In January 1980 Bradford called for IRA members captured by British security forces to be summarily executed as "saboteurs and spies".

[11] Secretary of State Jim Prior was verbally abused and jostled by a group of angry loyalists outside the church at his funeral and hissed at by members of the congregation.

[12] Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald made an expression of sympathy in the Irish parliament Dáil Éireann stating:[13] I would like to refer to the brutal murder, by the Provisional IRA, of the Reverend Robert Bradford, MP in Belfast on Saturday last.

His death and that of Mr. Ken Campbell, caretaker at the Finaghy Community Centre, are part of a calculated series of atrocities committed in recent days.

The killing of an elected representative of the people calls for particular condemnation in the strongest possible terms and serves to remind us of the real objectives of the organisation responsible.

Its true attitude to democracy and freedom was summed up in a recent statement of an IRA spokesman who, when asked by an interviewer for a foreign newspaper about the wishes of the people in this part of the country concerning an aspect of reunification, replied, "We call the shots.